EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
And I am still, fundamentally, left asking: What was the point? If the ending cannot even in principle be reached, why did I bother? At least if it could have been reached, had I simply made wiser choices, then the failure is on me--it's a "skill issue," to appropriate a usually dismissive internet phrase. (Though, of course, this then gets into the thorny issue of whether one is able to make wise choices or is simply given luck-of-the-draw, which IMO thoroughly invalidates the "it was on me" aspect just as badly as making it an inevitable failure.)The character moments it displays are those where you strain to get farther than anyone else has, even if it's not all the way to the end.
Precisely! That is precisely the problem. When the death is "some random punk/orc soldier/sewer rat/etc. got a lucky crit," how you died provides no true character moments. When "what you did in the career you had before you died" is "at best 1-2 incredibly basic dungeon heists where you... [3d100 clattering] stole some jewelry from...the burial mound of...an ancient warlock," and in general is "you went into one murder-hole and never came out again," there are no such moments there, either.And when the foregone conclusion is death, the true character moments come in a) how you die and b) what you did in the career you had before you died.
That's my whole point. Hence: the bitter taste of unfulfilled dreams and the wistful contemplation of what could have been. You had been very specific that you were talking about the lowest of low-level characters, where players have no attachment to their characters at all. Exactly the point at which the way you died will almost never produce any kinds of true character moments, and the career you had before you died was nil because you hadn't done anything yet.