Life is full of irrevocable decisions that you cannot take back, and that may change your life forever. Thinking of quitting your job? Thinking of getting a divorce? Thinking of moving cross-country to take an entry-level position at a job you might be more excited for? Pondering having a child, or going to grad school? There's a risk involved in every change, but there's also potential reward, too. Is the risk worth the reward? How can you know, without knowing all the different ways in which this might affect your life?
Turns out, there is a website out there that will help you make that tremendous decision.
It will toss a coin for you.
And it’s not just some fly-by-night click-bait gimmick, either. It’s a serious social science experiment, performed by economists from the University of Chicago, one of the world’s pre-eminent economic schools. A major life decision, possibly affecting the entire rest of your life, left up to a coin toss.
That sense of trepidation you feel right now, of the intimidating risk of this major life change, left up to a coin toss? That's normal. Most people would feel that. It's also deeply irrational.
Loss Aversion and the Left Brain Bias
Let’s say I give you $2,000. That could be pretty useful, right? Imagine all the things you could get with that. It’s a nice chunk of change! But, before you go, I give you a choice: I can either take $500 back, OR, I can let you flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, I’ll take $1,000, but if it comes up tails, I won’t take anything.
If you’re like most people, you’ll want to flip a coin.
This is a bones-deep instinct in people: to preserve what you have against loss. This preference isn’t rational, but the decent chance that you won’t have to give me ANY money is worth the additional risk to you. Loss aversion is hard-wired human behavior. Even monkeys demonstrate it. It makes good biological sense, in a Darwinian sense, to fear that loss.
This is part of why we have a left brain bias: the analysis and detailed thought helps us achieve some control over the possibility of loss. We convince ourselves that we have a better chance to win that coin flip than we actually do (exceptionalism also being an evolutionary advantage), and at least that illusion of control, and that sense of our situation being special, helps us prefer the flip of the coin to the guaranteed loss of $500.
In the games we play, we also have loss aversion: we don’t want our characters to die, we don’t want our plots unraveled. We like to preserve what we create. So you can see, over the last 40 years of D&D, a gradual but perceptible shift toward deeper control, and less catastrophic loss.
To Fail Without Losing
In D&D, unlike in my hypothetical situation above, it is possible to avoid all loss. Your characters never have to die, your plots never have to become unraveled, and hours and hours of magnificent fun can be had, and is had every week, by people whose primary activity is actually the creation of something, rather than its destruction.
That isn’t to say that you don’t suffer setbacks, or failures, playing a character in that game. You may not accomplish your character’s goals, but this lack of gaining is distinct from a loss. A failure for your character, while perhaps tragic and interesting and fun to play through, doesn’t cause the same sort of emotional response that actual loss causes.
So, a distinction can be made. From your character’s perspective, a failure is when they do not advance their goals. If you try to put an end to the orc horde, and are taken prisoner or slain, your character has failed. A loss, from your character’s perspective, happens when they have something taken from them. If the orc horde killed your character’s daughter, or if they took your character’s magical axe, your character has lost something. They can be the same thing, but they can also be different: your character might get their axe stolen while still beating back the horde (losing without failure), or your character might keep their axe but fail to stop the orcs’ advance (failure without losing).
In general, the player feels these failures and losses along with their character. It’s no accident that DM advice over the ages has advocated more and more for minimizing loss. If your player has something that’s important to them and/or their character, the more recent gaming advice would be to let them have it and keep it and not to cause them any anxiety about losing it. You don’t threaten to actually kill a PC’s family. You don’t take a PC’s iconic weapon. You don’t kill characters unless you have to. You don’t cause loss, as a DM. A player is invested in these character traits, so they are fairly off-limits. Loss is such a powerful motivator, that the DM is told not to ever seriously activate it, because it can ruin entire play sessions. This is distinct from early-edition advice that had no qualms with fairly common death, easily horrible equipment damage, and magic spells that focused on making the player suffer some real loss.
