This is absolutely 100% applicable, yes. I have the same response to horror films. I am arguing against the idea that a "horror-film-like" mentality is the best means to achieve an enjoyable D&D experience, and
especially that if such a mentality is removed, the game inherently becomes un-fun or pointless--which people have absolutely already made in this thread. I will, however, note that I don't think ALL "tension" is bad. Horror relies on a particular kind of tension and uncertainty, but there are others.
Thank you, genuinely. Because that is exactly what I'm railing at. The notion that it's only when you have the "thrill of death" that anything can ever matter.
I'm not the one claiming that the only way for D&D to
ever be enjoyable to
anyone is if it's always a tense, one-wrong-move-and-you-lose-everything experience. Others in this thread straight-up have. Who's badwrongfun arguing, in that instance?
I included an all-caps YMMV disclaimer. I'm not sure what more I can do besides abandoning critique of arguments entirely, which seems an excessive response.
Genuinely trying not to go straight into the salt zone here: You have incorrectly assumed that the
only form of thrill comes from fear, and that the only form of loss is character death. I am saying that loss can be a host of other things, and that tension can arise from wanting to protect/nurture the things that excite you (enthusiasm) or that you have come to love (affection). I am
very specifically arguing against the idea that ONLY death counts as loss and ONLY fear counts as thrill.
I feel very frustrated that you have misunderstood my argument in this way, as this is a very uncharitable reading of what I said. I am doubly frustrated because I tried very hard to explicitly state that this knowledge ISN'T a thing in my games. You DON'T know if you'll succeed or not. You DON'T know if you'll be able to protect the things you love or advance the things that excite you. I just don't include random, purposeless, irrevocable death. Perhaps the character does die, but Gets Sent Back, Gandalf-style--with a literal deadline and more questions than answers. Perhaps a valued NPC sacrifices
their life to save them, and now the party must quest to resurrect them or honor their sacrifice in some way. All sorts of costs exist, and many of them are much more
engaging than "your character is dead, everything they might have cared about or achieved is now dust in the wind. Try again? Y/N"
This would be a key difference between us, then. While I absolutely value emergent play (it's part of why I have forced myself to NOT prepare very much, to NOT hammer everything down, to rely pretty heavily on improvisation and adaptation), I'm interested in the stories of my players' characters. I want to see where they go--the ups and downs, the costs and rewards, the agonizing over difficult moral decisions, the righteous vengeance and the wise forgiveness. It's like having my own personal character-driven TV show. I don't want to hand things to my players on mithril platters, but I don't want them fearful that everything they've built will go up in a puff of smoke because of a couple bad die rolls. My players are skittish enough as it is.
Oh, I absolutely agree that "oh s**t moments" are memorable! Our party has absolutely had plenty of them. They just didn't include character deaths as a consequence. As one example, when the party exhumed the bodies of two individuals stricken by the Song of Thorns, a memetic virus and spirit of chaos and primal savagery. They performed an autopsy on them, and realized that the Song--despite being a spirit--literally transforms its victims into pre-sapient animals, modifying bone structure, muscle, brain tissue, the works. One of our players is an anthropologist by training, and was EXTREMELY disturbed by these revelations; it was an "oh naughty word, this thing is NASTY and SERIOUS" moment, despite involving
zero danger to anyone in the party personally. They could see how terrible this could be if it wasn't contained or destroyed.
Agreed.
I may have problems with Paizo and PF, but I can agree with this. It's a struggle to find a way to make "contextual" options that can be shared across an entire system, which
sounds like a contradiction. I, too, hope that we'll see more development on that front. I think 13th Age's Backgrounds and OUTs are good starting points for new design ideas in this space.
Also agreed.
It's a careful dance. I have personally been very lucky, in that my players have responded much
more positively than I ever dared hope to several NPCs I've introduced. Part of it is just that those NPCs are actually
useful to the party, but part is also that the players were On Board for two of them being in a relationship. I've found a big part of setting the stage for player affection (for my group, at least) is just to show NPCs being relatable people with a skill to offer, and saving the "help us plz" for after a baseline rapport comes up. Offering a little witty humor now and then also helps!
Perhaps. I've actually found affection to be an extremely strong motivator in my group, mostly because the party is really good at finding communities that look to them for leadership and guidance, and the player(s) in question have zero problem with getting on board. For example, our party tiefling has taken multiple actions I would not have expected, due to
deeply caring about people to whom he has a familial and/or philosophical connection. He became half-devil (as opposed to merely a tiefling) due to wanting to save a group of people who had collectively made a protect-us-from-horrible-things bargain with his (yet-to-be-determined) devilish ancestor, siphoning off their devilish essence, even though he HATES how manipulative and bastardly devils can be and wants nothing to do with them personally.
