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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8710750" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not sure how serious this post is meant to be. (I get the last line is wry and slightly wistful; but maybe also a bit exaggerated?) Which means I'm not sure how serious a reply you are inviting. If this reply is too literal/serious, I apologise in advance.With that throat-clearing done . . . have you considered looking at how non-D&D RPGs handle this? Perhaps playing some, but even if not playing at least reading their rulebooks and seeing how they approach the relationship between PC build, stakes in which players can invest, GM techniques for putting those things at stake, etc? <a href="https://www.burningwheel.com/burning-wheel-gold-revised/" target="_blank">Burning Wheel</a> is a poster-child for this. But other systems that talk about this include HeroWars/Quest (Robin Laws 2000-onwards Glorantha-oriented RPG); The Dying Earth (Vancian cynical comedy); Pendragon, to an extent; Agon (John Harper's game of Ancient Greek heroics); and of course Apocalypse World.Another system that can do this, and is in many respects rather D&D-ish, is Torchbearer: it's an adaptation by the BW gang of their core system to support D&D-type adventure RPGing. As part of PC build, one thing that players do is establish their PCs' family, friend, mentor, enemy, etc. One of the players, whose PC is an Elven Dreamwalker (in D&D terms, think roughly of an Elven mage or bladedancer), chose an Elven ranger as the PC's friend. In our last session, the PCs were preparing to trek across the wilderness, though neither is very good at doing that. So the player of the Dreamwalker thought it would be handy to have the assistance of a ranger! And therefore the Dreamwalker reached out to her friend in her dreams - mechanically, this was a Circles check, which is a type of Streetwise/Contacts mechanic in the BW family of games. The check failed, and so the character didn't make contact with her friend as she had hoped - instead, she saw terrible things in her dreams: her ranger friend had been captured by her enemy, a rival magic-user, and was being held prisoner in the tower the PCs were planning to trek to.The resolution, in play, of the Circles check, and its failure and consequence, took five or ten minutes: straightforward framing, check, and then narration of consequence. You can see that it took as its input some already-established elements of the PC build. And those elements made it easy for me, as GM, to set out the consequence for failure - which gives the PC a connection to the ingame situation, and a reason to confront adversity, which is quite separate from any risk of death.It took basically no effort at all, other than playing the game, for what I've described to occur. But your post - again, taken fairly literally - suggests that you're not seeing this sort of thing in your play although you would like to. Hence my suggestion that you might want to look at some systems that are expressly designed to make it happen fairly effortlessly.</blockquote>

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