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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8680471" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think we know what you are trying to say.  This is a very old subject that has been discussed many times and so the discussion is mostly moving over familiar points and arguments.  And I think that a lot of people in the thread are sympathetic to the idea that not every encounter needs to be perfectly balanced.  I think there are principally two points of disagreement.First, most rule sets don't actually enforce balance and do in fact provide for a wide range of encounters from trivially easy to overwhelmingly dangerous.  Even your example system 3.X D&D suggests, encourages, and provides for this sort of wide range of difficulties in encounters.  And even that is only a guideline and not a rule, like the common advice on how to write well in English, such as avoiding "-ly" adverbs or avoiding sentence fragments.  However, that is just a guideline, and strong and experienced writers can break the guidelines if they know what they are doing.  In the same way, you can break the guideline on balanced encounters, but you better know what you are doing if you do so.And secondly, while I think most of us agree that there can be value in a wide range of challenge difficulties, I don't think you'll get a lot of agreement with the assertion that "players' lives should be open to any kind of event like in our everyday lives".   Real life is not fair or just.  It's quite possible to get up in the morning and die to some accident you couldn't have seen coming.  For a soldier, the reality of war is not fair and balanced challenges.  Sometimes it's a 105mm shell bursting 5m from you and your body comes apart before you have time to realize you've died.   We could in real life go to sleep, be hit by an asteroid, and never wake up.  But these sorts of things shouldn't happen in a game because the point of the game is to be fun.  There may be a point in a 'Kobashi Maru No Win Scenario' when training Star Ship captains for the harsh realities of command, but there isn't much point in running the 'Kobashi Maru' as anything but a one shot.  In a game intended to go more than one session, no win scenarios are to be avoided. In reality most GMs very carefully but unconsciously steer way from realistic events because they are given examples of play that follow certain patterns.  And ultimately, most successful RPGs are not in any way trying to be realistic and conform the game to the realities of everyday life.  Instead, most RPGs actually are trying to have verisimilitude to fictional narratives.  They want actions to play out the way they play out in some favored story.  My advice to people who want to design RPGs is for them to play as many different styles of game with as many different rule sets and processes of play as possible.  Sit at a lot of tables.  Run a lot of different games.  Learn what works.  Learn what doesn't.  Try to figure out why things work, and how different styles and rules achieves different effects.  So if you have this theory that a good game would involve the party of 1st level characters being attacked by a hungry ancient red dragon, start a campaign that way and see how it goes.  Test your ideas. How much fun do your players report it is to make characters and then unexpectedly have them die in a brutal unfair encounter where they stood no chance of doing anything, not even running away?  How many times can you run that encounter and people still be interested in it?  How much less fun do you think it will be if instead of the first encounter of the campaign, a dragon that is not even part of the adventure comes out of nowhere and eats everyone unexpectedly after two years of developing characters.  It could happen.  Things like that do happen to NPCs, so in a sense it's realistic.  Why do you think game designers discourage GMs from doing that in their games?  Are they just dumb?  Have they not thought this out enough?</blockquote>

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