The thing with loss is that it can never be entirely consensual, if it is to be a true loss. Something you willingly give up isn’t a loss, and neither is simply failing to gain something. Loss takes what you have, what you want to keep, and separates you from it. And, emotionally speaking, that’s dangerous territory. It’s no surprise the game has moved toward controlling that loss.
A Controlled Story
While anyone who plays a sport or a game of poker at some point is going to feel loss, the same is not necessarily true of the stories we encounter in our books or movies. Especially in the genre of heroic fantasy, loss is a rare sensation. Passive media certainly can make one feel loss (think of the way you felt during the first few minutes of Up– that’s loss you’re experiencing, the same loss the protagonist is experiencing), but there’s a lot of things about the expectations of the genres we traffic in that loss will not play a big part in the story. The characters we play are motherless murderhobos, or exceptional heroes, or doomed investigators, or otherwise exceptional and magical people who all share one major thing in common: they don’t have much that they can actually lose as long as the story goes on.
Even when loss does occur, either in-genre or out, it always has a purpose. Losing at poker or monopoly or dominos can be frustrating and difficult and even random or inexplicable, but when a loss occurs in our stories, we demand an explanation, a reason, a cause, and a greater purpose.
This is loss at its most controlled, dispensed rarely, and only for very specific ends. In an RPG, this kind of loss can look something like a mechanic known as the “death flag.”
Typically, in a game that uses the death flag, your character will never die. They may fail, they may struggle, but you as a player will never lose this character that you have put so much work into creating and playing – that loss is off-limits.
Unless you opt into it, by “raising the death flag” at the moment that is important to your character. You control the loss you may experience as a player. In the coin toss at the beginning, you now know for sure: there’s no chance you’re going to lose that $1,000 unless you allow it, transforming loss into sacrifice.
The Thrill Of Losing
Despite 40 years and a general tendency toward avoiding loss in our games, we’re still at the point, as of 4e, where we still want rules for loss in the game. Characters can still die. In 4e, it’s kind of exceptional and requires bending the system a little bit, or a run of VERY bad luck, but it can and does happen. Some folks even use house rules like increased monster damage to make it more likely to happen. We know, on some level, that removing it entirely would be somehow…less fun. A basic 4e character is never deprived of their powers, gets whatever magic items they ask for, and, as a typical fantasy-genre hero, has no familial attachments of any great note. But they can still die. The player can still lose the character. And we want to keep that in the mix as a possibility.
Given that loss is something we avoid so vehemently, why do we want to keep even that remnant in?
Well, the truth is that some folks don’t, and they’re very comfortable with a 4e with the hypothetical possibility of character death that is rarely, if ever, actually employed. This makes them part and parcel of the more story-like, controlled style mentioned above.
But for those that cling to it, it provides something useful to them: an element of danger, the thrill of potential defeat.
Groups, of course, vary with how often they would like to employ potential defeat. Even simply being out there in the abstract most of the time, such as in 4e, it is more than enough for some people. However, one of the highlights of a more “game-like” kind of game is that this loss is more real and more prominent. Not simply failure, but actual loss, so that the player actually experiences an aversion. This is the core element of something like the old D&D cartoon with the armored guy cowering from the rust monster. This was also what the player was feeling: a severe aversion to losing their hard-earned (and often magical) equipment. If the player themselves is not scared of the consequences of going into the dungeon, for some game-centric playstyles, the game does not feature enough actual loss.
What Do You Want To Lose?
This week’s audience question is a bit of a tougher one to pose than in most weeks. What I’d really like to ask is what you would want to lose in your own gameplay, what you’d be willing to give up…but that kind of misses the point. The moment you’re willing to give it up, it stops being a loss.
