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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7452734" data-attributes="member: 97077">When I refer to the "goals of play," I'm referring to the ones stated by the rules themselves. Anyone adding additional goals of play to that or changing the default ones can expect different results. My players have no expectation that they will get to see the end of some plotline or whatever because there isn't one.I would say that nobody's looking for a TPK as a solution to anything or perceiving it as a favored result. But when the players willingly decide to stake their characters' lives on getting the XP, gold, or whatever they value and things don't go their way, the DM is doing the players a disservice by changing the stakes after the fact. "Oh, um, they actually capture you instead." I would be mightily annoyed at that because my expectation was that we'd be dead if we failed and I made all the decisions leading up to that point on that basis. I might have made other decisions had I known capture was the failure condition instead.It depends on the stakes that were set at the outset. If this fire giant battle is clearly life-or-death and the players bought into that, I would say it's denying agency that to suddenly change because things aren't going the PCs' way as the DM is negating or mitigating the impact of the players' own decisions. Don't make those the stakes to begin with if you're not willing to see it through. I'm all for other forms of stakes and my scenarios are rife with them. It would be a stupid position to take that the only stakes are life or death.If I were running a game with your particular goal of play above (to the extent I understand it well), I would probably remove life-or-death stakes completely from the game. To do otherwise means we might not achieve the desired goal.</blockquote>

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