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<blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8962601" data-attributes="member: 6801252">I haven't caught up on the whole discussion yet, but one observation the OP and first few replies made me think of is that I think part of the dynamic is the way the plot armor interacts with a lot of those other mediums such that they need more to be interesting than TTRPGs do. Because we have an expectation that things are generally going to work out in sufficiently high stakes stories, the interesting thing can't really be the conflict of the story-- that just becomes a setting for character development, action sequences, comedy, titillation and so forth, particularly in genre fiction with established tropes. Now to be clear that doesn't apply to all fiction, but you can generally tell when you're watching something that doesn't have that kind of plot armor baked into its premise because its a whole different vibe (there are fallback perspective characters already, for one thing.) But in a TTRPG the basic conflict is allowed to be more interesting because success isn't a guarantee, fighting a dragon is intrinsically more interesting because you aren't guaranteed to slay it so each beat of that fight has an element of tension to it that most stories where the characters slay dragons don't actually have because it mostly isn't interesting for them to fail to slay the dragon, unless the consequences of their battle are built into something else that narrative convention imposes less upon (e.g. who slays the dragon.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="The-Magic-Sword, post: 8962601, member: 6801252"] I haven't caught up on the whole discussion yet, but one observation the OP and first few replies made me think of is that I think part of the dynamic is the way the plot armor interacts with a lot of those other mediums such that they need more to be interesting than TTRPGs do. Because we have an expectation that things are generally going to work out in sufficiently high stakes stories, the interesting thing can't really be the conflict of the story-- that just becomes a setting for character development, action sequences, comedy, titillation and so forth, particularly in genre fiction with established tropes. Now to be clear that doesn't apply to all fiction, but you can generally tell when you're watching something that doesn't have that kind of plot armor baked into its premise because its a whole different vibe (there are fallback perspective characters already, for one thing.) But in a TTRPG the basic conflict is allowed to be more interesting because success isn't a guarantee, fighting a dragon is intrinsically more interesting because you aren't guaranteed to slay it so each beat of that fight has an element of tension to it that most stories where the characters slay dragons don't actually have because it mostly isn't interesting for them to fail to slay the dragon, unless the consequences of their battle are built into something [I]else [/I]that narrative convention imposes less upon (e.g. [I]who [/I]slays the dragon.) [/QUOTE]

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