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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7084223" data-attributes="member: 42582">The idea of finality can be approached fairly straightforwardly by considering a system like MHRP/Cortex, which (unlike D&D, any edition) uses an identical resolution system for all sorts of conflicts.If the players (via their action declarations for their PCs) inflict a sufficent degree of Physical Stress on the advisor, they knock him out cold. At which point the scene is resolved, and - however much, as a matter of colour, we imagine the advisor struggling against his bonds when he regains consciousness - he has been defeated and can't come back as a physical threat until something external to him occurs that would open up that possibility.If the players (via their action declarations fo rthe PCs) inflict a Treachery Revealed complication of succicient severity on the advisor, then likewise the scene ends, via exactly the same mechanical pathway, and - however much, as a matter of colour, we imagine the advisor wheedling and whining Wormtongue-like to the baron - he has been defetaed and can't come back as a social threat until something external to him occurs that would open up that possibility.One of the significant areas of GM judgement in running a game in which the players can establish final results via action resolution (and each of 4e, BW and Cortex/MHRP is such a game; D&D is more generally, also, at least in some respect, eg combat) is determining when to allow that something external to a defeated threat/challenge has allowed it to re-emerge as a threat/challenge. Is this permissible simply as a matter of framing, if enough time/action has passed? Is it something to be done only as a consequence of failure, and if so, what sort of failure?One thing that is at stake here is the basic issue of the repetitiveness in the fiction: is the game going to turn into a respawn-fest? or a version of comic book melodrama, where every 50 episodes or so Peter has to stop Aunt May from marrying a supervillain, while Batman has to deal with the Joker again.But another thing, which arguably is more important at least in the sort of RPGing I prefer, is the integrity of the fiction as determined by the players' action declarations for their PCs. The GM has a duty to honour this; and a casual overturning of player victories does not discharge that duty.I don't think this is something in respect of which there can be hard-and-fast rules. But it is not something (in my view) where the GM can afford to be careless, or to satisfy him-/herself with the thought that "of course the BBEG will have a henchman capable of casting Resurrection, or Break Enchantment, or, . . ." The issues is not one of in-fiction plausibility or explicability, but of respect owed, at the table, among participants in the game.</blockquote>

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