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="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8269039" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Just gonna hit stuff on the first page and most recent page because I don't have time to comb through all of 'em.Question is incomplete, and therefore unanswerable. At least two valid interpretations: (1) do all players always want this risk? (2) do any players ever want this risk? The answer to (1) is "hell no," while for (2) it's trivially "yes."You'll forgive me, I hope, for having an EXTREMELY jaundiced view of any position that claims, "I know better than you do what you need, so don't complain when I do things. I know you better than you do."It is, I grant, true that many people often do not actually know what they want, whether by actively seeking a thing that they don't actually enjoy, or by merely not actually being aware of the thing they do want. (I experienced a mix of both; I didn't even have a concept of the kind of experience that 4e D&D could provide, and I kept trying to find the right "tweaks" to fix the broken and buggy mess of 3.X so that it would be what I wanted when such a thing is mostly not doable.) But I am ALWAYS going to be EXTREMELY skeptical whenever anyone claims to know better than I do what I want--if I have no idea (or the wrong idea), I'm not going to trust some other person's idea any more than my own.Completely agreed on all counts. Consequences are what matter. Well, specifically, interesting consequences. Boring or dull consequences are to be avoided. That's not always achievable, because it's not always obvious what will or won't be interesting, but the trend should be away from the boring and toward the interesting. (There are whole other worlds of conversation to have about what "consequences" actually means, in detail, but the high-level term suffices here.)Agreed. But a "dangerous" world is not strictly the same as a "lethal" one--danger comes in many forms. Often, the things that hurt most are the ones that leave no physical mark--at least, not on the player character.Having gone through some of these myself, this is an excellent question--and difficult to answer. As others noted, system preferences usually reflect a player's tacit set of tolerable death risks.Speaking only for myself: I dislike games that are really really beholden to swingy dice, but want to retain some swing (bounded swing, one might say) as that does add a little spice to the uncertainty. I've lost a character to a combo of swingy dice (DM happened to crit--in Roll20, so no fake rolls--on a big nasty's hardest-hitting attack just after I'd hit my "okay I need healing" point) and forgetting a mechanic (I had armor that, as a free action, gives you healing equal to your surge value 1/day--had I remembered, it would've saved the char's life). I accepted the death with good grace, rolled with it, and had some really neat story result from getting the char revived--this was at 4th level IIRC, so there was no non-quest-style way we could get a resurrection, even in 4e.Thing is, I accepted that death because this DM had proven to me, in very short order, that he knew his stuff--and that he was, as DW puts it, "a fan of the characters." He wouldn't screw me out of this character's interesting story. In rolling with it, we got to see some really quite excellent additional parts of the story, and some brilliant roleplay from my fellow players. (You know you've been playing your Paladin right when the snarky joker of the party solemnly requests said Paladin's revival: "And he's saved us lots.....more than I usually care to admit.")In the abstract, though, and especially as DM? I tend to avoid permitting too much of most of the above. I don't use irrevocable save-or-die mechanics so the PWK thing would never come up. If I've forgotten a mechanic, I am always happy to accommodate a player's preferred way to fix the error. If my players forget a mechanic, I try to remind them gently, not harping on things but offering suggestions. Dungeon World doesn't have overly-swingy dice, and it's very difficult for a single attack to even potentially kill a character. Etc. Death is, as I've said, still possible in my game, but it is unlikely and the players almost always have enough resources and agency to address the possibility--if they wish to.I know we have often disagreed, Oofta, but I could not say this better. Fully agreed. (Well, I avoid games like this, so I haven't played any, but otherwise.)110% this. Engaging outcomes and the risk of loss. Neither wholly matches "deadliness" itself. Deadliness is one road to them, but the sights thereon may fall flat, and the weather is often bad. Other roads sometimes offer a better trip.Agreed on this (though not necessarily about the resource rate part I snipped).Part of the problem is that "interesting consequences" are extremely difficult to codify in rules. A consequence is interesting when it matters to people. One's life is, fairly naturally, going to matter to most people, and thus makes an easy consequence for systematic approach. But things like "the people you care about," while about equally universal (almost everyone has at least one other person whose life they value), is substantially harder to codify as a rule--and that doesn't even get into things like philosophical values, organizations, places, sought objects...the list goes on. Alignment is one incredibly fraught attempt to capture philosophical-value consequences. Whether it is a problem because of its method or because such things are inherently problematic, I don't know. Given the difficulty  of answering ethics questions IRL, though, I'm not inclined to be hopeful about a D&D system of handling ethical consequences, no matter how important ethical consequences are for most people.All this to say: We spend so many pages on Death As A Consequence because no practical number of pages would be sufficient to cover any of the others.Agreed. Even "trash" fights, to borrow the MMO term, should have some purpose--even if that "purpose" isn't one that would translate into the fictional world. (E.g. "this fight is here because we need the PCs to feel time pressure," when the in-world "purpose" of the fight is...because those patrolling monsters coincidentally happened to be there at that moment. I'm pretty sure most people would call that "not actually a purpose" IRL.)I try to avoid them, in part because yeah, I DO think they have a big risk of negatively affecting a campaign. This is part of the "controlled swing" thing: if swing is real, and you keep playing over a long span of time, eventually a "DM lucky, PCs unlucky" moment happens back to back--thus putting the PCs at a huge disadvantage for the "big fight" (as in your example), which they then lose, which puts them at an even worse disadvantage for the next fight...etc.The problem isn't strictly the swing, but rather that no measures were implemented to correct for extreme swing, only to "keep on keeping on," as it were. Bad results make worse results more likely, and when those worse results happen they make truly awful results likely, etc. That can really sap the fun out of the play-experience if it isn't addressed, and it can be difficult to do that if you allow it to go on too long. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," but that requires really serious forethought; the alternative is, IME, to level with your players and figure out a solution together.I usually take the prevention route, mostly by including powerful but usually-constrained allies, or consumables that are potent but irreplaceable. The natural "it can't be replaced, save it for a rainy day" instinct keeps my players from abusing the latter. Their NPC allies actually having the party's respect and trust keeps them from abusing the former. You don't ask the dragon who's legit helped you out of a couple binds to just SHOW UP every time things go wrong, because you like him and his fiancée and you don't want to jeopardize his secret mission; you don't just summon the head of the Church's internal police to help you clean out a sewer because you know he's busy with trying to prevent interplanar forces from corrupting the world.As do I, as long as it's understood as a trend/correlation, not an ironclad causative link.Thing is, this sort of vein has been present in D&D ever since you had groups that weren't "descended" (educationally) from Gygax's and Arneson's tables. For very very nearly as long as there have been people playing D&D to be Bilbo dangerously heisting his way through Smaug's lair and his dwarf friends holding their own against forces a dozen times larger until reinforcements arrive, there have been people wanting to play Legolas and Aragorn and Gandalf, movers and shakers who (in one case explicitly) aren't allowed to die because they're needed, and who go on to have cool destinies or just rewards afterward (taking your outsider-best-friend to the afterlife with you, becoming king and re-enacting the most famous romance in all of history, getting to finally return to your paradise home after thousands of years, etc.)Concerns about accurately representing fiction don't even really apply, because it wasn't about accurately representing the fiction, but rather accurately representing the personal fantasy: the heist-style play is a fantasy about doing incredibly dangerous things and being smart enough (and lucky enough) to pull it off, while the adventure-style play is a fantasy about doing incredibly dangerous things and being heroic enough (and smart enough, albeit in a different sense) to pull it off.</blockquote>

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