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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4130274" data-attributes="member: 42582">I assume I should read &quot;PC&quot; in place of &quot;player&quot;.This claim is not actually true.To draw on the Monopoly example, the fact that it is possible for one player to go bankrupt in the game does not entail that it is possible for everyone in the game to go bankrupt - because the last player still solvent wins.It is similarly possible to conceive of RPG rules that allocate certain metagame resources to the players of the surviving PCs when a party member dies, and once a single player has sufficiently many such resources his or her PC cannot die (what the in-game explanation for this might be would depend upon the in-game effect of spending the metagame resources).Accepting that part of the point of playing Monopoly is to win, it stands to reason that one bankruptcy (and thus losing out on the chance to have fun playing the game) is one possible consequence of play. I have played games of Monopoly which are not so competitive, however (it is, rather, to fill in an otherwise boring afternoon) and in those cases various devices are used to keep the bankrupt in the game (eg gifts and/or loans from other players, or from the bank).A game in which PCs can't die might be more equivalent to these non-competitve versions of Monopoly. Given the (non-competitive) point of a fair bit of RPGing, such a game might make a fair bit of sense.Even within a competitive framework such a game might make a fair bit of sense, if the point of the competition was not to keep one's PC alive, but rather to affect the in-game world in a certain way (because there are many ways to prevent the PC being used successfully as a means to that end without killing the PC).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 4130274, member: 42582"] I assume I should read "PC" in place of "player". This claim is not actually true. To draw on the Monopoly example, the fact that it is possible for one player to go bankrupt in the game does not entail that it is possible for everyone in the game to go bankrupt - because the last player still solvent wins. It is similarly possible to conceive of RPG rules that allocate certain metagame resources to the players of the surviving PCs when a party member dies, and once a single player has sufficiently many such resources his or her PC cannot die (what the in-game explanation for this might be would depend upon the in-game effect of spending the metagame resources). Accepting that part of the point of playing Monopoly is to win, it stands to reason that one bankruptcy (and thus losing out on the chance to have fun playing the game) is one possible consequence of play. I have played games of Monopoly which are not so competitive, however (it is, rather, to fill in an otherwise boring afternoon) and in those cases various devices are used to keep the bankrupt in the game (eg gifts and/or loans from other players, or from the bank). A game in which PCs can't die might be more equivalent to these non-competitve versions of Monopoly. Given the (non-competitive) point of a fair bit of RPGing, such a game might make a fair bit of sense. Even within a competitive framework such a game might make a fair bit of sense, if the point of the competition was not to keep one's PC alive, but rather to affect the in-game world in a certain way (because there are many ways to prevent the PC being used successfully as a means to that end without killing the PC). [/QUOTE]

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