Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9551676" data-attributes="member: 29398">To which the next step is, having created that grounded character and got it into play with that grounded tone already set, allow it - while retaining that grounded tone - to gain powers and abilities as it goes along.  This is what happens to Durnik during that series as he slowly becomes a better warrior.Never mind that this low-fantasy feet-on-the-ground character then performs perhaps the most heroic act of the whole story by - and back on thread topic here! - giving his life without anyone expecting this death to be anything other than permanent and irrevocable.Because it's the one specific tool some people seem to want to excise from the toolbox?Non-mechanical losses don't count for these purposes.Consider Snakes and Ladders.  Hitting a snake is a significant mechanical loss condition, albeit one that allows you to keep playing.  Rolling 2 on the dice where your opponent rolls a 6 (and nether of you lands on a snake or a ladder) is a loss, but only momentary and with limited long-term consequence as it'll even out in the long run.Mechanical win conditions in D&D: gaining a level (particularly if it's just you that gets one); finding or gaining a major item that you get to keep; permanently gaining one or more points in one or more stats - these are examples of the "ladders", i.e. major win conditions that are bigger than the in-the-moment defeat of a foe or solving of a puzzle.Tetris is a Rogue-like, in that you have to start over every time and there's no save points; and usually the main reason for playing such games is to try to beat your high score (and-or best your point of furthest advance in a true Rogue-like).Maybe it's onerous, maybe it isn't; more to the point is that it's work that wouldn't need doing had the designers left well enough alone and carried the existing mechanical loss conditions forward from 1e-2e.  That said, and to echo your well-made points about opt-in rules, they could have added in an option that would allows DMs to eschew those loss conditions if so desired, providing instead some other interesting and maybe-not-as-unpleasant consequences to take their place.On a more general note: while I very much agree with your ideas around providing lots of opt-in rules, I posit they work far better when the default is the nastiest most difficult state the game has and the opt-ins (or opt-outs, same idea) all then serve to make the game easier on the players and-or characters, because then the DM looks like the "good guy" if-when any of those opt-ins/outs are adopted at the table.Indirectly, lots, including you.Now, before you get indignant, allow me to explain.  <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    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />It's a true binary - death is either on the table (to any degree) or it is not.  If a character can die by player request or due to gonzo stupidity or for any other reason then death is on the table.  My position is that if death is on the table for these reasons then it must also be on the table due to sheer random bad dice luck - no fudging, remember.  And suddenly, RPI deaths - no matter how infrequent they may be - are in play.The flip side of this is that to take that random-bad-luck type of death off the table means in a no-fudging paradigm characters simply can't die, and thus all the other types of death have to go away with it.  As soon as you allow gonzo-stupid deaths then you have to either fudge to avoid random not-gonzo deaths or you have to allow and accept them.And as you've on numerous occasions said you don't want random (and permanent and irrevocable, the usual case at low levels) deaths and that you don't fudge your rolls, that means - because you can't have one type of death without the other - you're indirectly saying you want death off the table completely.</blockquote>

Verification