If you roll up the penultimate boss fight to wrap up saving the world and the heroes know they could just stand there and not die would take all the fun out of it for me.
Well, remember the standard I set when I proposed this approach earlier in the thread (and which I have consistently used on this forum for...gosh, probably a couple years now). To be nixed, the death must be ALL THREE of:
- Random: happening in a banal time or place, from a meaningless source, for no reason other than crap luck
- Permanent: the character is dead and going to stay that way (e.g., not Princess Bride "mostly dead is slightly alive" stuff)
- Irrevocable: there is nothing the PCs can do to reverse the death
Dying during the big climactic finish would absolutely not be random, it would be a fitting and heroic end (but possibly a tragic one). And at that point, the PCs probably have multiple options for resurrection, so most if not all deaths will not be irrevocable, absent particularly nasty BBEG powers like disintegration rays or something. And, in general, I work to have at least one tool for making deaths non-permanent in my back pocket, just in case. Even one of those would mean death is on the table; with
all of them, some kind of death is quite plausible, it just won't
necessarily take the character away from the player forever.
Note that I include "player ignored clear and explicit warnings/signs of deadly danger" as a non-random death. This is an offer to my players so they can adventure boldly, knowing I won't delete there investment for light and transient causes. It is not carte Blanche to ride roughshod over my attempt at being gracious. I don't like and won't tolerate being
used for someone else's jollies, and I have made this clear to my players. Only one player has ever even remotely risked treading on that ground, and a quick heart to heart cleared things up right quick.
And, finally? I don't advocate this for everyone. Something I've been explicit about in several posts in this thread (nearly all of them, in fact). I am 100% certain it is NOT for everyone. However, I'm also certain that it IS for a lot more people than the stridently pro-death crowd gives credit to.
If you remove the chance of death from combat is it still roleplaying or does it become something closer to
play acting?
Even according to your own linked example, no. He specifically notes cultural and setting connections, fitting into the world in a way that is sensible, working with the themes and ideas. (Note that this covers a spectrum from "rules as physics" ultra-pure simulationism, and what I call ultra-pure
emulationism, where the goal is not to mimic the real world, but to mimic the tropes, patterns, conventions, and details of a
genre in order to use it to explore something. A superhero RPG is pretty much guaranteed to fail to meet a sim purist's standards, but would absolutely meet an emulation purist's standards.)
Whether the PCs can be randomly, permanently, irrevocably killed has
nothing whatever to do with whether the characters in question find a "role" within that world that fits (be the fit thematic, cultural, economic, whatever.)
An example of sports came up earlier,
and apparently sports ttrpgs are a thing, but it would certainly be odd to describe that sports gameplay minus the chance of actually losing as a focus on anything other than guaranteed victory.
But there is no such thing as "death" on the sports field (or, at least, there shouldn't be.) Losing a game, even a very important game, does not cause your character to
cease to exist. Hence, there is no
need to protect against losing here. A player can have a bad season one year and a great season the year after.
Like...this is a perfect example of a game that doesn't NEED such things. because
the stakes are already something other than death. You can still participate later if you screw up now, even if you screw up very badly! That's not the case with TTRPGs with lethal combat. The stakes are fundamentally incomparable, because a total failure on the football field cannot (or, at least,
should not) ever be as bad as a total failure on the field of combat.
So--how is it that we can have a well-made sports TTRPG where death isn't even among the consequences, and yet it is still roleplaying and not mere "play acting"? I mean, I
assume you'd call this a well-made sports TTRPG, since you linked it as an example thereof.
There are games that focus on roleplaying and story, but those tend to have clear death analogs and/or various mechanics to override play acting by forcing the PCs to vow under the pressure of established story like fate's compels.
Your position has already committed the error of conflating "only play acting" with the removal of a specific kind of death (random AND permanent AND irrevocable) from the list of consequences. As noted above, this is simply a reasoning error, and the use of sports RPGs as "evidence" for it is completely the opposite of what you wanted to get out of it.
But
@EzekielRaiden's experiences are the opposite of this - GMs ignoring the rulebook's guidelines for encounter design, and doing crazy stuff like having 1st level PCs encounter mummies and then getting surprised when this kills those PCs.
Correct. Every single one of the (near-)TPKs I've seen has directly resulted from the GM doing whatever they felt like, rules be damned, advice be damned, player feedback be damned. Now, one might say that that means the players should play more defensively or the like. But when at least half of the people in these games have been new to TTRPGs in general, let alone D&D specifically, one would think that demanding the highest degrees of skill and forethought from the players is
not the best policy. I have no intention of becoming the "boss" telling a bunch of new players how to behave with D&D, not least because that would sour both their experience and mine in most cases.
Then why use rules and dice? Just let the players describe the awesome way they win this time. You don’t need rules for this and I don’t get the desire to use the rules if you don’t want them to affect the outcome.
Because we don't want the thing you described?
