Meant to respond to these, but apparently forgot. So you get a little bonus thing, Lanefan! Lucky you
I support unexpected player ploys, like the time they totally "ruined" a fight I made by luring a molten-obsidian golem into a pool of standing water, freezing it solid. No epic battle, no hard-won victory, maybe a couple minutes' exposition. They just outsmarted me. Nothing abusive or untoward about it. That fight ranks up there with the very first "boss" they ever fought (a scroll golem).
But challenge the tone and purpose of the game, and I'm not so open. Frex, I told them I won't run a crapsack world: they can show mercy and I won't ruthlessly exploit that mercy as if it were a weakness. (
Some prisoners are too dangerous though, like murder-cultists.) I
want a world where doing the right thing CAN work. If my players tried to exploit this (dunno how--but I bet
you can think of something!), I would be just as upset as if they exploited the "no random, pointless permadeath" policy. I'd feel that they were passive-aggressively crapping on my offer of a world
not ruled by cutthroat dog-eat-dog violence.
I guess that's fair, and...
technically I do? I just favor other things, or only use it at times that make sense to support cool RP chances. Def
not meatgrinders. Call it an "anti-funnel." Funnels soft-guarantee losing LOTs of chars, but survivors are keepers with a sort of story.* "Anti-funnels" soft-guarantee
not losing your character, but casualties go out in a blaze of glory. Funnels balance "zero to hero" with "let's not take a year to get a hero." Anti-funnels balance "you can always stand back up" with "be reasonable and make deaths fun too."
*TBH "I rolled better, so I survived" isn't a
story to me. It's mere statistics, draining away the
value of survival. Winning your first hand of poker is exciting; winning at least one game in a batch of 100...less so. Both are wins. But if you play 100 hands, I'd HOPE you win at least once if you're actually trying. Specialness slain by iterative probability. For me, "story" lies in chars
responding to success/failure, not the brute facts thereof. Can't respond to failure if failure kills you...unless your death IS your response, which makes it fun and engaging (see below).
Ay, there's the rub. Near-certain death + "keep trying,
one PC'll get lucky" kinda bore me. The former, I disengage: if my toys are always taken away, why care? Best to pull away, then the losses won't hurt. The latter sours me on the survivors, who don't feel "special" because of course it happens
eventually. Flip a coin enough times and you'll get ten heads in a row, it's not
interesting if you flipped 10k times before that. A royal flush is exciting during a poker tournament; it's not exciting if you speed-run 100,000 games a minute until you get one, and even less exciting if you are forced to fold and draw again repeatedly until you
do get one.
I'd let them retire chars if they wanted to. None of mine
have, because they're pretty invested in their characters, but I'd support them if they did. That Druid player who was going to kill off his char, sought it
only to enable an indefinite hiatus. I wanted to leave a
chance he could return, even if he doesn't. We talked it out. What he did (spirit-calling the
deity of a rival monotheistic religion as a spirit-worshipper who technically should see that deity as "merely" the biggest city-spirit) didn't feel like it should
kill. It felt like putting a burden on him (price for his boon), and on his allies (his soul was still locked in a devil's contract). That, plus the deity being good (so their followers claim) meant mystery+doubt felt better than certain death.
Yes, but an artificial
general intelligence remains distant. Even the computer science
theory of AIs learning from human behavior is touchy (though progress continues). In optimizing functions, statistical analysis, and data aggregation, AI beats us humans by miles. But ask one to write a full-page science news article, and even the best falls short. (Note: it's not really "writing an article," it's doing RNG with a
very complex filter to produce likely new words in sentences. The complexity covers long-range correlations. Basic English syntax--e.g. SVO word order, adjectives before nouns, "a"/"an," etc.--is very easy, but
semantics, like "two adjacent sentences should have subjects related to one another," is HIGHLY advanced stuff, only big, complex deep-learning algorithms can even
try to pull it off. Even complex syntax (like when to insert paragraph breaks) can baffle a mid-tier effort into predictive text generators.
Oh, sure. "Impose" seems pretty strong here. I take and offer suggestions, and support most things my players take interest in.
Great suggestions, and lovely examples. That copper dragon sounds like a hoot. (Dragons are rare in my setting, but a gold one is a trusted NPC ally, who is hunting a black dragon trying to conquer the party's homeland.) And yes, I definitely try to foreshadow shifts in tone.
Absolutely. I tend to prefer a "lighter and softer" side, but I have included several enemies who are just that: enemies. Like that one conversation between Zuko and Iroh.
Z: "I know what you're going to say: she's my sister, and I should try to get along with her."
I: "No, she's crazy and she needs to go down."
Various enemies--the black dragon, the Grandmother of Shadows, the Burning Eye, the (erstwhile!) Song of Thorns, the leader of the Shadow Druids--are genuinely bad people(/spirits) who need to go down. Their followers are also mostly bad, but some can be redeemed, and if the players are clever, they can figure out who and how. I have set one player on the road, but it's up to them to realize it and take it.
But there are also trusted friends, friendly rivals, love interests, potential suitors of political expedience....it's a complicated web, but much of it is good people, or at least ordinary people doing their best in difficult situations.