Is Dying Such a Bad Thing?

[Raven Crowking]

RC, come on now. You can't possibly believe that any time two people disagree on something, one must be mistaken or lying.

I am not talking about disagreement; I am talking about the form of disagreement, and what that form implies.

If I believe A to be true, but other people claim that A is not true, either A is true or A is not true. It may be that one or both of us is mistaken is our understanding of what A is, or in our estimation of the truth value of A.

Of course, where something is subjective, we can disagree without either of us being mistaken. But even in the case of something which is very subjective, our reasoning can be in error, or even our understanding of our own experience. Looking back at myself in High School, for instance, I can say that I did not understand myself as well then as I do now, and that some things that I believed about my subjective experience then were rather obviously self-delusional from the standpoint of my more mature experience.

This, in turn, leads me to believe that I am blind about myself now.

IME, it is not at all uncommon for others to be aware of things which a person might not be, himself, aware of, about himself.

This is something I always try to keep aware of.

It's my experience in life that rarely is there one right answer (except in math).

It's my experience that we cannot know the right answer with certainty, but only by searching for it using the rational tools at our disposal can we improve our model of the world we operate in.

In that case, you are agreeing with me.

About many things.

What I disagree with is your statement:

RPGs are a no-risk activity. Even if your PC dies, you lose nothing. You can claim to enjoy it better when your PC is at risk, but even then you are exactly as safe as the guy who's playing TOON​

That you equated that disagreement with the arguments of other posters is, AFAICT, simply unfortunate.....but by no means unusual for Internet forums.


RC

 

[Nifft]

What I disagree with is your statement:

RPGs are a no-risk activity. Even if your PC dies, you lose nothing. You can claim to enjoy it better when your PC is at risk, but even then you are exactly as safe as the guy who's playing TOON​

That was part of a response to this:

There has to be a chance of failure, or else it's all just wanking. Whether that failure is death or not, depends on the game.

My point was that it is mental wanking either way. There is no genuine risk to the player -- financial, physical, league standing or reputation -- if his character suffers some kind of failure.

Furthermore, some of the most fun aspects of role-playing have nothing to do with risk-taking. Are these parts "just wanking"? Sure they are, to the exact same degree that playing a wargame for entertainment value is "just wanking", even though the latter has a lot more in-game risk evaluation.

That you equated that disagreement with the arguments of other posters is, AFAICT, simply unfortunate.....but by no means unusual for Internet forums.

Uh, no. YOU are the one who kept trying to drag other posters in, with your repeated "mistaken or lying" shtick.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

My point was that it is mental wanking either way. There is no genuine risk to the player

Tell that to Marcie. "No! Not Black Leaf!"

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Oddly enough, it was seeing that illustration that got me to start my voluntary abstention from participating in piracy/intellectual property rights threads a couple of years ago.

 

[Umbran]

Then I am mistaken. "A is B" is wrong.

That statement is incomplete enough to be misleading. In the subjective/opinion case, "A is B" can be both correct and incorrect. While you are wrong, you are also right.

It seems to me this may be the issue with your current discussion. Risk assessment requires a judgment on the value of the thing that may be lost. The value in this case is highly subjective.

If the terms are clarified, and I say, "A is B" and you say "A is not B", either I am mistaken or I am lying, or you are.

If the new statement does not still fall into one of the other cases.

I hope by now you have noted that adding options which exist solely as special cases of "I am mistaken" does not somehow make them not "I am mistaken".

See above, about "statement incomplete enough to be misleading". The basic problem with your position here is that it depends on "A is B" having a single absolute truth value.

 

[Nifft]

Tell that to Marcie. "No! Not Black Leaf!"

... I thought I did ... ah, here it is:

Well, Jack Chick might agree with you... but I don't find his arguments very compelling.

- - -

Oddly enough, it was seeing that illustration that got me to start my voluntary abstention from participating in piracy/intellectual property rights threads a couple of years ago.

So you're saying you stole an idea from XKCD?

Cheers, -- N

 

[CleverNickName]

Oddly enough, it was seeing that illustration that got me to start my voluntary abstention from participating in piracy/intellectual property rights threads a couple of years ago.

And inspired me to create the Edition War Flowchart.

 

[Uder]

Leaving aside the question (and definition) of stakes in fiction, most serial adventure protagonists survive to star in their next story. Note the whiff of tautology here. I don't know what you consider good, but it's easy to put together a list, spanning a century or so, of popular and enduring characters, from the likes of Holmes, Tarzan, John Carter, and Conan to Bond, Kirk, John McClane and Jack Bauer, who surmount insurmountable odds on a fairly regular basis.

Suspend our disbelief? I'd say we deliberately seek out, with all possible speed --especially if you own an e-reader-- that happy, tidy, ending, or, barring that, one that at least implies there's a certain level of meaning and comprehensibility in life.

Right. I guess I wasn't clear then. We suspend our disbelief so we can experience the thrill that the story could end badly at any moment... even though we know there are still 300 pages to scroll through. The thrill, for me, is the point of reading adventure fiction - I'm certainly not reading Burroughs for his contributions to the human condition through literature. I'm dating myself here, but I very much envy the pleasure my Dad took in reading the later ERB books as they came out, where each book had the (illusionary) appeal that it could very well be the end of Carter or Tarzan. To gain that level of thrill I have to stick to newer properties.