So instead, let me tackle this from the other side: what do you like most about your favorite characters? And how much would you be able to tolerate the DM taking that from them, before it became un-fun? Would you be OK with your brave strong fighter becoming cowardly and weak? Or your smart mage becoming dumb? What about having your god shun you as a cleric, or experiencing a fall from grace as a paladin? How much can you lose, and still have fun with your game?
Turns out, there is a website out there that will help you make that tremendous decision.
It will toss a coin for you.
And it’s not just some fly-by-night click-bait gimmick, either. It’s a serious social science experiment, performed by economists from the University of Chicago, one of the world’s pre-eminent economic schools. A major life decision, possibly affecting the entire rest of your life, left up to a coin toss.
That sense of trepidation you feel right now, of the intimidating risk of this major life change, left up to a coin toss? That's normal. Most people would feel that. It's also deeply irrational.
Loss Aversion and the Left Brain Bias
Let’s say I give you $2,000. That could be pretty useful, right? Imagine all the things you could get with that. It’s a nice chunk of change! But, before you go, I give you a choice: I can either take $500 back, OR, I can let you flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, I’ll take $1,000, but if it comes up tails, I won’t take anything.
If you’re like most people, you’ll want to flip a coin.
This is a bones-deep instinct in people: to preserve what you have against loss. This preference isn’t rational, but the decent chance that you won’t have to give me ANY money is worth the additional risk to you. Loss aversion is hard-wired human behavior. Even monkeys demonstrate it. It makes good biological sense, in a Darwinian sense, to fear that loss.
This is part of why we have a left brain bias: the analysis and detailed thought helps us achieve some control over the possibility of loss. We convince ourselves that we have a better chance to win that coin flip than we actually do (exceptionalism also being an evolutionary advantage), and at least that illusion of control, and that sense of our situation being special, helps us prefer the flip of the coin to the guaranteed loss of $500.
In the games we play, we also have loss aversion: we don’t want our characters to die, we don’t want our plots unraveled. We like to preserve what we create. So you can see, over the last 40 years of D&D, a gradual but perceptible shift toward deeper control, and less catastrophic loss.
To Fail Without Losing
In D&D, unlike in my hypothetical situation above, it is possible to avoid all loss. Your characters never have to die, your plots never have to become unraveled, and hours and hours of magnificent fun can be had, and is had every week, by people whose primary activity is actually the creation of something, rather than its destruction.
That isn’t to say that you don’t suffer setbacks, or failures, playing a character in that game. You may not accomplish your character’s goals, but this lack of gaining is distinct from a loss. A failure for your character, while perhaps tragic and interesting and fun to play through, doesn’t cause the same sort of emotional response that actual loss causes.
So, a distinction can be made. From your character’s perspective, a failure is when they do not advance their goals. If you try to put an end to the orc horde, and are taken prisoner or slain, your character has failed. A loss, from your character’s perspective, happens when they have something taken from them. If the orc horde killed your character’s daughter, or if they took your character’s magical axe, your character has lost something. They can be the same thing, but they can also be different: your character might get their axe stolen while still beating back the horde (losing without failure), or your character might keep their axe but fail to stop the orcs’ advance (failure without losing).
In general, the player feels these failures and losses along with their character. It’s no accident that DM advice over the ages has advocated more and more for minimizing loss. If your player has something that’s important to them and/or their character, the more recent gaming advice would be to let them have it and keep it and not to cause them any anxiety about losing it. You don’t threaten to actually kill a PC’s family. You don’t take a PC’s iconic weapon. You don’t kill characters unless you have to. You don’t cause loss, as a DM. A player is invested in these character traits, so they are fairly off-limits. Loss is such a powerful motivator, that the DM is told not to ever seriously activate it, because it can ruin entire play sessions. This is distinct from early-edition advice that had no qualms with fairly common death, easily horrible equipment damage, and magic spells that focused on making the player suffer some real loss.
The thing with loss is that it can never be entirely consensual, if it is to be a true loss. Something you willingly give up isn’t a loss, and neither is simply failing to gain something. Loss takes what you have, what you want to keep, and separates you from it. And, emotionally speaking, that’s dangerous territory. It’s no surprise the game has moved toward controlling that loss.
