NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6487763" data-attributes="member: 1465">Nice to see lots of ideas here!Since many of you mentioned some concepts particularly often, I'd like to add to those some little out-of-the-box thinking on my part, just to see if it brings any additional food for thought:1) "If death isn't a possibility, then there is no challenge in the game"Really? Sure the threat of death is the most obvious factor that motivates players to play well. But death doesn't equate to failure, there are a lot of ways to fail without dying. I think in general a RPG can be much more interesting than just "win or die", if only we could put some more creativity in our stories. 2) "PC should die because of bad player's decisions"What's a "bad decision"? The DM knows everything, so it's easy for her to say "opening the treasure chest is a good/bad decision", but the players can often only guess. The DM might make the treasure chest #34 trapped, and treasure chest #41 holding a ring of 3 wishes. Is there really any ground to morally judge (and therefore punish) a player that makes the wrong choice? The DM might give clues, but where is the boundary between a clue too faint to believe in and a clue too good to disbelieve in, when the same DM is other times going to trick the same players with false clues?Truly the only way to consistently define "good/bad decision" is by the outcome. Did you die attacking the orcs? Then it was a bad decision, simple as that.Unfortunately however, in a game with dice the outcome is random. There is no way to know it beforehand. The best the players can do is estimate the odds (i.e. the probabilities of success/failure) and decide if the reward is worth the risk or not, but very rarely the risk is zero. The only zero-risk decision is not to play. To me these mean you can't ever really say that a PC deserved to die. You can accept it dies, or you can overrule that it doesn't die, but there is no deserve involved IMHO.3) "PC should die because of very bad luck"If I see someone being very unlucky, my first feeling is to help them. Why should penalize someone even further (i.e. permanent PC death), just because of bad dice rolls, which already bring negative consequences such as typically not being able to complete your wanted step forward in the adventure?-----Just to be clear, as I said at the beginning of the thread "PCs protection" is not the only way I want to play the game, I really like playing the old-school dungeons like Tomb of Horrors as well. To me these are 2 ways to play the game that I can equate to "horror movie" vs "TV series".What I don't like, is having players with bad feelings because their PC died unsatisfactorily when playing in "TV series" mode. I say "unsatisfactorily" because I believe that for most players the problem is more with dying too early / in the middle of something or in a way that is appalling, while under different conditions they would have accepted it.Resurrection never really fixed the problem, since it opens other cans of worms (especially, you have to "fit" the idea of resurrection itself into the fantasy world).So if/when playing in "TV series" mode, why not just decide all together in case of a PC's death, if this feels good or not? If not, then come up with another option, not always just a technical penalty (like a lingering injury) but also simply a negative story outcome. As a matter of fact, sticking to the "failure equates death" principle means that reducing the death rate implies increasing the chances of success. So maybe once the DM is free from the burden of such equation (i.e. a PC dropping "dead" might still be alive, but whatever he was trying to do is obviously botched), she can actually increase the challenges, make encounters more difficult so that players are forced to often find solutions other than combat, or stock a locale with traps, without fear that this would result in people having to scrap their PC and restart new ones.</blockquote>

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