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="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6487999" data-attributes="member: 4937">I hear this a lot, and find it very unpersuasive.  First, the overwhelming majority of RPGs are based on literary genera that are usually marked by high action and violent conflict.   I see very few RPGs out there that are based on a romantic drama, slice of life drama, political drama, and so forth where the terms at stake are a characters well being and happiness.   There aren't a lot of RPGs out there that make their explicit goal emulating the conflicts of say an episode of 'Friends' or 'Gilmore Girls', and to the extent that we could find a few those RPGs are far from the mainstream, poorly known, and have very few fans.   There are a number of independent games that have tried to drum up interest in play where the characters happiness was of primary consideration, but so far none have been very successful and more than a few seem to want to replace violence with sex.  While I was MUSHing I saw lots of play centered around trading sexual favors and who likes who, and I've seen at least one PnP game that seems to want to emulate that style of play, but I dare say this is unlikely to make a leap into the broader gaming world any time soon for a variety of reasons nor does this style of play necessarily preclude risk of death.Secondly, there is no direct relation between a story being creative and whether or not death is a potential consequence that the protagonist is facing.  You didn't die isn't necessarily a more creative outcome.  At some point 'obscure deaths' and averted deaths grate many fans even in the settings we expect them to happen, and begin to trivialize and wear down the quality of the story.And thirdly, in the context of the vast majority of settings actually being played, applying the rule that failure doesn't necessarily mean death and supposing that other sorts of failures can always substitute with the same degree of dramatic tension only results in stories without the real danger of failure.  For the vast majority of gamers, all they care about is continuing the story and increasing the power of their own character or playing piece in the environment.  While they may secondarily care about other things, very few actually have as a primary goal anything other than survival.  If this was not true, we'd regularly see players preferably taking death over other outcomes.  I've never seen it happen with any PC avatar.  Heck, I've only once seen a player retire a PC from a game because the PC's goals were considered by the player to be more important than continuing the PC in the story, on the path to power and wealth.The fundamental problem here is that neither the GM nor the game can define for the player what it means to win.  So long as the player defines winning primarily as staying alive to fight another day and every crash you can walk away a good one - and in my experience 95% of players do - removing death from the table functionally removes the possibility of failure whether you the GM believe it or not.   I suppose 'inescapable imprisonment' or 'maiming you can never recover from' (as with CoC full SAN drain) is equivalent to death, but generally the 'fail forward' crowd seems to eschew these outcomes as well so that fail forward becomes euphemism for 'nothing less than a partial victory, ever'.Because even in TV series, these are minor setbacks, and not failure.  Further, in a game setting, you the story teller can't impose values on your players.  In a story, a protagonist can always feel hard rending agony for the death of an NPC, losing a favored possession to a rival, not getting the girl, or whatever.  In a game, it's not up the GM to actually feel that and as a point of fact, rarely do I see players actually feel that even if they bother to RP it.  In this sense though, what is actually the challenge?  If a locale is stocked with traps, but I know that those traps can do no more than inconvenience me temporarily and the story will always go on with new opportunities, what actual challenge do I have to face?   What skill are you actually concretely cultivating in the player?  In most cRPGs, which effectively have no death outside of rare and usually optional 'hardcore' mode, the sort of skills you are cultivating are generally obvious - improved reflexes, improved planning and problem solving.  But even cRPGs don't do this by 'failing forward'.  They do this by 'failing nowhere', forcing you to replay the same obstacles again and again until your skill improves.  If you actually could fail forward past obstacles in a cRPG, developing skill would be entirely optional.   The same applies to PnP RPGs.It seems to me that the only sort of story that supports 'fail foward' is slap stick comedy.  (See 'Toon' for an example of this done well.)  To suggest that because the audience knows the protagonists of action adventure stories won't die but will win in the end allows for fail forward is to get it backwards.  The protagonists of action adventure stories are believed in by the audience because in the overwhelming majority of cases they are presented as making cunning decisions and evidencing superhuman levels of skill, so that even in the odd cases where they are surprised or overwhelmed, we still can believe in them finding a way out of their troubles.  If in fact these protagonists were goofs that made bad decisions and yet the story played this straight and not for comedic effect, the sympathy of the audience would completely change.  Either the audience would lose interest in the protagonist, or the audience would begin to actively root for the protagonists horrible demise.  For example, this is how slasher style horror movies are played.  The erstwhile protagonists are stupid, and the audience can see that, so at some level the fans of the genera are actually rooting for the antagonist and want to see the protagonists pay for their mistakes.   If the protagonists of an RPG are bumbling and make poor decisions, eventually not even most of the players are going to be rooting for their own survival, and ultimately the narrative you'll create will be at best one of a slap stick comedy.</blockquote>

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