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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9382328" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Wanted to tease out this line of thinking and talk a little bit about scripted events and Souls-Games. I'm just using your post as a springboard.Many video games have long had scripted events where the players are forced to lose a fight. It has been a long-standing point of contention in the various games, because it is annoying. Being put into a scenario where you have absolutely no chance of winning is just not fun. Very, very rarely you will get a no-win fight that a skilled enough player can last long enough in to realize that it is actually impossible to win, instead of just losing over the course of the fight. But, notably, there are two points in a game where is it less frustrating for this to happen. 1) The very beginning of the Hero's journey2) The very end of the Hero's Journey. The beginning is rather more common. Big Bad shows up, knocks out heroes, now we are on a quest to get stronger and eventually defeat that same Big Bad. Common stuff, mildly annoying still when it happens, because "we could have just skipped this part". The Ending is interesting, because it is usually a heroic sacrifice. The example I remember best is Halo: Reach, where at the end of the game, your character is faced with fighting an entire invading army by himself, and no matter how good you are, eventually the endless waves of enemies overwhelms you. But... anyone who knew the Halo franchise KNEW that the mission ended in failure before they even bought the disk. The Fall of Reach was a major turning point in the war that the first three games were about, this was a prequel story about an unknown Spartan who was the silent hero of this battle. You spend most of the game watching your squad slowly die around you. It feels GOOD to have that ending, if bittersweet, because the entire game made the point that THIS was the point of the story, a stand against literally impossible odds, honor and duty before all else. But DnD, especially when we usually talk about Old School play... doesn't do either of these. The impossible to win scenarios are not at the start of the journey to kick off your ascent to heroism. They aren't a heroic sacrifice at the climax of the campaign. They are in the middle, and only end the story for your character. You are the squad mate who gets sniped from afar during the fourth mission, never reaching the end of the story. And that SUCKS. It utterly, completely, without any regard for nuance, sucks to be the person who just drops dead midway through the story, then gets replaced by another character. But, I also brought up another type of game, because it ties into this. The Souls Games are infamous for being incredibly difficult. And they do have a few scripted events, especially in the earlier games, where your character is meant to flee a foe they cannot defeat. But, there are two twists here and they are vital. The first twist is that no Souls creature I am aware of, is actually undefeatable. There is a famous challenge of defeating the first big boss in the first game with the broken sword you start with. You aren't supposed to do that. You are supposed to run past, survive, get better gear, and come back. It is technically supposed to be an unwinnable fight. But you can win it. You just have to be highly skilled at the game. The second twist is, there is no RNG in a Souls game. If you are fighting the big devil, and you attempt to dodge roll away from its hammer, the only consideration is "did I time it correctly". If you pressed the buttons at the correct time, in the correct sequence, you will dodge, every single time. If you swing your weapon, and you are close enough to hit, you will hit the enemy, every single time. It actually is pure skill. A skill developed by being able to die over and over and over and over and over again, but resurrecting in the same time, same place, with the same character following the same story. Every death is a chance to learn, but also the story never changes with your death. You are not suddenly playing the second game if you die in the first. DnD does not work this way. If I make an attack on an enemy... I need to roll to see if I hit. Randomly, with no regard to my personal skill, I may miss. Then I roll for damage, and randomly, with no regard to my personal skill, I may roll low damage. If an enemy attack me, they roll to hit, and they may hit, randomly, with no regard to my personal skill. They might roll high damage, randomly with no regard to my personal skill. That fight with the jailer demon and the player with the broken sword cannot work in DnD, because even if it is technically possible for a character to hit 50 times in a row with the enemy missing 50 times in a row, statistically it isn't going to happen.And there is one last point. No one who runs one of the ridiculously difficult challenges in a souls game (like the Elden Ring challenge of winning with nothing but a basket hat and a sword) looks down on or disparages someone who beats the game using optimized methods. No one states that you aren't "really" playing the game if you choose a standard route over some bonkers challenge meant for players who are on the bleeding edge of the game's curve. Because while a gamer who does the basket-head challenge for the game, or the invincible challenge where if they die they need to start all over, is showcasing a high level of skill... they are showing off. They are doing it for fun, because the beat the game six other ways already, but they love the game too much to move on. No one likes playing no-win scenarios, unless it is deeply and perfectly thematic to their character's arc and journey. No win scenarios that can be overcome with an extreme amount of skill are fun for showing off, but DnD is largely not about skill, because it is about rolling dice. A perfect plan with perfect execution can fail because of a bad die roll. And yet, there is this habit, of looking down on people who are not trying to flex, of calling out people for playing on "easy mode" just because they are not letting everything ride or die on a single die roll. And I think it is in part because those people are playing with the goal of never rolling dice, trying to make DnD into a game of pure skill of description, where as long as you have a perfect plan, you are not allowed to fail.</blockquote>

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