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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9551738" data-attributes="member: 6790260">1. Why is that "the next step"? Why are we already talking about "the next step" when you have not yet actually defended why this is the only way people should be playing?2. Why is that "the most heroic act"? It's certainly the most self-sacrificing. I love heroism! But by your own explicit descriptions, the gameplay your method actually favors is extremely selfish and antagonistic to the very concept of self-sacrificing heroism. If that connection is in practice nothing like what you're selling here, why should I believe the other parts will be?Who is doing this? I certainly haven't been. I have, explicitly and repeatedly, said that I speak only for my own preferences and that I simply want space for my preference to be possible. I'm not the one projecting a hegemonic thing on everyone else. You are.Says who? You have to defend this.Okay. I think this example is much too simple to actually draw a meaningful comparison. After all, you can actually "win" Snakes and Ladders.None of those are "win" conditions to me. They are certainly good events! But not a single one of them is actually winning. They're certainly achieving something. But that's like saying that one of the win conditions of poker is to have good cards; that's not winning anything, it's just a necessary step on the road to other things. Plus, your Snakes and Ladders metaphor is failing you. You can lose at Snakes and Ladders despite never touching a single snake. You can win at Snakes and Ladders despite never touching a single ladder. Hence, they cannot be win or loss conditions.Further, you are fluidly using "win(/loss) condition" in three radically different senses: necessary, sufficient, and useful. (For the rest of this paragraph, "win"/"victory"/etc. should be understood to apply to loss as well.) The third is simply incorrect. Things that are useful to have in order to win, but not actually necessary nor sufficient to make that happen, are not win conditions. They're simply part of gameplay. Something that is necessary but not sufficient for victory is also generally not seen as a win condition, e.g. having cards in your hand is necessary to win poker, but that doesn't secure the win. Instead, when people speak of "win conditions", they mean things that, once achieved/gained/secured/etc., they make you win, then and there. Rolling boxcars, for example, is not a win condition--but if the game is "who can roll higher on 2d6", then the win condition is "having a higher roll", and boxcars is extremely useful for meeting that win condition (since at worst you will tie).The things you describe aren't win conditions, neither on the small scale nor the large scale.You have not answered the actual question, so let me ask it again, as simply as I can:Why is Tetris not "hollow" because you can lose a game and yet continue playing? You specifically did not answer this question.If you prefer something that does have, to an extent, a preserve-able state of play, what about other arcade machines, the "quarter eaters"? Those literally just let you pump some money in and boom, you're back exactly where you were, no progress lost. Of course, this mechanic is cynical and designed to fleece players of their money, but the point stands, especially in the modern context where many of these difficult arcade games are now played on PC or home console, where it costs the player nothing but the push of a button to insert new virtual quarters.You have taken a hard and explicit stance: Without the very specific type of loss condition, one which completely deletes your prior participation and investment, ALL victories are completely hollow and meaningless. That's going to take a lot more than a one-sentence dismissal here.Again, you are simply presuming the correctness of your argument without defending it. In order for them to have "left well enough alone", that state of affairs would have to be objectively correct and superior, and the new state of affairs objectively worse and inferior. You still have not lifted a finger to demonstrate this, apart from fiat declaration or circular reasoning.Only if you intend to drive everyone away and make the game unpleasant for the vast majority of people who might try.It is easy--trivially easy--to add difficulty to a game that lacks it. After all, every DM can say, "Rocks fall, everyone dies." (Ironically, in Monday's Ironsworn game, we did have Rocks Fall, but nobody died. The rockslide carried away the bad thing we were facing off against.) Likewise, it is easy--trivially easy--to make a game that has no difficulty at all, just do the reverse, declare everyone wins.The hard thing, the thing that is on the starting side of the one-way function here, is making a system which reliably produces the desired level of interesting difficulty, as chosen by the GM/DM/ST/whatever. That is where the default should be, because it is by far the hardest state for a game to achieve, particularly with that "interesting" tag, since trivial difficulty is eminently possible and mostly worthless. (Tic Tac Toe is a perfectly balanced game in the trivial sense, which is why most people, even young children, tire of it quickly.)Nontrivial, asymmetrical, dynamic balance is extremely difficult for a single person to develop on their own, so that is a task that we absolutely should be expecting the designers, the people who want to make money selling these rules, to undertake. It's why we pay them in the first place. Once you have a system that is already designed such that the DM can be quite confident about the difficulty of the challenges they construct, it is quite easy to break away from that and chart your own course if you so wish. Such things should be both directly supported (e.g. 13A-style "Nastier Specials" rules, amongst other things) and indrectly supported (e.g. advice for how to push the boundaries, ways to make high-difficulty conflicts managable for the PCs if the players do clever things, etc.)And, again, this one-way function approach doesn't always do the things I personally want. I, personally, prefer first-level characters with lots of choices. That's not what is best for brand-new players. Hence, first level should be relatively light on choices in order to help induct new players. There may be other opt-in choices (such as novice levels) that can help with this process, but keeping 1st level relatively snappy is very important for getting people to actually want to play the game. Further, it's quite possible to add more choices for folks who want them; it's rather difficult to know how to remove choices that are baked in by default.Then your (bolded) position is, simply, wrong. Allow me to explain: It doesn't have to be. You can do it, or not do it, as you like. It's that simple.Your position boils down to pretending that your hard binary is generous (either some kind of death is on the table, or it isn't), but you then immediately turn it into a hard binary that is begging the question, because you (without justification or explanation) demand that if any kind of death is on the table, every kind of death must be. Why?This is what I referenced above. Here, you have quite cleverly turned what should be a generous, open hard binary--either some kind of death is on the table, or it's not--and then turned it into a self-serving, begging-the-question binary by asserting, without explanation or evidence, that allowing any death of any kind means we must now allow absolutely all deaths of all kinds. It's a slippery slope argument, and I reject it for exactly that reason. Either you need to explain why all deaths absolutely have to be on the table just because one kind is, or you need to get used to people blowing off this argument as a load of hot air.Yes, you can have one type of death without the other. Quite easily. I am not "indirectly saying [that I] want death off the table completely", and in fact have explicitly said that I want death to be on the table. Just not RPI death.Unless you actually prove that the presence of any one kind of death, any at all, logically requires the presence of absolutely all of them--something I sincerely doubt you will be able to do--then your claim completely falls apart.You have argued from two premises, both of which I reject:A -- "If one kind of death is present, then absolutely all kinds of death must be present."B -- "If all kinds of death aren't present, every achievement is hollow and meaningless."I have given clear and specific arguments to the contrary and asked for explanation or evidence. You have provided no such things.</blockquote>

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