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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7716651" data-attributes="member: 42582">Agree with that. Kind-of agree with that. The "only" makes the claim too strong. But I think a fair bit of contemporary RPGing does focus more on what I have called "setting/story tourism", which is a type of participation.I think a lot of discussion - and it comes out on these boards as well as in blogs, DM's guides, etc - gets confused because it wants participation/tourism and it wants challenge (these days probably more of a tactical combat challenge by default, rather than square-by-square exploratory challenge), and doesn't begin to tackle the tension involved in having both these things in the same episode of play.Generally I'm following along with your posts, and [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s - but just like there are bits of his where I differ, likewise here I only kind-of agree. It depends on "fail", at least in part - overall I think it is more common in contemporary RPGing to have non-death failure conditions, and these don't necessarily make the game easier.And then there are also non-die-roll-based failures. A game where success in action declarations is pretty likely, and in which the (mechanical and immediate story) consequences of failure are fairly mild, but where the social/"at the table" consequences of failure can be more serious (eg The Dying Earth that Hussar mentioned upthread) might be hard, in a completely different sort of way.Different games can require a player to "put him-/herself out there", on-the-line as it were, in different ways.When I think back over my own RPGing experiences, one of the most demanding was a freeform CoC scenario, where each of the PCs was related to a particular NPC who had been taken by dark forces to a bad place. We were going into that place to rescue the NPC. I was playing the mother of the NPC; the kidnapper (another NPC) was my ex-husband. It wasn't the sort of game where there was any risk of PC death - the actual events we went through had been prepared in advance by the scenario authors. But it was demanding, very demanding: in part because at a few key points choices had to be made (about which of the five of us woud bear a cost or get a benefit) and those were hard to make while remaining true to our characters, and our GM did a masterful job of pushing every player to stray true in reaching the final consensus (in effect by playing the angel/devil on one's shoulder); and in part because giving a sincere portrayal of a person wronged by her ex-husband and potentially losing her son is, itself, demanding (especially for someone, like me, not trained as an actor). (In my mind I used the mother of some old school-friends as my starting point for portraying the character.)I guess my bottom line is that there is more than one way to make a RPG require more than just participation, and the likelihood of irreversible PC death is only one of those ways.</blockquote>

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