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<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 7652208" data-attributes="member: 2067">I think the most successful use in my personal games pertains to the Goals for the PC, and making it so that failure at accomplishing those goals was assumed. For instance, there was a PC there who had the goal of Independence, and was an escaped slave. I made it clear up-front that it was assumed that, at the end of this little 5-level mini-campaign that the PC would be captured by her previous owners -- unless she did something to stop that from happening (each character was assumed to fail at their goal unless they did something active to counteract that). The three stages on her path to her goal were all about stopping that fate, and she was always well aware of what the future held for her. There was a scene where the party was pretty blinkered from a series of difficult combats and was in retreat, but her character charged during a particularly difficult combat, because &quot;If I die here, at least I die before they can catch up to me&quot; (or something like that). Really awesome scene, and all because the stakes were high, failure was assumed, and the player was thinking about what was going to happen in the future. It also helped me, throughout the campaign, to set up scenes where Who Wants What and Why Now and What Happens If We Fail were very, very clear. That combat itself was based on another PC who, with the goal of Peace, was doomed to failure if he didn't do something active to stop his Rome-esque empire from going to war. It pushed him to attack this nation he was very loyal to (he was a monk trained as a soldier in the army) and be branded a traitor, all because he wanted to see the wars end.High stakes and clear goals and the real and present threat of failure bring out a lot of juicy drama. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 7652208, member: 2067"] I think the most successful use in my personal games pertains to the Goals for the PC, and making it so that failure at accomplishing those goals was assumed. For instance, there was a PC there who had the goal of Independence, and was an escaped slave. I made it clear up-front that it was assumed that, at the end of this little 5-level mini-campaign that the PC would be captured by her previous owners -- [I]unless she did something to stop that from happening[/I] (each character was assumed to fail at their goal unless they did something active to counteract that). The three stages on her path to her goal were all about stopping that fate, and she was always well aware of what the future held for her. There was a scene where the party was pretty blinkered from a series of difficult combats and was in retreat, but her character charged during a particularly difficult combat, because "If I die here, at least I die before they can catch up to me" (or something like that). Really awesome scene, and all because the stakes were high, failure was assumed, and the player was thinking about what was going to happen in the future. It also helped me, throughout the campaign, to set up scenes where Who Wants What and Why Now and What Happens If We Fail were very, very clear. That combat itself was based on another PC who, with the goal of Peace, was doomed to failure if he didn't do something active to stop his Rome-esque empire from going to war. It pushed him to attack this nation he was very loyal to (he was a monk trained as a soldier in the army) and be branded a traitor, all because he wanted to see the wars end. High stakes and clear goals and the real and present threat of failure bring out a lot of juicy drama. :) [/QUOTE]

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