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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6306803" data-attributes="member: 4937">The big problem I have with this is that it is not unusual, especially in old school play, for the party to have but a single overriding goal - survive the dungeon.  Outside of that context many players do not care what happens in the fiction nor in my opinion has the DM any right to demand that they do start caring.  What are you going to do, force the players to behave as if the lives of the orphans are meaningful to them?  It's not reasonable to expect that a player is going to be highly motivated to take moral responsibility for the actions of something they themselves see only as a playing piece in a game.  This general approach fails in the generic case because it makes assumptions about the motivations and aesthetic interests of the players.  In some cases there is an actual defeat I suppose (of a sort).  In other cases, players generally don't care what NPCs do to other NPCs, but instead treat it as background color to their story.  The most common alignment I see in play is Chaotic Self-Interest, which is followed closely there after by Neutral Pragmatist.  The only campaign defeat that is meaningful in that context is the death/maiming of a PC.  Expecting players to view other goals with great concern is I think naïve, and even to the extent that some will, all I think you are doing is punishing players for having goals beyond killing things and taking their stuff and specifically punishing those with story goals more severely than those with less prosaic concerns.  If everyone is a thespian with shared dramatic goals, ok, fine.  However more likely you've got a thespian, a power gamer, a clown, a casual gamer, and a couple of players with an amalgamation of motives playing together.  I also suspect that this would encourage a lot of 'don't throw me in the briar patch' behavior, with stated goals being actually less important to the player than their unstated goals so as to avoid ever actually being thwarted. Beyond that, this approach once again amounts to railroading, with the GM deciding what story he'd actually prefer and then implementing it regardless of the rules or fiction.  What justification other than your preferences as an author do you have for causing something to occur during the 5 minutes that a PC is 'out of it', if 5 minutes taking a bath room break, binding wounds, polishing a sword, or taking 20 to search a chest for traps wouldn't have the same consequence?  You're no longer adequately sharing the story in my opinion.  The PC's now live in a world which is unreliable, unpredictable, unknowable, and changeable.  In such a situation, no choice can truly matter and the only thing that really matters is subtly influencing the master of the world.Moreover, outside the context of a well established fiction, most 'campaign defeats' are probably rationalizations by the GM.  That is to say, unless the GM knew ahead of time exactly what resources were available to a foe, he could not meaningfully make the situation worse.  If you are constructing your fiction post hoc, if you have 'no myth', or if your challenge ratings are mostly being dictated by what the rules say a challenge should be like, you are not really going to follow through on 'In Encounter #62, the BBEG will be aided by 20 servants rather than 4, resulting in a high probability of defeat' because Encounter #62 doesn't exist yet in any concrete way.  Unless you've established rules that say event M occurs on Wallsday the 24th of Clement, and concretely know how to adjust the BBEG's time table based on each potential victory or defeat, you're just playing with smoke and mirrors.  The theoretical set back to the PC's interests is largely existing only in the mind of the GM, and IMO solely for the GM to rationalize his intervention in the situation to himself.   The players themselves are used to living in an unknowable world that spawns encounters according to the GM's whim, so they themselves are never going to know 'this is bad' compared to any standard.  Now, there is nothing wrong with having smoke and mirrors and for that matter, it's not always bad to railroad.  But in my opinion artful dungeon mastering requires you consciously know what you are doing when you utilize these bags of tricks.  Obfuscating from yourself what you are doing via smoke and mirrors strikes me as a rather poor use of illusionism.As a bit of an aside, Aragorn going over the cliff in the Two Towers movie was terrible story telling and is not the sort of thing you should implement in your games on purpose.  It's also in a gaming context illustrative of the problems with the approach I outlined above.  It's bad movie making because first it was redundant.  Aragorn falling off something and being semi-conscious happens multiple times in that movie alone, each with a slow motion pan to close up, and each with no sense that the hero is really in danger (especially the second or third time it happens).  Secondly, it's bad story telling because it adds nothing to the story.  At no point do any of those scenes actually add anything to our understanding of the character or develop the story.  Aragorn continually falling down or getting separated from the group isn't symbolic of anything and isn't meant to reference anything. (Unlike for example, foreshadowing Boromir's moral fall might by doing the same thing in the first movie).  There is nothing artful here.  All they do is pad the story length out meaninglessly.  They go by without ever being referenced again.  The audience can almost see the mental workings of the writer, "Add some action here.  Maybe falling from a high place.  That's always exciting."   Ironically, all that padded action does is slow the pace of the story down and make it less exciting.Thirdly, they are truly meaningless.  Nothing about the story changes because Aragorn goes over the cliff.  The same set of events still happen and still happen in basically the same way that they would have whether Aragorn took a time out or not.  No resources are gained or lost because of them.  Aragorn sacrifices nothing of meaning to him.  The Battle of Helm's Deep still plays out in the same way.   In the context of a post about 'campaign defeats', Aragorn going over the cliff is a quintessential example of how meaningless declaring a 'campaign defeat' that doesn't involve Aragorn's death actually is.   Likewise, it shows I think that declaring a 'campaign defeat' that doesn't in some way involve Aragorn's eventual futility - the Battle of Helm's Deep is lost, preventing Aragorn from stopping the sacking of Minas Tirith, one of his major campaign goals - and moreover Aragorn's player KNOWING somehow that if he hadn't fallen off that cliff he would have saved Minas Tirith (rather than the fall of Minas Tirith being DM fiat), is itself pretty meaningless. And all that assumes Aragorn's player deeply cares about anything other than Aragorn surviving the campaign, preferably while retaining Anduril and that sweet chainmail he got from Théoden.</blockquote>

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