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<blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 8835255" data-attributes="member: 53980">I agree that challenge involves a risk of failure. That said, failure comes in many forms.Take the following example. A merchant has some McGuffin that the party needs. He wants a sum that is more or less the total wealth of the party. Unless the party does something foolish, acquiring the item is basically a given. The challenge becomes to acquire the item without losing all of their wealth. Similarly, in a dungeon, a few orcs might not pose a lethal risk to a mid level party. However, the challenge becomes to get past those orcs while expending the least amount of resources (HP, spells, etc) possible, because too much resource attrition might shift a later encounter from dangerous to lethal.I would tentatively define a challenge as something with real stakes, or something that has the potential to raise the stakes of subsequent challenges. Of course, those &quot;real stakes&quot; are only real in a limited sense. There aren't any real stakes from a real world perspective (at least I hope no one would ever be exiled from the gaming group for failing a challenge). The &quot;real&quot; stakes are only real within the fiction of the game world. In the real world if we TPK we roll up a new party and keep playing.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Fanaelialae, post: 8835255, member: 53980"] I agree that challenge involves a risk of failure. That said, failure comes in many forms. Take the following example. A merchant has some McGuffin that the party needs. He wants a sum that is more or less the total wealth of the party. Unless the party does something foolish, acquiring the item is basically a given. The challenge becomes to acquire the item without losing all of their wealth. Similarly, in a dungeon, a few orcs might not pose a lethal risk to a mid level party. However, the challenge becomes to get past those orcs while expending the least amount of resources (HP, spells, etc) possible, because too much resource attrition might shift a later encounter from dangerous to lethal. I would tentatively define a challenge as something with real stakes, or something that has the potential to raise the stakes of subsequent challenges. Of course, those "real stakes" are only real in a limited sense. There aren't any real stakes from a real world perspective (at least I hope no one would ever be exiled from the gaming group for failing a challenge). The "real" stakes are only real within the fiction of the game world. In the real world if we TPK we roll up a new party and keep playing. [/QUOTE]

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