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[rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.
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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9701551" data-attributes="member: 6790260"><p>Oooh boy. Gonna have to completely reject that penultimate sentence of this bit. Death <em>is not</em> a structural necessity. There are plenty of games, <em>including some versions of D&D</em>, that do not have character death. 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.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Nah. I had a whole thread about this topic a long, long while back (couple years at least now). Death is not the only thing that achieves these goals. It is merely one way to do so. IME, it actually <em>is not</em> the best way, because the extreme severity means a significant number of players turtle up and disengage, becoming no-experimentation, no-risk, no-derring-do types, because they're afraid of having their participation taken away. And no, in my experience, it <em>EMPHATICALLY is not</em> effective to try shock therapy on these folks. Quite the opposite; that's the fastest way to drive them away from ever participating in TTRPGs ever again. Further, because death is simultaneously maximum severity and maximum impersonal-ness (impersonality? hmm), it doesn't really motivate players very well in my experience, other than scaring them off. If you actually want to motivate them, they need a reason to dare, not a reason to be scared of daring--which means other motives are actually a lot more effective. Again, all IME.</p><p></p><p>So with the very foundation of your argument challenged, it's hard to really respond to the rest. You're working off an assumption I find not only personally inapplicable, but objectively incorrect. There are, in fact, versions of <em>specifically</em> D&D, not just any TTRPG, that involve no-death or minimized-death rules, and yet they still hold together, they still have weighty decisions, they still have meaningful tension, and still have stakes both general and specific. My DW game still has plenty of edge and isn't flat, even though I have told my players that they will never be subject to character deaths that are all three of (1) random (=fluke of the dice, not the result of an intentional incredibly dangerous choice or of accepting one's fate), (2) permanent (=character is dead and isn't going to come back on their own e.g. Gandalf in LotR), and (3) irrevocable (=players will not have the ability to reverse the death in a reasonably short period of time by expending resources or promising something to a being that can do the job.) My players are still highly invested and indeed even the brand-new-to-TTRPG players care a lot about many things in the world, and have done rash or dangerous things to protect who and what they care about.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 9701551, member: 6790260"] Oooh boy. Gonna have to completely reject that penultimate sentence of this bit. Death [I]is not[/I] a structural necessity. There are plenty of games, [I]including some versions of D&D[/I], that do not have character death. 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. Nah. I had a whole thread about this topic a long, long while back (couple years at least now). Death is not the only thing that achieves these goals. It is merely one way to do so. IME, it actually [I]is not[/I] the best way, because the extreme severity means a significant number of players turtle up and disengage, becoming no-experimentation, no-risk, no-derring-do types, because they're afraid of having their participation taken away. And no, in my experience, it [I]EMPHATICALLY is not[/I] effective to try shock therapy on these folks. Quite the opposite; that's the fastest way to drive them away from ever participating in TTRPGs ever again. Further, because death is simultaneously maximum severity and maximum impersonal-ness (impersonality? hmm), it doesn't really motivate players very well in my experience, other than scaring them off. If you actually want to motivate them, they need a reason to dare, not a reason to be scared of daring--which means other motives are actually a lot more effective. Again, all IME. So with the very foundation of your argument challenged, it's hard to really respond to the rest. You're working off an assumption I find not only personally inapplicable, but objectively incorrect. There are, in fact, versions of [I]specifically[/I] D&D, not just any TTRPG, that involve no-death or minimized-death rules, and yet they still hold together, they still have weighty decisions, they still have meaningful tension, and still have stakes both general and specific. My DW game still has plenty of edge and isn't flat, even though I have told my players that they will never be subject to character deaths that are all three of (1) random (=fluke of the dice, not the result of an intentional incredibly dangerous choice or of accepting one's fate), (2) permanent (=character is dead and isn't going to come back on their own e.g. Gandalf in LotR), and (3) irrevocable (=players will not have the ability to reverse the death in a reasonably short period of time by expending resources or promising something to a being that can do the job.) My players are still highly invested and indeed even the brand-new-to-TTRPG players care a lot about many things in the world, and have done rash or dangerous things to protect who and what they care about. [/QUOTE]
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