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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8708160" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Absolutely. I keep seeing this sort of thing happening: the analogies being used never actually consider the investment of the player into the character.A novel or film character can be interesting, but isn't a personal creation of a player; that's a critical difference which is specifically relevant to the situation at hand. A pawn, or indeed literally any piece on the chessboard, has no narrative component to it at all; that's a critical difference which is specifically relevant to the situation at hand. By comparison, the fact that regular human lives are not as likely to include lethal danger as a character's life really isn't a critical difference for the argument I was making above, namely, that life is full of meaningful choices which are totally orthogonal to the question of survival, and thus any claim that there cannot be meaning unless survival is on the line is suspect at best. The fact that survival is more likely to be in question is really not very relevant to whether it is exclusively relevant. (This is also my response to your most recent reply to me [USER=6747251]@Micah Sweet[/USER].)It is not comparable in key senses, exactly as you laid out here. The fact that you aren't invested is, in fact, the most relevant point possible, since both sides here are specifically talking about what gets, or keeps, them invested into the game, as noted in some of the stuff below.I mean...that's not exactly what I've been getting from this conversation, but okay. And no, I don't, at all, think that we can "leverage" the fact that it's a game with game pieces. That doesn't have any intersection with narrative, investment, and questions of the worth thereof, except in the extremely narrow and specific OOTS or Erfworld type "game-rules literally as world-physics" narrative. (Not intending to disparage that approach at all, it can be very fun, but it's a pretty small niche in the much broader space of narrative-via-gaming.)Well, that's an incorrect assumption on your part. I in fact prioritize challenging my players. I just challenge their moral-ethical decision-making as the primary goal, or in-battle tactical decision-making as a secondary goal, rather than their strategic-logistical decisions. A character that dies in a given combat is going to stay dead for that combat (unless they really impress me with a clever way to change that fact), but that death isn't going to end the overall saga, because the dead cannot participate in the types of decision-making I'm interested in challenging.Sure. Those occur within the context of a given fight, generally speaking. I have little need for extensive rules outside of combat; that's where the fiction is undisputed king. Within combat, the rules tend to take primacy because we want to avoid the stereotypical schoolyard squabble. Outside combat, where the pressures are different and usually broader-scope, negotiating a consensus result is much more feasible. And I find detail-oriented logistical rules to be, quite frankly, incredibly dull in most games--I get how they could be interesting, I just find almost all mechanics proposed for them to be really poor ideas, because one engages with them only to avoid the bad, not to seek the good, as it were. So there's little reason for me to consider out-of-combat rules other than something like 4e's Skill Challenges, which are just a fairly loose and adaptable framework.Sure, though again, nothing prevents that from occurring in specific areas (like individual combats) and not others (like the over-arching narrative.) These things can (and IMO should) interact, such as retreating from a combat resulting in deleterious consequences for the narrative, a character dying in a combat derailing current plans or prompting strange and disturbing revelations, Staking your investment on those gameplay decisions and risk evaluations, again, does not require that your character poof out of existence forever when certain mechanical conditions occur. Instead, it requires that there be at least the possibility of realized loss: that the things you wanted to happen didn't, and that that either cannot be reversed at all, or can only be reversed by paying some other price instead. Hence why I and others have emphasized these over-arching narrative consequences. A dead character never coming back is, certainly, one of the ways to put an irreversible mark on things. But a dead character requiring the sacrifice of their beloved signature magic item in order to be revived is a similarly irreversible mark, one that plausibly invites a great deal more exploration. Or, a dead character spurring another character to do something atrocious or blameworthy in order to bring the dead character back. Etc.If the time, effort, and creative energy you've invested are worth it, then having that creative energy bled away does not seem as effective nor as productive as having it collide against opposed creative energy from others. Which is, more or less, my point; people act as though no-death (or, in my case, low-death) games necessarily cannot have any creative energy in them at all, solely because that creative energy isn't under threat of being casually discarded. I see it as exactly the opposite: I don't really understand the point of putting creative energy into something that has a rather high chance of eventually being casually discarded (and, all too often, replaced with something nigh-equivalent), when I could instead create stakes by holding that creative energy hostage, or giving the player the personal choice between allowing it to be lost but keeping some other thing they might value more, or keeping it at the cost of that other valued thing.Again: no shade on anyone who wants their ability to participate in play to be the core stake. My shade is being cast on those who have--repeatedly, in both this thread and past threads--explicitly told me that I must want a dull and boring game where nothing happens and nothing is ever lost, without even the possibility of stakes. Because yes, I have been straight-up told that. Repeatedly, and rather insultingly, so I tend to take a defensive posture about this stuff.Again, I don't see the two things as even remotely comparable. Because both you and I explicitly care about investment and creative energy and the like. One of these things is literally actually necessary for having investment and employing creative energy: you have to have an entity (avatar) to be invested into, and it must take part in an imagined context (quite literally, a fantasy) in order for you to do creative work with it. That's very literally what you actually need. You do not need a spreadsheet and a game piece to do that. Those are potentially useful tools, to be sure, but they are not required for getting-invested-in and creative-energy-expenditure. Sure, calling excessive attention to the nitty-gritty can be grating. But you cannot design a game where people are meant to invest their creative energy but they never, ever have anything that is plausibly an avatar (even if that avatar could be rather different from what we would normally consider a D&D-like character to be) nor anything like an imagined fictional context for that avatar to take part in (ditto.)</blockquote>

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