Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8650052" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Honest question: Why?You are the DM. You have the power to say, "y'know what, this campaign can keep going if you guys want it to. What do you think?"Just because things get dire and long-term (possibly permanent!) consequences arise, doesn't mean the story has to end. Hell, that could be the start of something insanely epic: a journey out of the underworld, or (as Bill Zebub showed) being forced to serve someone the PCs oppose or hate, or being indebted to rescuers who they may not actually like (yet), etc.That there are alternatives does not mean the PCs are golden boys and girls who literally never fail at anything ever. Alternatives can get progressively worse and nastier nearly ad infinitum.YOU are the one who keeps saying "the PCs always win"! That is YOUR phrasing which I keep repeatedly rejecting as unfair, inaccurate, and frankly insulting to my position.And of course there are always alternatives. But by being "alternative," they aren't the same. They may have costs (sometimes nasty and permanent ones). They may require compromise or sacrifice. E.g., consider the "Justice Lords" episode from the Justice League cartoon; the Lords are willing to kill, while the League is not. Even with the League having a slight numbers advantage (because their Flash is still alive), it's clear the Lords are willing to do whatever it takes to win, and the League would unequivocally lose in a straight fight. Something has to give. They choose to compromise on a different moral issue: they agree to accept the help of Lex Luthor, in return for securing him a full pardon for his crimes (because, in context, this time, those crimes actually stuck, and he's been in prison for a while.) Through that pardon, Lex is able to go into politics and cause all sorts of terrible mischief, leading to almost all of the subsequent problems for the following seasons (aka "Justice League Unlimited.")This is an example of taking an alternative with HUGE costs, ones that legitimately define the campaign. Though, obviously, in a TTRPG context the plot is not so perfectly planned out in advance, so which costs, sacrifices, or compromises will end up being campaign-defining and which ones will end up footnotes is unclear in the moment. But the process of making those choices, of deciding what really matters, of handling individual task failure (hence fail forward...and hence ACTUALLY FAILING AT TASKS SOME OF THE TIME), is where the most interesting and significant choices of the game will be made. Not whether you try to bluff, intimidate, or persuade the guard.Okay. Why make it so goals have one single point of failure and then zilch? That seems pretty boring to me. Why not instead make things more complicated? Give the players the choice to pursue this goal at the cost of giving up on another, or spending/destroying a valuable resource, or breaking a promise to an ally, or swearing fealty to someone they hate, or...All of these things can be massive failures in the players' eyes, but ones they take on willingly, securing a Pyrrhic victory because they tried everything else and nothing worked. How is that not absolutely avoiding players always succeeding at everything ever?Okay. Why does "escape from being trapped" not count as that, but "get through the entrance to a place you need to go" does? I don't see how these two are not entirely symmetrical in this sense.Okay. See above: why not make it more complex than that?Given how many times people have explicitly said that I am advocating that players should always succeed, despite me explicitly and repeatedly rejecting that notion, you shouldn't be surprised to know that I feel the same way. Like... how many times do I have to say, point-blank, zero embellishment or equivocation, "players do not have to always succeed ar everything they attempt," in order for it to actually get the message across? And yet three people (yourself, Crimson Longinus, and Oofta) have repeatedly replied with (paraphrased) "well I'm not interested in players never failing/always succeeding."I'm not the one saying that players should just absolutely, totally, unequivocally fail with literally nothing else and zero change of situation here!I gave it as an example because of exactly the things you describe: that the PCs' failure, which is still a failure, does not come at the cost of "welp, guess the game is over because plans A-C failed." Instead, it comes at some other cost: indebtedness, servitude, loss of allies or resources, failure to secure and protect the things that matter to the characters, damage to the world (whether locally or globally), compromises to the characters' morals or principles, being forced into a Sophie's choice or "damned if you do, damned if you don't," suffering tarnished reputation...There are so, so, SO many different things you can do that still sting, sometimes badly, that don't just halt play in its tracks. So why are people so welcoming of "yeah sure, just let play grind to a total halt on this" when there's an enormous spectrum of better, more interesting costs and, yes, FAILURES than "you literally just fail and literally nothing happens," the phrase I have repeatedly used and which people have repeatedly defended as what they want to see?</blockquote>

Verification