NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7192606" data-attributes="member: 71699">Thank you for your efforts to assist me in developing my rhetorical style. I'd like to focus on the thread's goals. You dislike that I suggest that people aren't honestly interested in consequences. You then present an example where you raise fears that the consequences will be a problem. Remember, if we're using story pressures to accomplish the same thing as mechanical pressures, the outcome should be the same. The BBEG will have recruited additional help. Or he'll be nearer completing his ritual. Or whatever: conditions will prevail that make the PC's job harder. Alternatively, we can say that we are not honestly interested in consequences and neither story pressures nor mechanical pressures will please us. That's also a reasonable position to take... so long as we give up any claims to the contrary. You seem to interpret that point pejoratively.Your example is partly a take on the variance argument raised earlier. One of the key elements that separate PnP RPGs from linear narrative (e.g. books) are stochastic mechanisms that can result in things going awry. In my experience, some of the most exciting moments in the game have been where something unexpected happened. Where things came down to the wire. Moments that people remember for years. So the straight answer to your question is that - yes - the PCs have a difficult choice to make. That elevates the action. The outcome will be remembered longer than if they went in full-powered and alpha'd the BBEG. Worst case, they had the fun of triumphing earlier when they nailed whatever lesser threat they expended their resources on, and will have the fun of trying out some other character concepts. I'd also make the point here that through making easier encounters mechanically meaningful, we elevate the tension in those. Even a random encounter may become relevant. The BBEG's outriders matter. Overall, the tension and fun of our game made gains.One needs to reflect here on character death. Think of this in terms of a fair bet. One of the issues for all persistent RPGs is that investment in a character - the player's stake - is continuously increasing. Up to a point, a DM is able to offer payouts worth the wager, taking into consideration the possibility of loss. A simple way to represent that is that hours played*chance of loss must be less than anticipated winnings. However, at some point the player's stake becomes more valuable than any reasonable payout. That is balanced out by declining the chance of loss; in practice that eventually collapses into no chance of loss. The exit from the maths of character death is to focus on the incommensurables. Did I enjoy what happened? Did I feel tension? Excitement? Was it memorable? For me, the mechanical tools are all about elevating those things. The reason for preserving consequences is not to avoid being a "pussy" (as you put it), but to create memorable heroic fantasy.You may now accuse me of belittling other DMs by suggesting that they have no interest in creating memorable heroic fantasy <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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