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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8706612" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Loss needs to matter for success to be meaningful, but loss does not need to be character death. The only thing the game needs to be an engaging challenge is for there to be two states - success and failure, and that the player's decisions have a meaningful impact on which outcome occurs. The rest is just shaping the details to emulate the playstyle preferred.Fundamentally I think the issue is that there is a divergence of what people want from TTRPGs. Initial dungeon-crawl D&D fits very well in line with the computer game style known as roguelike -- make careful decisions about whether or not to press on/push your luck in a threatening environment, knowing full well that if you guess wrong you will have to start over, but if not you get stuff/points which help you get better at pressing forward and getting more stuff/points, until maybe one day you finish out the game or hit a retirement point or something, but most likely you are just seeing how high you can get those metrics before eventually you make the wrong decision or your luck runs out. In that kind of scenario, a harsh penalty for failure (starting over, or whatever burden resurrection imposes in a given edition) makes perfect sense.In a game where you are more concerned with the narrative or the like, it isn't that death isn't useful, it is just that it isn't the primary fail-state against which the players are testing themselves, so it can be seen as confounding interference to the actual primary play loop.I'm really on the fence on whether D&D needs to do anything about this, since on one hand, it is people taking a square pegged game and trying to make fit it into a round hole playstyle (the primary game engine is a combat-centric resource depletion loop with one or more character death as the main failstate), but on the other hand, people will be doing so whether the game fits that mold or not (and WotC certainly would have no problem with those players not deciding to jump ship for another system).As a home rule, I would suggest that there be some other secondary form of fail state that is more likely to happen than death -- let's say 'clobbered' (unconscious, and even when brought back up, have some kind of limitation). I agree with OP that some of the consequences rules aren't great, often being worse than death (predominantly because death=reroll ). Clobbered instead means you are meaningfully constrained from completing the narrative success state.None of this does address that, yes -- if your character role is some kind of Stalwart Defender and thus you're doing your job by standing in the middle of the fray and taking blows meant for others or the like -- then eventually you will receive the Penalty of being taken down and suffer some negative consequence for the act of doing your perceived job. That's unfortunate, but I don't see a way around that. If your job is to take on party risk, it's hard to make a reasonable failstate not be your character taking the hit (I guess the time the enemy gets past you and greases someone else is also a failure, but I doubt you want that happening more either). Maybe one could make some kind of group HP total and dropping it to 0 meaning the whole team just loses the narrative exchange rather than any specific character dropping and being hurt for a time, but that's getting significantly more abstract than even D&D combat.</blockquote>

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