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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8957083" data-attributes="member: 6690965">To be fair, I do think that's a generally held position. The difference is more in where you put the player side incentives. I generally prefer games where the goal is to try and ensure everything goes right, and my choices and planning can lead to that as an outcome. Games that use narrative structures for pacing/resolution tend to suffer from the opposite problem, in my experience, where they insist things must go wrong, so as to be &quot;interesting.&quot; I want to allocate resource, makes contingency plans, and ideally steamroll through obstacles through my skill....I also, of course, want to fail to do that and have to think reactively when it call comes crumbling down and goes bad, but that means the obstacles can't be structurally impossible to defeat that way, and that I can actually be rewarded with that kind of easy success when I earn it.I generally think players should be able to mitigate death as a consequence, but not using a meta-game resource. Encounter structure should make them fairly survivable and sufficiently competent that they have tools to deal with most situations. Ideally also, players should have sufficient awareness to know when they can't deal with something and have tools to disengage. I don't think variability is the interesting part of risk. It's not that you might randomly die that's interesting, it's that the board state will evolve dynamically in a way you can't entirely plan for, and iterated, tactical decision making is necessary to proceed. There should certainly be a flowchart that leads to death on the table when you're modeling combat, but it should take an exceptionally bad player to find it.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 8957083, member: 6690965"] To be fair, I do think that's a generally held position. The difference is more in where you put the player side incentives. I generally prefer games where the goal is to try and ensure everything goes right, and my choices and planning can lead to that as an outcome. Games that use narrative structures for pacing/resolution tend to suffer from the opposite problem, in my experience, where they insist things must go wrong, so as to be "interesting." I want to allocate resource, makes contingency plans, and ideally steamroll through obstacles through my skill....I also, of course, want to fail to do that and have to think reactively when it call comes crumbling down and goes bad, but that means the obstacles can't be structurally impossible to defeat that way, and that I can actually be rewarded with that kind of easy success when I earn it. I generally think players should be able to mitigate death as a consequence, but not using a meta-game resource. Encounter structure should make them fairly survivable and sufficiently competent that they have tools to deal with most situations. Ideally also, players should have sufficient awareness to know when they can't deal with something and have tools to disengage. I don't think variability is the interesting part of risk. It's not that you might randomly die that's interesting, it's that the board state will evolve dynamically in a way you can't entirely plan for, and iterated, tactical decision making is necessary to proceed. There should certainly be a flowchart that leads to death on the table when you're modeling combat, but it should take an exceptionally bad player to find it. [/QUOTE]

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