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"Hot Take": Fear is a bad motivator
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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8247496" data-attributes="member: 6790260"><p>Except that losing your artifacts or your beloved NPCs or whatever else, no matter how hurtful they are, doesn't mean losing your connection to the game. Death does. That's really the only fundamental difference between death and other permanent losses; with (irrevocable) character death, the player must invent an entirely new connection to the game.</p><p></p><p>Having discussed it with my players, there's also a sense in which all the other things--the items, the NPCs, the city, etc.--are less "personal" than one's character. The other things that can be permanently lost are <em>ours</em>, collectively because we collaborate to develop them, or <em>mine,</em> because I'm the DM and I run them (and possibly created them). The Bard <em>belongs</em> to the Bard's player, and nobody else. I've contributed challenges and questions and opportunities, but fundamentally, that's the only thing that truly, unequivocally belongs to that player and nobody else. It's a special kind of hurt to lose that. It doesn't mean losing the other things wouldn't hurt--it totally would, that's why we call it <em>loss</em>. But it's a hurt that can be tolerated far better.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Being "pure luck" implies skill has no relevance, but you then say it does (it can reduce odds). Otherwise...I honestly have no idea how this is relevant, nor where I meaningfully disagree with you. Yes, hard loss is always an option. I said as much myself. I support my players' efforts to avoid it. But they can fail. I prepared, for example, for the possibility that they could flat-out <em>fail</em> to defeat the Song of Thorns--worse, that it could <em>grow</em> in power due to their attempts to stop it. Had they failed, it would have been utterly disastrous; had they failed <em>badly</em>, it would have been nothing short of Armageddon for their world. Those possibilities were remote, but still possible. They did not come to pass.</p><p></p><p></p><p>My players generally listen, but there have been times where they plowed ahead anyway. Not a lot of times, but still.</p><p></p><p></p><p>I do not understand why this is a "hard and fast" rule, whereas "races occur on racetracks" is not. Same goes for "computer programs (without procedural generation) are finite in scope."</p><p></p><p></p><p>So, you really couldn't give a (ahem) <em>fig</em> about respecting the spirit of the game? This honestly comes across as incredibly rude. Like, this sounds like straight-up "Stop Having Fun" Guy material. "Stop <em>limiting</em> yourself in ways the rules don't explicitly require! Isn't it so much more fun to push the limits to their breaking point?!?"</p><p></p><p></p><p>I don't understand how the "but" part is relevant.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Three years of DMing and ~20 years of playing have never shown a situation like this. If accusations of favoritism are flying, the game is already WAY dead, regardless of whether the DM adjudged a death rightly. It means the players no longer respect the DM. Again, whether rightfully or wrongly doesn't matter. The relationship is <em>already broken</em>. And it can only be restored by restoring that respect, which is vital for making the entire thing--including rules based on "what makes sense"--functional.</p><p></p><p></p><p>I have not ever seen this happen, and with my game group, I can pretty much guarantee it wouldn't. I certainly have more <em>sway</em> than others, being the one who knows the cosmology best etc., but I am always willing to defer to a player that has an idea that sounds better, or to yield to the group--just as I would yield to them if they said, "Nope, sorry, all the campaign stuff you've made is boring, we wanna go set sail." I absolutely would not tolerate "loud" players shouting down everyone else; if someone behaved that way at my table, <em>ever</em>, they would get one warning. Failure to heed that warning would result in being removed from the game. Being respectful to your fellow players is mandatory. This has only once been an issue (for completely unrelated reasons; a player was pretty rudely failing to engage with the game, and it was weighing down the group), and we resolved it with a respectful, adult conversation in private.</p><p></p><p>Do you have problems with keeping your players respectful to one another? If so, that sounds like a really really serious issue. I would struggle to <em>play</em> in such a group, and certainly could not <em>run</em> anything for one.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Let me be clear here: the kind of departure I'm talking about is "we literally cannot find <em>anything</em> interesting about the <em>millions of square miles of territory</em> you've described, so we're going to head out to an area about which you've prepared absolutely nothing whatsoever, not even world-map-level prep." This would be the Fellowship of the Ring heading, not toward Mount Doom, but as far due south of Gondor as possible--to areas where no map exists at all. If the players even <em>remotely</em> stayed within the region in question, they'd still be directly dealing with at least SOMETHING related to the stuff I've done.