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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 9168960" data-attributes="member: 20564">This is D&D's fault.In any story, novel, movie, whatever, there are up and down beats.  There are failures, and characters have flaws.  This is the storytelling tradition we have had for as far back as we have history.D&D however, has combat-unto-death as common stakes.  And losing a character is punitive.  It's not fun.  It is part of the game that is explicitly not fun - at the very least the player is sitting out for a period, but it may go much further than that.  Basically, because of it's wargame roots, D&D fails at the very basic level of a much larger storytelling context of delivering downbeats in a fun way.  And that's a failing of D&D as a whole - because it's a game, and the parts of the game should be fun.  And storytelling downbeats should be part of the game.D&D is also the 800 lb gorilla that is the entry gateway for the majority (maybe even the vast majority) of gamers into TTRPGs.  So people learn this.But when you get outside D&D-like games, you see a lot more of real flaws.  Some games like Fate you literally can't have a viable character be unflawed because then you don't get to play to your charater's flaws and get the meta-currency that lets you take advantage of your character's strengths.So this is because of D&D, and gamers who routinely play things other than D&D will see much less of this competence porn.  "Almost never happens" is only for the slice of gamers who play D&D-like games where there are routine unfun-to-the-player repercussion for playing flawed characters.This is basically the corollary to people conflating player success and character success, when they can wildly differ at times -- assuming the game doesn't penalize the player (by having them sit out) for character failures.</blockquote>

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