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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9559287" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Certainly. My approach is not universally superir, and I'd never claim so. What has made me bristle is folks telling me my approach is universally horrible, as in, it is impossible to ever have any stakes or meaning.The only strong-ish claim I've ever made on this is that I believe folks dismiss non-mechanical consequences almost completely, treating them as irrelevancies, whereas (agian, I believe) many games would actually benefit a lot from making non-mechanical consequnces matter. I think the long shadow of old D&D traditions--not quite "old school" per se--is the cause here. Obviously, the distinct harshness of old-school play did not last beyond mid-2e at the latest. The mere existence of the OSR shows that. But it is true that traditions often linger long after their original purpose is lost. E.g. fireball isn't an unusually powerful 3rd level spell because having a suped-up 3rd level spell is productive; it's that way because it's traditional, and 5.0 was built to feature as many "traditional" elements as possible (even if the "tradition" only started in 3e...). Likewise, I'm of the belief that an emphasis on hard-edged, permanent mechanical consequences (particularly death, but also things like dismemberment, permanent drain e.g. levels or more pointedly ability scores, and related things) is one of those things where folks came to expect it as The Consequence(s) Bar None, and thus never even bother trying for other kinds of consequences. I don't just think this in a vacuum, though. The trickle (or sometimes flood) of DM complaints about "murderhobos" etc. is good evidence. IME, players learn quickly from their DMs...even if the DM doesn't realize they're teaching. Like that one thread a few years back, where a DM-group misunderstanding meant both sides were annoyed: the DM thought their players were being bizarrely muderhobo-esque, killing ANYTHING that talked to them seriously, while the players thought the DM was being a jerk pushing them through a grueling meatgrinder....because the DM thought maps and minis were just useful tools in general, while the players thought they meant "IT'S FIGHT TIME NOW, GET READY!!!"I find too many DMs unintentionally teach their players that only mechanical consequences actually matter, and non-mech ones never matter. Thus, their players stop caring. They constantly kill and steal and backstab and whatever else, despite this being extremely frustrating and un-fun for the DM, because they know the DM treats non-mechanical consequences as mere fluff, rather than as serious concerns that matter. In nearly every case where I've (proverbially, digitally) sat down and really gotten into the nitty-gritty of it, this murderhoboism either was in response to that DM's failure to make non-mechanical consequences matter, or the group had had a previous DM who ran things that way and now this DM is struggling with the IRL consequences thereof.</blockquote>

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