</p><p></p><p>I'm also not super happy with your implication that I've put them on rails here. I haven't. I have prepared a world, a fairly sizable one, which contains many things in it. The players are absolutely free to contribute more things (and have done so, thankfully!), to go exploring in unfilled parts of the map and I'll improvise stuff to find. (Well, sometimes there might be a big fat nothing, but big fat nothings take very little time to interact with, so the party will sooner rather than later reach something that <em>isn't</em> a big fat nothing.) The party has, in fact, just gone exploring before, to find what might be out there. I've made stuff up to fill it. I very intentionally leave most of the map blank so I <em>have</em> to fill it later, as they learn new things.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Again: I do. I just, y'know, would be really really disappointed if, after having articulated various factions, ally NPCs, enemy NPCs, lost civilizations, mysteries yet unsolved (and which <em>I don't know the answer to yet</em>), things in peril, etc., etc., the players just say, "Nope. Literally nothing here is even remotely interesting to us. We're sailing off into the sea. What do we find?" Because, again, that would mean that the cities, the people, the factions, the politics, the races, EVERYTHING I had crafted with the hope that it would interest them, was completely and utterly worthless in their eyes, and "sail off to a place we know nothing about, simply because we <em>can</em>" was in fact more interesting than every single piece of it.</p><p></p><p>I'd feel, and I think this is a pretty reasonable feeling, like I had so radically misunderstood my friends that I should be ashamed of myself. To truly strike out <em>so badly</em> that, out of the whole lot of them, not <em>one person</em> could think of something already present that was more interesting than sailing off into the total unknown? That's a pretty stunning rebuke.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Lanefan, this comes across as very condescending. Yes, I'm aware that spontaneity is important. It has played an extremely important role in my game. I have known very high-level ideas--less "plot" and more "the secret histories," so to speak--but intentionally do not prepare comprehensive notes so that I am <em>forced</em> to adapt and extemporize, so that there really is very, very little "planned." Unless you mean to tell me that I should be so radically anti-planning that I should literally invent every encounter spontaneously (which would take forever, by the way) and never even pause to <em>think</em> about what things might appear at a destination the party has chosen. But I doubt you want me to be...well, hostile to the very idea of planning.</p><p></p><p></p><p>It "supports" it in as much as it "supports" any cost, that is, by the application of the GM Agendas and Principles and the various GM Moves. [SPOILER]The Agendas are:</p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Make the world fantastic</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fill the characters' lives with adventure</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Play to find out what happens</li> </ul><p>The Principles are:</p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Draw maps, leave blanks </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Address the characters, not the players</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Embrace the fantastic</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Make a move that follows</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Never speak the name of your move</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Give every monster life</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Name every person</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Ask questions and use the answers</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Be a fan of the characters</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Think Dangerous</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Begin and end with the fiction</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Think offscreen, too</li> </ul><p>The GM Moves are:</p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Use a monster, location or danger move</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Reveal an unwelcome truth</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Show signs of an approaching threat</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Deal damage</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Use up their resources</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Turn their move back on them</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Separate the characters from each other</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Give an opportunity that fits a class’ abilities</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Show a downside to their class, race, or equipment</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Offer an opportunity, with or without cost</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Put someone in a spot</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Tell them the requirements or consequences and ask</li> </ul><p>[/SPOILER]</p><p>Destroying a magic item could easily be "use up their resources," "turn their move back on them" (if the item has an associated move), "show a downside to their...equipment," "offer an opportunity, with or without cost," or "tell them the requirements or consequences and ask." Permanent destruction of a magic item would be appropriate for a hard move (the result of a miss aka fail on a die roll, or the players ignoring a threat caused by a soft move, or the players making a major error of judgment). I, personally, would reserve such destruction for only a relatively high-tension scenario; it would feel dumb and cheap to just destroy magic items out of the blue, but in a high-tension situation, this can add some real bite to the challenge.