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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5228069" data-attributes="member: 2067">Thanks for the responses, everyone! These are interesting, but kind of situational. They're good in a big combat or two, but if something like this happened every time you got in a fight, I imagine it'd be frustrating.FFZ does a pretty good job of situating the combat in an ongoing plot, so there's stuff at stake, but that doesn't speak to how difficult an individual combat should or shouldn't be. Huh. If the PC's are 99+% likely to survive each fight, doesn't that mean that they're 99+% likely to survive the length of the campaign? Because the effects are isolated in each combat? Like, if you have a kid who is a boy, and then have a second kid, the probability of that second kid being a boy is still about 50%. Or, if you toss a coin twice, and it comes up heads the first time, it's still about 50% likely to come up heads a second time?In other words, when this is playing out at the table, if each combat is so nearly an assured victory, why do we bother resolving that conflict? There doesn't seem to be much conflict, really, to resolve: the party wins, and the game keeps going.Which seems to make combat kind of pointless, as a "game system" or "task resolution" at least (though it still could be fun as part of the ongoing interactive story). ...like EW said:I certainly want combat to be a challenge, but what, really, do we mean by that? What's challenging? 99.77% chance of success doesn't seem very challenging. But a 50% chance of success does seem fair, at least on the surface of it. However, it's true that D&D usually has a much higher survival rate than that, too, regardless of editions.This is pretty close to what's happening right now with my FFZ work, only the chances are skewed for certain characters: some folks (notably, those melee fighters with light defenses) wind up dead in a fight more often than others (in part, because they're delightful targets). This is what took me off in the direction of figuring out things for KO'd characters to do, but I think it's a little more fundamental of a problem then that, and I'm not sure how best to solve it.What makes a given combat a challenge, if you're expected to win it as a team? Is it the chance that your own character might be KO'd? And if it is, how do I keep players engaged if their characters are winding up unconscious early and often?</blockquote>

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