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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Uder" data-source="post: 5196402" data-attributes="member: 11949">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!"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.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. 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.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? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />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.[/spoiler]</blockquote>

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