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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5164940" data-attributes="member: 42582">This may be true for some ways of playing the game. I'll try to explain why I doubt that it is true for all ways of playing the game.It depends on (i) what we mean by failure, and (ii) what the goals of play are.Suppose that our goal in play is to have the PCs be participants in a fantasy adventure story which (i) is thematically compelling (a metagame goal) and (ii) changes the ingame world in a signficant way (an ingame goal). The possibility that we will fail at these two goals doesn't increase the fun of achieving them. It just gets in the way. If the mechanics make such failure a real possibility, we need to change games (eg to HeroQuest, The Dying Earth, Burning Wheel, or some similar modern game). The sort of mechanics that get in the way of the goal, and which are (by the standards of this goal) therefore candidates just to be bad mechanics, are "miss-a-turn" mechanics. Because they stop the players, at least temporarily, from driving the game in the desired direction.On the other hand, it is quite consistent with success at our two goals to be guaranteed that there be a possibility of the PCs failing in their ingame endeavours - after all, it may be this very failure that brings about results (i) and (ii). So mechanics that result in the PCs failing are fine, provided that  they still allow the players to drive the game forward by engaging those mechanics. (HeroQuest and Burning Wheel are both full of advice to GMs about how to run a game that will work this way. DMG2 tries the same for 4e, but doesn't do as good a job of it, in my opinion.)The sort of approach to play that I'm describing is therefore quite different from Gygaxian play, because it contemplates the possibilit of a strong divide between player success/failure and PC success/failure. But I don't think it is especially about ego-gaming.EDIT: A comparison. When I used to play armies or cops and robbers at primary school, there was always a chance that a teacher would come into the playground and confiscate our toy guns. This chance of failure did not enhance the fun - it was just a pointless obstacle that got in the way. (Note that things would be different if the aim of the game was to play in spite of the teachers' prohibiting the game - but I never played this "deliberate disobedience" variation.)</blockquote>

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