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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9471391" data-attributes="member: 4937">One problem with this argument is Heroes of Might and Magic IV is a single player game and tabletop RPGs traditionally have at least 2 participants, and usually have more.  And the original author here I think gets it entirely wrong when he pauses to think about this.  The problem is not that a game in which the player participants always win isn't fun for the GM.  I'd argue from a perspective of 42 years as a GM that the GM tends to suffer more from PC death than even the player of the PC.  Every PC death harms the GMs game and vision in very tangible ways.  GMs are just as interested and often more interested in advancing PC stories as the player is because from the GM as story teller perspective, the PCs are the GMs protagonists and to lose them is to lose all the investment around those characters and to harm the GMs overall narrative.  Generally speaking, protagonists in heroic fiction don't randomly die outside of the climax in the story or other meaningful event.  If they do, then that fiction tends to be harmed - less enjoyable to relate or transcribe.The real problem with a tabletop RPG where the PCs don't or can't lose is it interferes with other aesthetic desires of the participants that are almost universal in RPG play, namely the expectation of verisimilitude and the expectation of agency.  There is an unstated near universal expectation that the outcome of choices made by the partici2pants will be meaningful and the logical result of the choices made in the fictional situation, and there is a nigh universal expectation that the participants will be allowed to make meaningful choices.  It is these two expectations that inexorably lead to game supporting failure as an outcome including total failure such as death.If you design or run a game such as that it violates these expectations, even if every agrees death would not be a desirable outcome, the game loses its excitement and sense of value for most tabletop participants.  A common compromise is to rely heavily on Illusionism as a technique where the players believe or are led to believe that they are playing in a game with high agency and verisimilitude but where behind the screen the GM is manipulating outcomes in such a way as to avoid undesirable failures, including undesired deaths.  However, Illusionism is a fragile system of play because if something happens to reveal the illusion it has all the fun of realizing that you were winning Chess solely because your opponent was throwing the game.  The story you made has been cheapened because the verisimilitude or agency you thought you had turns out to not be there.  Depending on the expectations of the GM, this can also cheapen the GMs experience if he knows he is using illusionism to a high degree, because he suspects even if the players don't that the hypothetical "reader" of his story will see the deus ex machina and other coincidences as a story flaw.Another common way to deal with the problem is turn down the difficulty level just as the original writer suggested with a single player game, setting up the math in such a way that failure is statistically improbable.  One of the easiest ways to do this historically was run a "Monte Hall" type campaign where the GM generously gave vastly more resources than were necessary to overcome the challenges.  This is a little bit better of a solution than high levels of Illusionism, but again depending on the aesthetics of play the resulting story can be unsatisfying.  While there are stories with protagonists that are never meaningfully challenged and go from scene to scene displaying their prowess by easily overcoming the challenges that limits of such story telling are generally regarded as juvenile and such ego validating or ego driven narratives can be tiring or even dysfunctional if you have more than one participant contending for the awesomeness spotlight.  In short, the real problem with player death is participants in an RPG often have complex expectations and desires that conflict with each other, and the more participants you add to the RPG, the more of a potential problem this becomes.</blockquote>

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