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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9530353" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Yep. Deaths are not created equal, so to speak.An irrevocable but impermanent death is, as noted above, stuff like what happened to Sheridan. There was nothing any of his friends or loved ones could do to save him. As far as they were concerned, he was dead and gone. But Lorien's intervention made the death impermanent, meaning he would come back to life, it just would take time. This was represented as, effectively, Lorien gently guiding Sheridan to a profound personal epiphany, which would permit him to face death without fear, while still wanting to live. ("You're not chasing life, you're fleeing death!"/"Do you have anything worth living for?" "Delenn!") Parsed as a D&D party, something very easy to do with much of the B5 universe, JMS loves fantasy tropes in his sci-fi, this is pretty clearly the party having to struggle and suffer without a beloved and important character while the DM cooks up something suitably dramatic for that player's triumphant return a few sessions later.They may not be totally incompatible, but they are often at loggerheads. You have to want a very specific kind of story--a story that only forms after the action, not before nor during--and you have to be supremely tolerant of constant dead ends,The problem is, for a lot of people, there is no group story without the individual stories. For them--for me!--this is like saying, "the group story of the building is more important than the individual story of any one brick, so we can just allow 90% of the bricks to be broken before we use them, the building will still be what matters!" That's where the key breakdown point comes. You see the party story as being, in a sense, wholly independent of the individual stories. I see the two as fully co-dependent. You cannot have the individual stories without a party story for them to play out within, but you cannot have a party story without the individuals who make up that party. The more you lose of that party, the more the story decoheres until it's an utter mess.And, also from personal experience? I've lost a lot of players in my game. Not just characters, I've had at least 5 different players depart the game for IRL concerns that matter a lot more than a tabletop game does. No death involved--but with the player gone, the story is necessarily at a dead end too. It wasn't too bad when we had a player leave in the first year or so. It was a little tougher when someone left in the middle of the third year. Since then, we've gained and lost another four other players, and...yeah it's really actually starting to become difficult to keep folks invested in the "party story" because they don't have any reason to be. They hear about things that other people did years ago and it just washes over them. Without the personal connection, it's just a lot of events, and that personal connection takes a long time to build.So...yeah, you're right that it is possible to make these two mix, but it requires both a specific set of characteristics that a lot of players don't have, and it requires that you only engage with a particular style of story and relationship to the world. If anyone isn't interested in that style or that kind of relationship, or if multiple players just don't respond the right kind of way to stories, then it just isn't going to work.So it would be better to say that, while they can be compatible, there are many games, many tables, where they simply will not mix.</blockquote>

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