A Controlled Story
While anyone who plays a sport or a game of poker at some point is going to feel loss, the same is not necessarily true of the stories we encounter in our books or movies. Especially in the genre of heroic fantasy, loss is a rare sensation. Passive media certainly can make one feel loss (think of the way you felt during the first few minutes of Up– that’s loss you’re experiencing, the same loss the protagonist is experiencing), but there’s a lot of things about the expectations of the genres we traffic in that loss will not play a big part in the story. The characters we play are motherless murderhobos, or exceptional heroes, or doomed investigators, or otherwise exceptional and magical people who all share one major thing in common: they don’t have much that they can actually lose as long as the story goes on.
Even when loss does occur, either in-genre or out, it always has a purpose. Losing at poker or monopoly or dominos can be frustrating and difficult and even random or inexplicable, but when a loss occurs in our stories, we demand an explanation, a reason, a cause, and a greater purpose.
This is loss at its most controlled, dispensed rarely, and only for very specific ends. In an RPG, this kind of loss can look something like a mechanic known as the “death flag.”
Typically, in a game that uses the death flag, your character will never die. They may fail, they may struggle, but you as a player will never lose this character that you have put so much work into creating and playing – that loss is off-limits.
Unless you opt into it, by “raising the death flag” at the moment that is important to your character. You control the loss you may experience as a player. In the coin toss at the beginning, you now know for sure: there’s no chance you’re going to lose that $1,000 unless you allow it, transforming loss into sacrifice.
The Thrill Of Losing
Despite 40 years and a general tendency toward avoiding loss in our games, we’re still at the point, as of 4e, where we still want rules for loss in the game. Characters can still die. In 4e, it’s kind of exceptional and requires bending the system a little bit, or a run of VERY bad luck, but it can and does happen. Some folks even use house rules like increased monster damage to make it more likely to happen. We know, on some level, that removing it entirely would be somehow…less fun. A basic 4e character is never deprived of their powers, gets whatever magic items they ask for, and, as a typical fantasy-genre hero, has no familial attachments of any great note. But they can still die. The player can still lose the character. And we want to keep that in the mix as a possibility.
Given that loss is something we avoid so vehemently, why do we want to keep even that remnant in?
Well, the truth is that some folks don’t, and they’re very comfortable with a 4e with the hypothetical possibility of character death that is rarely, if ever, actually employed. This makes them part and parcel of the more story-like, controlled style mentioned above.
But for those that cling to it, it provides something useful to them: an element of danger, the thrill of potential defeat.
Groups, of course, vary with how often they would like to employ potential defeat. Even simply being out there in the abstract most of the time, such as in 4e, it is more than enough for some people. However, one of the highlights of a more “game-like” kind of game is that this loss is more real and more prominent. Not simply failure, but actual loss, so that the player actually experiences an aversion. This is the core element of something like the old D&D cartoon with the armored guy cowering from the rust monster. This was also what the player was feeling: a severe aversion to losing their hard-earned (and often magical) equipment. If the player themselves is not scared of the consequences of going into the dungeon, for some game-centric playstyles, the game does not feature enough actual loss.
What Do You Want To Lose?
This week’s audience question is a bit of a tougher one to pose than in most weeks. What I’d really like to ask is what you would want to lose in your own gameplay, what you’d be willing to give up…but that kind of misses the point. The moment you’re willing to give it up, it stops being a loss.
So instead, let me tackle this from the other side: what do you like most about your favorite characters? And how much would you be able to tolerate the DM taking that from them, before it became un-fun? Would you be OK with your brave strong fighter becoming cowardly and weak? Or your smart mage becoming dumb? What about having your god shun you as a cleric, or experiencing a fall from grace as a paladin? How much can you lose, and still have fun with your game?
