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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 7121788" data-attributes="member: 87792">That depends on the story. In Fantasy Vietnam you absolutely can kill off characters to enhance the mood while leaving dangling plot threads unfinished. Look, for example, at Game of Thrones - or possibly the most tightly plotted TV of the 90s, Babylon 5. They wrote the intended protagonist out there.But fundamentally you are making a spectacular mistake regarding narrative when you consider the only possible failure of the protagonists to be death of the protagonist. Unfortunately the D&D character sheet only really has options for death and equipment loss. I've cared more about whether my character became Prom Queen in Monsterhearts than whether my character died in D&D, and because it wasn't a matter of life or death the narrative for that character worked whether or not she succeeded at becoming Prom Queen.One of the most certain facts regarding storytelling is there is more than one way to do it. Bujold also often begins "What's the worst thing I can do to this character and have them survive" and has it go forward while Rowling herself has admitted that actually sticking to that final chapter she'd pre-written was a mistake.TV Tropes talks about <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlidingScaleOfPlotVersusCharacters" target="_blank">the sliding scale of character vs plot</a> - and the question of character driven vs plot driven stories is very much something sorted out on an author by author basis (or even in Bujold's a book by book basis; Memory is clearly character driven while A Civil Campaign clearly started with the dinner party and worked outwards from there). In the paragraph I quoted you seem to exalt plot driven stories over character driven ones while most such shared narrative games are character driven.There are very few RPGs I'd regard as mechanically leading to plot driven stories; even Montsegur 1244 uses its narrative as a framework. The only ones that actively come to mind are My Life With Master (master mistreats minions -> minions get pissed off enough that one rebels -> fight to the death), Fiasco (the five act structure), and Grey Ranks (although even that's veering into Montsegur 1244 territory), and from memory Robin Laws' The Dying Earth in the worst ways .What are hit points but plot armour?</blockquote>

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