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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8594805" data-attributes="member: 42582">On top of what [USER=82524]@Vaalingrade[/USER] has posted about the role of character-identification in RPGing, notice that in LotR the protagonists ultimately succeed.But things happen to them in the course of that success. Beregond finds himself banished from his home city. Legolas and Gimli become friends, completely changing their attitudes to one another's peoples and places. Merry and Pippin become warband leaders. Sam changes from gardener to statesman. And Frodo is unable to continue living on earth - only heaven can sooth his hurts.Notice also that the story has beats. The success is not total. Gandalf fails to redeem Saruman. The fields of Rohan are burned. The party tree is cut down. The secret Elvish lands fade. Arwen (in the Appendix) is widowed.It's straightforward to build a RPG that will emulate this sort of thing. (It wasn't always straightforward, but today all the technical design issues have been solved.) My favourite is Prince Valiant. I've also enjoyed <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/middle-earth-lotr-rpging-using-cortex-heroic.670013/" target="_blank">LotR/MERP played using MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic</a>. I reckon it could also be done using <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-green-knight-frpg.680475/" target="_blank">The Green Knight</a>, though I've only used that system for its pre-packaged scenario.I think there are some obvious hurdles in the way of using D&D for this sort of RPGing, though: mostly that it tends to lean heavily on lethal combat as a source of tension, and that it has no straightforward way to put things like the cutting down of the party tree at stake in a manner that is independent of GM's say-so. I'm sure some individual tables have found various ways to deal with these hurdles.Which brings me to this:One thing I notice about this is that it has nothing in common with LotR. The PCs in this post have no values, no families, nothing they care for. They are just gameplay avatars.There's a find tradition of playing D&D with the PCs as gameplay avatars - KotB, White Plume Mountain, ToH, Ghost Tower of Inverness, Castle Amber, Isle of Dread, etc, etc all work like this. But you have to have buy-in from the players; and your challenges have to be compelling.This episode with the mayor reminds me of things I've experienced - some mistakes I made in my first year or two of GMing, and things I've seen in RPG clubs and heard about on ENworld: the GM does not produce any compelling challenges, but gets upset when the players try and make their own!There are pathways out of (what [USER=22779]@Hussar[/USER] has rightly identified as) the looming toxicity. But trying to beat the players around the head by withholding XP or threatening divine punishment isn't one of them.Actually, it's trivial to have D&D PCs with the sorts of ties to the world that characterise the protagonists of LotR, or Batman and Superman. In 5e D&D it is Backgrounds that are the obvious hook for this, but it can be done in AD&D. I know, because I've done it. I've also done it in Rolemaster, which is - in these particular respects - functionally equivalent to D&D.The main obstacle I tend to hear about, to those sorts of tie, is that when players try and build in their ties, the GM shoots them down or ignores them.A more subtle GM error is to treat harm-to-relationships as a framing device rather than a consequence of failure. Doing the first thing is an invitation to players to have their PCs turtle, and to have their future PCs be orphaned men-with-no-names. Doing the second thing will produce functional GMing, using (more-or-less) the Apocalypse World technique of soft-moves first, hard-moves as follow-ups on failure but not success; eg "You hear that Luthor is heading for Lois's place - but his giant robot is wreaking havoc on downtime Metropolis" - now the player has to (i) choose priorities, and (ii) see if they can succeed in their action declarations. If they tackle the robot, and they fail to take it down within a certain timeframe (there are all sorts of ways to run threat clocks like this - from do it within three rounds to the skill challenge ideas of 4e to the clocks of AW/DW to the Doom Pool in MHRP), only then is Lois kidnapped. Which then supports new soft moves (eg Lex ties her to his nuclear warhead) and new hard moves if more checks are failed.Again, there are features of D&D that can get in the way of soft-move/hard-move pacing (except in 4e, which supports it right out of the box), but I'm sure there are workarounds - beginning with making the stakes of success or failure on action declarations clear before the dice are rolled.But anyway, if players don't want to play connected PCs; if they want to play relatively boring gameworld avatars; then pull out Tales of the Yawning Portal and see how they go recovering the stolen weapons from Keraptis.</blockquote>

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