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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CandyLaser" data-source="post: 9261840" data-attributes="member: 7029413">It's not really feasible to answer a question like that in the abstract. It certainly can be. I'm currently running a game of Fellowship, which is a heroic fantasy PBTA game. In Fellowship, the GM controls a villainous Overlord, and the power imbalance between the Overlord and the PCs is vast, especially at the start of the campaign. One of the recommended ways of starting a Fellowship campaign is to have the Overlord show up and absolutely wreck the PCs. This is how I started my campaign. There was essentially no chance for the PCs to "win" that encounter, but that's fine, because the point of the encounter is to 1) show off the threat of the Overlord, 2) make it clear why the PCs need to oppose them, and 3) introduce the main antagonist figure. Starting things off this way worked well at my table, because I know my group well and before we started I let them know that it was a possibility (both of which are things the book recommends if you start the campaign off this way). The book suggests it as a possible campaign start because it fits well with the tropes of the genre the game is trying to emulate. Importantly, though, the outcome is still highly variable in lots of ways. There was no chance that the PCs could overcome the Overlord in direct combat, so my PCs shifted focus and tactics, and the scene became about whether or not they could distract and delay the Overlord long enough to accomplish their other goals. So we play to find out what happens and see if they can manage to pull that off or not (they couldn't, as it happens).You regularly make sweeping generalizations like "the vast majority of other games DO manipulate things for set endings" with no evidence at all. This is bad form and bad argumentation. I'm not sure how to understand you when you say things like "I don't care what the players think or say." Taken at face value, that sounds like you're being an insensitive boor. I'd like to give it a more charitable reading, but I don't know what that might be. Why put things in such a dismissive and demeaning way? It's unnecessarily rude and aggressive, not to mention highly counterproductive if your goal is to try to understand someone else's point of view. If, on the other hand, your goal is to be confrontational, then I suppose you get top marks. It definitely seems to me that you're not actually interested in learning the whys and wherefores of other ways of running games.</blockquote>

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