</p><p></p><p>I can also promise you, without doubt, that at most exactly one player is more attached to the items than the character. And even in that case, I'm fairly certain the items are less important. A sword, even a fancy special sword, can be replaced. The investment of who a character <em>is,</em> and that they belong to that player specifically, cannot be replaced.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Low-grade anxiety <em>specifically about the character</em> is something that sours the fun of at least two of my players. Not having that <em>specific</em> type of anxiety gives them the peace of mind to actually engage with the game, and go on adventures, rather than becoming hypochondriac turtles. I honestly wish I were joking; my players are EXTREMELY skittish, even by my standards (and I tend to be a risk-averse player myself). Even with me explicitly saying that I won't kill off their characters unless it makes sense and we've come to an understanding, they're <em>still</em> very, very shy about taking risks. It's been getting a little better since the Song of Thorns fight, I suspect because that triumph made them realize what they could achieve....but even with that, they continue to exhibit an overwhelming abundance of caution.</p><p></p><p></p><p>I have had one player, somewhat younger than the others, who slightly verged in that direction. It never became a problem, and he ended up needing to leave the game for unrelated reasons. (Working on his mental and physical health, mostly.) Had it become a problem, I would have done exactly what I did with the other player: sat him down for an adult conversation. If he proved incapable of having a respectful, adult conversation about it, I'd ask him to leave. Given that we play over Discord, "asking" is mostly a matter of being polite.</p><p></p><p>None of my current players would take character death as a personal attack. They would, however, be very sad, and be daunted by the task of creating a new character with a similar level of <em>gravitas</em> as the one they'd lost. Since we as a group have agreed that those experiences would sour an otherwise beloved experience, we choose to set that, <em>and only that</em>, aside. Other permanent losses, which would not induce quite the same pitch and intensity of sadness, and which do not have the cost of re-inventing one's investment in the game, are acceptable, so they remain.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Anything that relies on absolute ironclad rules is potentially abusable. Where does that leave us?</p><p></p><p></p><p>Except that it isn't that easy. I <em>already</em> let the dice fall where they may; the dice just aren't invoked in the first place for determining whether a character survives. If I were to, it would cost me at least two players, who would almost certainly cease to be able to enjoy play, because they would be so preoccupied about losing their investment into the game.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Okay. So, why is it that you can do <em>other</em> things because you like and respect your friends, but you can't adhere to the spirit of a pleasant leisure-time activity because you like and respect your friends? This is very confusing to me.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8247496, member: 6790260"] Except that losing your artifacts or your beloved NPCs or whatever else, no matter how hurtful they are, doesn't mean losing your connection to the game. Death does. That's really the only fundamental difference between death and other permanent losses; with (irrevocable) character death, the player must invent an entirely new connection to the game. Having discussed it with my players, there's also a sense in which all the other things--the items, the NPCs, the city, etc.--are less "personal" than one's character. The other things that can be permanently lost are [I]ours[/I], collectively because we collaborate to develop them, or [I]mine,[/I] because I'm the DM and I run them (and possibly created them). The Bard [I]belongs[/I] to the Bard's player, and nobody else. I've contributed challenges and questions and opportunities, but fundamentally, that's the only thing that truly, unequivocally belongs to that player and nobody else. It's a special kind of hurt to lose that. It doesn't mean losing the other things wouldn't hurt--it totally would, that's why we call it [I]loss[/I]. But it's a hurt that can be tolerated far better. Being "pure luck" implies skill has no relevance, but you then say it does (it can reduce odds). Otherwise...I honestly have no idea how this is relevant, nor where I meaningfully disagree with you. Yes, hard loss is always an option. I said as much myself. I support my players' efforts to avoid it. But they can fail. I prepared, for example, for the possibility that they could flat-out [I]fail[/I] to defeat the Song of