I don't want players to simply narrate their flawless awesome victories every single time. I want the tension of not knowing precisely what the consequences will be before something begins. I still want a mix of frustrating failure, riotous success, and various points in-between, and I want it to be the result of the players' actions which of those things comes about, rather than the DM secretly puppeting the world to guarantee any particular result. (Hence my antipathy for fudging of any kind.)
Just because I don't know what the consequences
will be doesn't mean I cannot know ANYTHING AT ALL about them. I can know things both as a character (e.g. "If I don't help the Sultana, she might be killed!") and as a player ("We'll probably have to solve a puzzle at some point, I know Sam loves a good puzzle.") One of the things you can potentially know as a player is, as I have phrased it to my players, "I won't take away your character unless that's how you would prefer to move forward. That doesn't mean your character won't pay for their mistakes, perhaps even dearly if those mistakes are severe. But it does mean you won't lose the character you're invested in, so long as you wish to continue playing at my table."
Permanent, irrevocable character death (random or otherwise) is a severe consequence that affects any player since, by definition, the character is how they interact with the world. I just find it a terribly
boring consequence, because all that it does is cut threads. I don't find that particularly interesting in the vast majority of cases. I very much prefer consequences that
create new story. I prefer consequences that only matter because they matter to this specific player and/or character. These are of course much more difficult to create, develop, and conclude, but I see that as merely doing the work to earn the better reward, like the difference between always buying takeout and learning to cook your favorite dishes yourself.
I have never had a problem like this:
Can be, but IME rarely if ever are to any great extent.
Where Lanefan was responding to this:
Players, in general, can be invested and motivated by things other than the simple eradication of their characters - threats to those things can create tension, even if the PC themselves are not threatened.
I have never--not once--had a problem doing this,
@Lanefan. I'm frankly a bit shocked that you
have had such a problem getting players invested in anything other than a character's lifespan. Of course, you proceeded to accuse modern D&D of coddling players into always doing stupidly reckless things. If such a criticism is fair, then perhaps we should question whether the materialistic, ultra-lethal style of old-school play robs its players of the ability to care about anything other than survival and amassing wealth?
Or maybe instead we should recognize that different styles cater to different interests, and that it is a fool's errand to try to project the goals and values of one design space (such as old-school D&D with its ultra-high lethality, logistical focus, heist-centric gameplay, and encouragement of self-serving behavior) onto another (such as modern D&D, with its greater attention to long-running story, action focus, adventure-centric gameplay, and encouragement of team-focused behavior).
Running a 1e style game, where the players are all purely self-interested ne'er-do-wells with the most grim, ultra-mercenary attitude, with the goal of each player developing their character's story both individually and as part of the team together? Probably not going to work out very well! You're using tools and ideas outside their intended space. In that context, a blanket statement against random, permanent, irrevocable death is
probably out of place. But most games aren't like that--certainly not anymore, and we've seen no appetite for them suddenly becoming resurgent, at least not thus far. Instead, the focus is quite clearly to achieve for oneself the same general sort of highly-satisfying narrative experience that things like CR, TAZ, and other prominent game podcasts have produced. It won't have the same production values (after all, most of those are professional actors and creators), but the core experience is quite replicable.
And as a brief aside: The key difference that you so casually dismissed between the threatening of other things (friends, loved ones, respected elders, beloved leaders, precious artifacts, signature items, etc.) vs threatening the player's ability to participate is that the former
allows the character's story to continue. It might continue in a brand-new (and possibly much darker) direction, but regardless, it can continue. That there may be death or destruction either way is nowhere near as relevant as the fact that killing the
character ends the character's story for good, while killing or harming other things pushes that character's story in new directions. It is the difference between a dead end and an unexpected fork in the road. A dead end simply causes the journey to
stop, permanently. You may start a new journey from somewhere else to somewhere else, but the original journey is terminated. An unexpected fork in the road forces you to make choices, or as Frost put it:
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The journey will change you, and you will change the journey too. I want to see those changes. They weave the pattern of permanent consequences, and ripen from fresh-budded fruit to sweet and aged wine. You'll never get to the wine if you allow every bird and beast to just randomly eat the fruit; the farmer must
cultivate the harvest, and care for the wine thereafter too, as it ages. Eating the fresh grapes off the vine can be a treat--but so can drinking the finished wine. Often, we want different grapes for different things; most table grapes make poor wine, and most wine grapes make terrible eating (in part because they often have lots of seeds and very thick skin). You're looking for snackable table grapes. I'm looking for sweet red wines and dry white ones. Things that would be helpful or important to me may be utterly useless or even inhibiting for you, and things that are essential for you may be likewise useless or even actively harmful for me.
Returning to my comments to
@Crimson Longinus, these non-death stakes are something explicitly part of every version of D&D I've ever played (not counting retroclones or offshoots, just
formal D&D--so that would be 3e, 4e, and 5e.) If the books themselves talk about doing this sort of thing, about developing your character both as an individual and as part of a team, where exactly are you getting the notion that the rules aren't "for" this purpose?
