Dragonlance has been a setting for several versions of D&D, all of which have death rules. Unless you're talking about the original module run, which is so railroady that to me it barely counts as a game, more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book (one where none of the choices lead to a bad end). The actual setting has no less potential for death than any other D&D game.
Yes, I was in fact talking about that. I really did refer to the modules in specific:
Consider Dragonlance stuff. Very much D&D--but the modules explicitly had rules against deaths for named characters prior to certain events happening. Hence death cannot be a necessity of any kind, structural or otherwise.
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I think you're using a considerable amount of hyperbole in your rhetoric (a tactic I'm personally not fond of, but I digress). GMs and players in traditional games have different roles with different degrees of power over the game. A GM has less motivation to act in bad faith I think, because under the rules they can pretty much do what they want anyway.
"I can do whatever I want" has never, in my experience, been a
reducing effect on whether people act in untoward ways. It is almost always going to
increase people doing that. Thinking one has license to do whatever one wants, whenever one wants, is the fastest way to get people acting in crappy ways.
I refer you to, for example, the Greater Internet F@#$wad Theory from Penny Arcade. Anonymity on the internet means people think they can do whatever they want without meaningful hindrance or consequences. Hence, even perfectly ordinary people--people who might be quite respectful and constructive in
personal social situations--quite easily become the worst people you know under such conditions. Or consider how people will use self-serving justifications to absolve themselves of their less-than-moral behavior, e.g.
as Psychology Today notes, recasting their behavior as a "grey area" or asserting that behavior as actually beneficial to others in some way. Or, from that same article, their reference to studies which have shown that people who get paid a monetary reward equal to the value of a die they throw, will self-report higher values if allowed to roll the die three times but asked to report only the first result, rather than asked to roll the die only once and report the result.
"You can do pretty much whatever you want and avoid the players finding out" IS something that increases the likelihood of misbehavior. This is as close to scientific fact as one can get without literally doing an actual peer-reviewed study on it.
They don't gain anything in play by acting in bad faith (not to say some GMs might behave badly regardless, of course).
Don't they? They gain
control. They gain assurance that their "vision" remains unsullied--that's something folks on here
love to bring up, that the GM's vision is incredibly important and should be preserved even if that means resorting to certain questionable tactics. Further, they "gain" by removing negatives. If you just successfully
deceive your players into thinking they're in a wide-open sandbox when they're actually riding invisible rails, you need to do a TON less work and--if the deception is indefinitely flawless--exactly as happy of players as if you had actually given them the experience they're seeking.
So...yeah. There's quite a bit GMs can get from it, both in gaining beneficial things and in reducing undesirable things.
A player, on the other hand, defines and expands their role in the setting solely through the actions and abilities of their PC (in games I play anyway). They have motivation to try to increase that role by whatever means they can get away with. This doesn't mean they're going to act in bad faith, but often they have reason to do so, for in-game advantage, so it is IMO understandable.
Yeah I just don't buy this. I don't buy that GMs get nothing while players get everything. Both sides have reasons to do it. Both gain.