Likewise with playing RPGs such as D&D. I'm not playing because we're going to weave the next Odyssey through participatory storytelling... I'm doing it "because you should see the look on Bob's face when his guy is halfway up the tree with a Wyvern at the top and an Ankheg at the bottom!"

Most people actually like the conventions of the genre stories they choose to read/watch/consume. Only the curmudgeonly ones purport to merely 'accept' them.

C'mon, let's not do that. It should be clear what I mean by "accept." I thought we were talking and then... pick-pick-pick poke-poke-poke. This is drive-by stuff.

I'm super-leery of phrases like 'natural consequences' when applied to deliberately non-naturalistic/unrealistic genre fiction. What can it mean other than 'conventions'? The natural consequence of 007 tangling with a SPECTRE mastermind is the mastermind loses, his undersea base gets ruined, and James ends end on a raft w/a beautiful woman.

The natural consequence of tangling with a criminal mastermind is you are dragged out back and taught a new meaning of the word, "riddled" that has nothing to do with puzzles. James Bond is effectively our PC though, so he uses his mind and his resources to come up with a way to avoid that fate. It doesn't just happen while he sits back swilling martinis.

I don't want players to think they can sit back and watch their players glide to success.

'Push at the boundaries of the game' seems to imply all players inevitably become exploit-seeking lava-swimmers as soon as you dial down the campaign's lethality. That's just not my experience. I gamed with people who are more willing to support and maintain the game's fiction, without needing to poke at every boundary as if they were playing a computer game.

Pushing at the boundaries of the game is just an obtuse way of saying metagaming, sorry. To use a very old example of metagaming - the natural consequence of falling off a 200 foot cliff should be a messy end, or at least severe injuries due to miraculous events, yet a high-level D&D can just get up, dust off and go on to fight seconds later. Many versions, clones and derivatives of D&D have a note in the falling damage section about GM-adjudicated consequences for just this reason. In my experience, players only stopped making suicidal leaps when they knew these consequences were in place.

I've played in several campaigns with little or no permanent death played in high-heroic mode. The players where interested in maintaining a specific tone and had no interest in camp.

(and I'd hate to see insincerity mar a game where elves fight carnivorous Jello, but that's neither here nor there)

Well, it's D&D so death doesn't have to be permanent. It's still a risk and has consequences. I agree with your parenthetical point too - it's possible to play emphatically and sincerely in a gonzo game, in fact I think that any less would make the game flat and unenjoyable. Or were you being facetious?

Still OT, and probably not worthy of a thread fork:

Spoiler

"You're assuming that either the transgendered PC --Roxy Huzzah, BTW-- was designed to be an object of ridicule or the player isn't capable of playing the role as anything but an ugly stereotype in blackface, or virtual drag, as the case may be. That's uncharitable, to put it nicely. The character is great; strong, fabulous, unabashedly queer-positive."

Well, I did say I'm probably being knee-jerk, oversensitive. I've seen in done in non-positive ways too many times not to at least try to stick my foot in my mouth.

 

[Uder]

The "juvenile" aspect is irrelevant. What I'm targeting in your post is the derogatory aspect.

See, the fact is, RPGs are a no-risk activity. Even if your PC dies, you lose nothing. You can claim to enjoy it better when your PC is at risk, but even then you are exactly as safe as the guy who's playing TOON (where PC death is literally impossible, IIRC).

Character death doesn't matter, except as a matter of play-style preference. There are plenty of ways to model failure which don't involve death. There are even plenty of ways to enjoy a game which doesn't have much in the way of failure -- not everything in every game is competitive. The improv aspects, for example, would be rather dreadful if one were to replace the cooperative default with risky competition.

Your comments thus far are typical BADWRONGFUN, and they don't really deserve better than a glib response. Aren't you lucky to have gotten better than you gave.

Cheers, -- N

Ah, I see. It's THAT kind of conversation. You're wearing a macrame belt. I say I don't like macrame belts. You claim I'm declaring people who wear macrame belts are badwrongpeople.

I guess I was being derogatory ("hippy dippy everything is equal land") after the fact, because irreverent drive-bys annoy me. If you read anything other than that as derogatory, you're wearing your macrame belt a bit too tight. I regret the "wank" comment because the juvenility of it invited response in kind.

I've never said you can't have fun playing whatever RPG you've got in your mind. I've said I don't have fun playing sword and sorcery type D&D games where there is no risk (to the things written on paper we call characters). I don't like playing games in general where there's not conflict or failure. I believe that in games where players feel invulnerable they start doing things that break the game.

I'm not making these claims because I think this way, I'm making it because I've seen it happen in play. I've both felt that way as a player ("he won't even let traps in Rappan Athuk kill us? We may as well do the assault on Orcus at 15th level...oops"), and as a DM felt the creeping sensation that I had pulled out the kid gloves one too many times and watered down my game to an unacceptable level as a result. Immersion was gone, metagaming became the order of the day.


BTW - Death is possible (and desirable) in TOON. It's just not permanent. Much like D&D. Failure in TOON is not getting enough "screen" time or not dictating the narrative as much as other players before the short is over.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

... I thought I did ... ah, here it is:

Apologies, missed that post in catching up with eight pages.