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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5196069" data-attributes="member: 3887">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. 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. 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.'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.  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)[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.[/spoiler]</blockquote>

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