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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 6705488" data-attributes="member: 6777454">While save or die things might be satisfactory to a person trying to present the game as a simulation, it does not function at all in a narrative sense and is fundamentally bad for game play.It knocks both a player and a protagonist out of a story due to an event that was almost certainly not meant to actually be an important or meaningful moment. Just a random trap coupled with a single poor roll.And for that single poor roll?An actual real life human being is out of the game for the rest of the night and either goes home or finds something else to do away from everyone else as they are no longer part of the group activity.Within the story, a protagonist that had a story to tell now is unable to fulfill the story to its conclusion which is ultimately unsatisfactory to all participants in telling that story. All progress made by that character towards telling their story ends abruptly without satisfaction or meaning.Moreover, all investment the player has made in that character so far is lost and they are, hopefully, going to be willing to make a new character-- but I guarantee you that their willingness to invest in that next character is going to be greatly diminished as they will soon just see the characters as expendable numbers on a piece of paper that will just be crumpled up and tossed away on the first bad die roll. You will see less and less and less effort put into character details like name, background story, description and so forth-- because you'll have made it clear you couldn't care less about any of it, its just another faceless, nameless lemming to go pop on a random die roll.The rest of the group is now down a member for the rest of the adventure leading to a higher probability that the above to events will occur again before the adventure has finished.Now, granted, there needs to be risk in the game for it to capture attention and be fun. If one is guaranteed the best result regardless of their choice of actions, then the actions themselves have no meaning.BUT, prior to putting down the planned event where you are going to call for the entire group to make a single die roll with-- let's be generous-- an 80% chance of success, with 5 people in your group did you really mean for this to be the point in the game where you fully intended one of your players is going to leave the group unsatisfied and likely a bit bitter with less willingness to ever engage in your game again?Because if that wasn't what you wanted happening at that particular moment in the game, you royally screwed the goose there by setting up that planned event. You virtually guaranteed a result you didn't want all for the sake of trying to make the game more "exciting" by introducing greater risk... forgetting that what you are risking is a player disengaging from a game that lasts hours a session.</blockquote>

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