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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9012089" data-attributes="member: 6790260">And my question remains: why should I care?If the party is always dead in six months and nothing ever gets anywhere or has any lingering meaning other than the team jersey (to jump just a little ahead), why should I care? Any investment I put into anyone or anything is definitionally a waste of effort. All due respect to Rudyard Kipling, but within the sphere of my gaming, I have neither the time nor the patience to wager everything on a coin flip on the regular, nor to lose it all "and never breathe a word about [my] loss."A serious problem with the jersey analogy: People essentially never start watching a sport by following one individual player and becoming attached to a team solely because that play happened to play for it, thus transferring allegiance from person to team. They become attached to teams from the word go, usually by that team being their "home" team, and as a result show fear or favor toward players exclusively because of the jersey—never having been attached to the individuals at all, or at least only in the most rudimentary way. Essentially nobody (ignoring the vanishing % of people who are their personal friends/family/loved ones) started engaging with basketball because they were invested in (say) Kobe Bryant or Shaquille O'Neal and only after a good long time of watching Shaq or Kobe play did they become attached to the team. Shaq is especially useful as an example because he switched teams a lot, having played for six different pro teams in his career (Magic, Lakers, Heat, Suns, Cavaliers, and Celtics)—and while he might have been a household name, people would essentially never switch team allegiance solely because he did, and would probably find the very notion bizarre. Instead, Shaq switching teams would be a cause for dislike toward him, having left the team to which one's loyalties had belonged from the beginning.With a TTRPG group, it's exactly the opposite. You start out with no investment in the group at all, being invested solely in the one thing you know, your own character. You slowly grow attachments to the individuals who happen to adventure beside you, with the (as mentioned) "group self" notion only developing well after as a neat, desirable byproduct of becoming attached to the people who constitute that group. And if a player truly leaves a group, unless it's specifically on bad terms, it's a sadness, and the focus for everyone (leaving or staying) is still on the character(s, but usually singular) that they play(ed). But if this group-self sedimentation process is continually disrupted by metaphorical catastrophic flooding (near-TPK or losing your character that anchored you to your group), it never forms in the first place; without the individual connections, durable and meaningful group attachment is impossible. It becomes a blur, and one you may as well not care any more about than you did the previous blur, nor the blur that will follow it.For group consequences to have meaning, you must already value the group. Death ever waiting in the wings certainly reminds you that you should pick your choices carefully, but it also reminds you that, due to the vagaries of dice, it probably doesn't matter how careful you are, you'll just lose sooner or later. Defeat assured is just as lethal to investment as victory assured. Hence why I prefer to re-frame things so that "defeat" does not mean "total, absolute loss of everything about a character." Because that means you can still have defeat—indeed, you can make it much more likely!—and yet avoid the problem of statistical inevitability. Absolute defeat is not three bad rolls away, so partial-but-still-devastating defeat can be.That isn't what I said though. What I said was, if I know for certain that everyone will die quickly, unceremoniously, and frequently—if essentially total defeat is guaranteed, and statistically speaking it must be, especially in old-school contexts with low numbers and high lethality!—then there is no time nor opportunity for attachment to the group to form in the first place.Attachment to the jersey can only form well after the group does. It requires becoming invested in the individual team members first, caring about who they are and why they are and what they want. It requires that the individual lines get woven together until the group has taken on transcendent meaning beyond just the individuals who comprise it: the bundle held together long enough, and through enough trials and tribulations, that the group-self identity can actually have meaning apart from the people who fill its roster.Cut those threads early and often, and no group-self weaving can occur. You just have lots of disconnected individual threads; not a tapestry, but a pile of yarn. The group self supervenes on the bonds between the individual selves, and takes even more time to form than those bonds do.Or, if you prefer a more visual presentation, <a href="https://www.tricksywizard.com/comics/2018/10/21/class-clown" target="_blank">the (genuinely!) gripping tale of Slappy the Clown</a>.Having 2-3 merely near-TPKs before session 40 prevents a scene like this from occurring for most groups. Both because Slappy probably died already, and because everyone else probably already died too. Some players' characters more than once. The jersey lives on, but I have no connection to it—because I never got the chance to build a connection to the people in it.</blockquote>

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