Thorns--worse, that it could [I]grow[/I] in power due to their attempts to stop it. Had they failed, it would have been utterly disastrous; had they failed [I]badly[/I], it would have been nothing short of Armageddon for their world. Those possibilities were remote, but still possible. They did not come to pass. My players generally listen, but there have been times where they plowed ahead anyway. Not a lot of times, but still. I do not understand why this is a "hard and fast" rule, whereas "races occur on racetracks" is not. Same goes for "computer programs (without procedural generation) are finite in scope." So, you really couldn't give a (ahem) [I]fig[/I] about respecting the spirit of the game? This honestly comes across as incredibly rude. Like, this sounds like straight-up "Stop Having Fun" Guy material. "Stop [I]limiting[/I] yourself in ways the rules don't explicitly require! Isn't it so much more fun to push the limits to their breaking point?!?" I don't understand how the "but" part is relevant. Three years of DMing and ~20 years of playing have never shown a situation like this. If accusations of favoritism are flying, the game is already WAY dead, regardless of whether the DM adjudged a death rightly. It means the players no longer respect the DM. Again, whether rightfully or wrongly doesn't matter. The relationship is [I]already broken[/I]. And it can only be restored by restoring that respect, which is vital for making the entire thing--including rules based on "what makes sense"--functional. I have not ever seen this happen, and with my game group, I can pretty much guarantee it wouldn't. I certainly have more [I]sway[/I] than others, being the one who knows the cosmology best etc., but I am always willing to defer to a player that has an idea that sounds better, or to yield to the group--just as I would yield to them if they said, "Nope, sorry, all the campaign stuff you've made is boring, we wanna go set sail." I absolutely would not tolerate "loud" players shouting down everyone else; if someone behaved that way at my table, [I]ever[/I], they would get one warning. Failure to heed that warning would result in being removed from the game. Being respectful to your fellow players is mandatory. This has only once been an issue (for completely unrelated reasons; a player was pretty rudely failing to engage with the game, and it was weighing down the group), and we resolved it with a respectful, adult conversation in private. Do you have problems with keeping your players respectful to one another? If so, that sounds like a really really serious issue. I would struggle to [I]play[/I] in such a group, and certainly could not [I]run[/I] anything for one. Let me be clear here: the kind of departure I'm talking about is "we literally cannot find [I]anything[/I] interesting about the [I]millions of square miles of territory[/I] you've described, so we're going to head out to an area about which you've prepared absolutely nothing whatsoever, not even world-map-level prep." This would be the Fellowship of the Ring heading, not toward Mount Doom, but as far due south of Gondor as possible--to areas where no map exists at all. If the players even [I]remotely[/I] stayed within the region in question, they'd still be directly dealing with at least SOMETHING related to the stuff I've done. I'm also not super happy with your implication that I've put them on rails here. I haven't. I have prepared a world, a fairly sizable one, which contains many things in it. The players are absolutely free to contribute more things (and have done so, thankfully!), to go exploring in unfilled parts of the map and I'll improvise stuff to find. (Well, sometimes there might be a big fat nothing, but big fat nothings take very little time to interact with, so the party will sooner rather than later reach something that [I]isn't[/I] a big fat nothing.) The party has, in fact, just gone exploring before, to find what might be out there. I've made stuff up to fill it. I very intentionally leave most of the map blank so I [I]have[/I] to fill it later, as they learn new things. Again: I do. I just, y'know, would be really really disappointed if, after having articulated various factions, ally NPCs, enemy NPCs, lost civilizations, mysteries yet unsolved (and which [I]I don't know the answer to yet[/I]), things in peril, etc., etc., the players just say, "Nope. Literally nothing here is even remotely interesting to us. We're sailing off into the sea. What do we find?" Because, again, that would mean that the cities, the people, the factions, the politics, the races, EVERYTHING I had crafted with the hope that it would interest them, was completely and utterly worthless in their eyes, and "sail off to a place we know nothing about, simply because we [I]can[/I]" was in fact more interesting than every single piece of it. I'd feel, and I think this is a pretty reasonable feeling, like I had so radically misunderstood my friends that I should be ashamed of myself. To truly strike out [I]so badly[/I] that, out of the whole lot of them, not [I]one person[/I] could think of something already present that was more interesting than sailing off into the total unknown? That's a pretty stunning rebuke. Lanefan, this comes across as very condescending. Yes, I'm aware that spontaneity is important. It has played an extremely important role in my game. I have known very high-level ideas--less "plot" and more "the secret histories," so to speak--but intentionally do