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="pemerton" data-source="post: 6605867" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think this all might depend a bit (maybe a lot) on player expectations and table practices.In my case, I play with a regular group. Some of the friendships in the group go back to high school; in my case, the shortest time I've known any group member is over 20 years. So there is no danger of the game coming to an end in any literal sense, nor of the fun going away.If you take as a premise that the only (or most) exciting thing in RPGing is finding out whether or not you get to keep going without frustration, then what you say follows.But that premise is not universally true. Particularly because the "less fun" is not, at least in my case, a very apt description.PC death changes the player's mechanical vehicle for engaging the game. But this may or may not be a loss, depending on table conventions for brining in a new PC. I've played in games where it was mechanically advantageous for a PC to die, because new PCs came in at the same or very similar level but could have their build optimised for the current  level and ingame situation, rather than wearing the vicissitudes of organic development over the course of play.In many cases, the main consequence of PC death is frustration: time lost generating a new PC (and perhaps missing out on getting to play for minutes or hours); elements of the fiction left dangling and unexplored; the player's vision of the broad parameters within which the game would unfold being thwarted. But there will not be "less fun" in any real sense: the friendships will endure and new sessions will be played.Is fear of frustration a great stake? Not really, in my personal approach to RPGing. Be frustrated for a brief period does not evoke fear in the people I RPG with. We're not afraid of being frustrated; just a bit annoyed by the prospect in the context of what is, for us, a leisure activity.There is no comparison, for me at least, to heats in competitions. The game (as I run it, and as I prefer to approach it when I'm a player) is not a competition to see who is best, or who can last the longest without experiencing frustration. As [MENTION=6790260]EzekielRaiden[/MENTION] pointed out upthread, the "prize" for winning is simply getting to keep going (ie non-frustration), not any sort of proof that you are the best.The stakes that I prefer to focus on in RPGing are stakes within the fiction, in which the players have an emotional investment. (Upthread you rejected the comparison to dramatic fiction. I don't. I find that the emotional pull of RPGing, which distinguishes it from other forms of gameplay, is precisely that it gives rise to a fiction in which the participants have an emotional investment. They care about the characters, their circumstances, the future of their world.)From this point of view, PC death has a certain meaning or significance in the fiction, but so do many other things. Any number of changes to the fiction can engage the emotions of the players, and hence constitute things that are at stake in making a choice.Something that I find interesting and complex is the interplay between fictional stakes and mechanical consequences for the player: players can care sufficiently about an outcome in the fiction - wishing it to be one thing rather than another - that they are prepared to sacrifice mechanical capabilities, and thereby reduce the extent of their ability, as players, to make moves within the game, in order to achieve that outcome. In my 4e game that has mostly taken the form of sacrificing magic items to achieve particular outcomes (eg <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?330383-Underdark-adventure-with-Demons-Beholders-Elementals-and-a-Hydra" target="_blank">here</a>), but in a <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?440504-The-Abyss-sealed-the-drow-freed-the-campaign-reaches-its-climax" target="_blank">recent session</a> it meant the player permanently giving up his PC's (then) best daily power, plus his racial encounter power.If the measure of intensity of stakes is how much emotional weight or force a choice has, or how big a willingness to commit it is understood by everyone at the table to demonstrate, these are some of the situations that, for me, clearly demonstrate such intensity.I would generally say the same thing of my game, but it is likely I would mean something different by it. My goal (not always achieved, because I'm not the best GM I could be) is that every choice the players make should engage the fiction in which they are emotionally invested (beyond the mere survival of their PCs).Because 4e is a game in which, ultimately, the deepest conflicts will be resolved by violence, combat examples are easy to give: I linked to one above.Here are three non-combat examples that add to the power-sacrifice example I linked to above: a <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?309950-Actual-play-my-first-quot-social-only-quot-session" target="_blank">dinner-party</a> in which the PCs had to withstand and (in the end) thwart their nemesis without embarrassing their ally, the baron, to whom the nemesis was an advisor; the <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?312367-Actual-play-another-combat-free-session-with-intra-party-dyanmics" target="_blank">interrogation of a captured prisoner</a>, which - due to the way that player choices about where their PCs were and what they did interacted with the pressure I had been creating in the unfolding situation - meant that they all wanted her dead, but found themselves obliged to insist to the baron that she not be executed but be imprisoned instead (because the fighter/cleric woudn't break a promise that had been made in his name, and the other PCs weren't prepared to cross the fighter/cleric's sense of honour); and the <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?324018-Wizard-PC-dies-returns-as-Invoker" target="_blank">resurrection of the dead PC wizard</a>, whose rebirth was permitted by the gods on condition that he be accompanied by an imp who would report back on his doings to the archdevil Levistus and the god-general Bane.These were all episodes that generated strong emotional responses from the players (raised voice, disagreement over what choices should be made, lengthy periods of deliberation, etc). But in no case was PC death at stake (in the third case, the PC was already dead, and the question was whether the player would bring in a new PC or rather continue to play the same PC, but with that PC importantly changed both mechanically and within the fiction).For me, personally, that is what I am looking for in an RPG.</blockquote>

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