I mean, I literally quoted a person who used that exact word. And I have seen plenty of others, here and elsewhere on the internet, who either used that exact word, or said things functionally equivalent to it (something like "if the player isn't constantly in fear of
Perhaps I did not specify finely enough. I have absolutely seen (and
been) a player having to sit out for 2-3 sessions or more, because there weren't henchmen around to step up or it didn't make sense to find a replacement yet. If that isn't losing your ability to participate, I don't know what is. And, as noted, I have had multiple people tell me that that's the whole point of character death--costing the player their participation in the game. ZakS, for example, explicitly said that to me on another forum, a long while back.
As I said, I
literally quoted Lanefan, who
explicitly used the word "paranoia" to describe the feeling players should have. If that isn't explicitly doing that, I don't know what to tell you.
I'm honestly not entirely sure what you're saying here, Tetrasodium. Also, I made this a General D&D thread since I didn't specifically mean to discuss 5e alone.
As above: I emphatically DO NOT wish to remove
loss from the game. But "chance of injury" is not at all the same as "chance of loss," and a key part of my argument is that a lot of people, for a very long time, have been equating those two in a D&D context. Equating "your character may, and indeed almost certainly will, suffer loss, hardship, and difficulty" with "your character is at a very real risk of irrevocable (or at least not short-term resolvable) death basically all the time" is exactly the problem. The two are NOT one-to-one equivalent.
My experience, particularly with OSR things, has been that a player whose character dies does
nothing (except make jokes and comment on the state of play) for the rest of that session. And possibly for multiple sessions thereafter. Hence why I said what I said.
Mr. Kuntz, I genuinely respect your contributions to gaming, but again, I feel very frustrated by this severe misinterpretation of what I said. I understand that you are mostly choosing to disengage with the thread, so if you do not wish to respond to this post, I would not hold it against you. But I emphatically reject the notion that I am advocating anything that lacks "challenges and uncertainty." Yes, I am saying that (character) death is severely over-emphasized as a potential cost. It frustrates me greatly that saying that gets transmuted into "oh, so you want a game where the players just
succeed at everything they do, every time, always?"
I
completely agree with you that an "Adventurer" that never experienced challenge or uncertainty would not deserve the title! I'm not saying that that is what should happen in any game. (I mean, if a group really wants that, more power to them I suppose, but it's definitely not for me.) I'm saying that the culture of D&D has falsely treated "death, particularly the ever-present threat of character permadeath" as being the ONLY form of loss, of "challenges and uncertainty," and that I think the hobby as a whole--
but obviously not every single individual table--would be better-served by emphasizing a wider spectrum of losses, challenges, uncertainties, by considering other motivators besides fear (and very specifically the fear of character death).
I was told it is not possible to "win" D&D. Would you disagree? If you agree, does that mean D&D isn't a game? You can certainly lose, in lots of ways. I find losing-by-character-death is highly overvalued, and other forms of losing are often neglected or forgotten.
Completely agreed. When making changes to a game, you have to expect the unexpected. Consequences almost always spiral out from a change, and sometimes what seems like a small tweak has vast impact. Focusing challenge, hardship, loss, and uncertainty away from character death requires effort to keep things exciting and engaging. I have found that effort is not a burden, though, and its rewards are rich.
This, definitely. Though in my case, I run a world which is bright, but under threat: less "points of light" in a vast tapestry of darkness, and more...light and darkness about equal in
influence, currently, but the latter poised to destroy the former....unless heroes rise to make a difference. Inattention and neglect can be just as dangerous as failure, because dark forces are surging back into power. It is not really possible for darkness to totally snuff out light, but things might suck for just as long as they've generally not sucked very much (that is, centuries to millennia, depending on the severity).
Agreed. Character death (that isn't reversed) permanently ends change and development. Hence, when I do consider death as a consequence, I prepare for making it yet another journey. The journey ends when we as a group decide it ends, but there's no guarantee the course will be easy, nor that it will go even remotely as planned, nor that the party will even
get to where they originally planned to go. Those are all sources of challenge, loss, and uncertainty that are much more interesting to me than cutting the thread and ending a character--and I think they would be more interesting to other groups out there too, if more DMs considered something other than "your character died" as the weapon of first
and last resort in terms of creating tension and hardship for the characters.