not prepare comprehensive notes so that I am [I]forced[/I] to adapt and extemporize, so that there really is very, very little "planned." Unless you mean to tell me that I should be so radically anti-planning that I should literally invent every encounter spontaneously (which would take forever, by the way) and never even pause to [I]think[/I] about what things might appear at a destination the party has chosen. But I doubt you want me to be...well, hostile to the very idea of planning. It "supports" it in as much as it "supports" any cost, that is, by the application of the GM Agendas and Principles and the various GM Moves. [SPOILER]The Agendas are: [LIST] [*]Make the world fantastic [*]Fill the characters' lives with adventure [*]Play to find out what happens [/LIST] The Principles are: [LIST] [*]Draw maps, leave blanks [*]Address the characters, not the players [*]Embrace the fantastic [*]Make a move that follows [*]Never speak the name of your move [*]Give every monster life [*]Name every person [*]Ask questions and use the answers [*]Be a fan of the characters [*]Think Dangerous [*]Begin and end with the fiction [*]Think offscreen, too [/LIST] The GM Moves are: [LIST] [*]Use a monster, location or danger move [*]Reveal an unwelcome truth [*]Show signs of an approaching threat [*]Deal damage [*]Use up their resources [*]Turn their move back on them [*]Separate the characters from each other [*]Give an opportunity that fits a class’ abilities [*]Show a downside to their class, race, or equipment [*]Offer an opportunity, with or without cost [*]Put someone in a spot [*]Tell them the requirements or consequences and ask [/LIST] [/SPOILER] Destroying a magic item could easily be "use up their resources," "turn their move back on them" (if the item has an associated move), "show a downside to their...equipment," "offer an opportunity, with or without cost," or "tell them the requirements or consequences and ask." Permanent destruction of a magic item would be appropriate for a hard move (the result of a miss aka fail on a die roll, or the players ignoring a threat caused by a soft move, or the players making a major error of judgment). I, personally, would reserve such destruction for only a relatively high-tension scenario; it would feel dumb and cheap to just destroy magic items out of the blue, but in a high-tension situation, this can add some real bite to the challenge. I can also promise you, without doubt, that at most exactly one player is more attached to the items than the character. And even in that case, I'm fairly certain the items are less important. A sword, even a fancy special sword, can be replaced. The investment of who a character [I]is,[/I] and that they belong to that player specifically, cannot be replaced. Low-grade anxiety [I]specifically about the character[/I] is something that sours the fun of at least two of my players. Not having that [I]specific[/I] type of anxiety gives them the peace of mind to actually engage with the game, and go on adventures, rather than becoming hypochondriac turtles. I honestly wish I were joking; my players are EXTREMELY skittish, even by my standards (and I tend to be a risk-averse player myself). Even with me explicitly saying that I won't kill off their characters unless it makes sense and we've come to an understanding, they're [I]still[/I] very, very shy about taking risks. It's been getting a little better since the Song of Thorns fight, I suspect because that triumph made them realize what they could achieve....but even with that, they continue to exhibit an overwhelming abundance of caution. I have had one player, somewhat younger than the others, who slightly verged in that direction. It never became a problem, and he ended up needing to leave the game for unrelated reasons. (Working on his mental and physical health, mostly.) Had it become a problem, I would have done exactly what I did with the other player: sat him down for an adult conversation. If he proved incapable of having a respectful, adult conversation about it, I'd ask him to leave. Given that we play over Discord, "asking" is mostly a matter of being polite. None of my current players would take character death as a personal attack. They would, however, be very sad, and be daunted by the task of creating a new character with a similar level of [I]gravitas[/I] as the one they'd lost. Since we as a group have agreed that those experiences would sour an otherwise beloved experience, we choose to set that, [I]and only that[/I], aside. Other permanent losses, which would not induce quite the same pitch and intensity of sadness, and which do not have the cost of re-inventing one's investment in the game, are acceptable, so they remain. Anything that relies on absolute ironclad rules is potentially abusable. Where does that leave us? Except that it isn't that easy. I [I]already[/I] let the dice fall where they may; the dice just aren't invoked in the first place for determining whether a character survives. If I were to, it would cost me at least two players, who would almost certainly cease to be able to enjoy play, because they would be so preoccupied about losing their investment into the game. Okay. So, why is it that you can do [I]other[/I] things because you like and respect your friends, but you can't adhere to the spirit of a pleasant leisure-time activity because you like and respect your friends? This is very confusing to me. [/QUOTE]
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