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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9087882" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Ah.In that case, when I sit down to play, I want the D&D I get to be:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Challenging, but achievable. Meaning, it's meant to take effort to overcome, but major loss/destruction is very unlikely even unless I, as a player, make multiple bad decisions. (Which, to be clear--I've done that before, as have my co-players. In games people deride as "too safe.")</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Difficult in ways that cannot be solved purely through calculation, which must come down to value judgments. This can be the typical moral/ethical issues, or it can be purely personal, e.g. putting a Chaotic character in a position where they must choose between their opposition to structured authority and whatever deeply-held goals they have (e.g., they can go after the man who killed their parents...but they would only have the power to do so by accepting a position in the constabulary they have philosophically opposed in the past.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Genuinely fair. Meaning, if there actually is a shot at victory, it's a sincere one, and I am sufficiently well-informed to be able to make a reasonable decision in context. Further, it should be designed with an eye to the fact that your enemies only deal with one encounter (or perhaps a couple), while the PCs have to endure an indefinite string of them. It sounds fine to have a 5% chance of instant death per encounter, until you realize that means an average of 20 encounters between deaths (meaning, a couple of months at most) and fairly high odds of at least one TPK per year.</li> </ol>These are all, IMO, best served by creating a system which starts off well-balanced, and offers tools for pushing things away from that balance in an intentional, if not necessarily predictable, manner. Like how 13th Age has the "Nastier Specials" rules for how to spice up various monsters.The problem is, I'm not sure that that is meaningfully achievable. Keeping even a roughly fixed chance (e.g. maybe only 5% for a short campaign and 15% for a spend-many-sessions-at-cap campaign) is going to be an extraordinarily difficult design problem. Perhaps even mathematically impossible. Because if it's even 0.5% chance of TPK per encounter, all you need are 140 encounters to have a 90% TPK rate. If a short campaign has only, say, 100 encounters, and a long campaign has 300, how can you possibly design both to end up in the same place? Unless, of course, what you actually do is make the risk of TPK go down as the game gets "harder"...which I suspect is not what you intend for this!Also--you really want 80% of encounters to fail? Like...run away or surrender because you just cannot succeed? That's...extremely high. That means nearly all encounters end in failure. I dunno about you, but failing at 80% of the things I attempt sounds unbelievably demoralizing, and at that rate, almost a third of five-encounter runs would be literally all failures (.8^5= .32768). Even a 50% "sorry, this is just failure, you get nothing, good DAY sir" rate would probably drive me away from the game after only a few sessions.I did not mean to imply that there are absolutely no other reasons that it might be desirable. Though I would say that simply allowing players to respec if they feel they have made an error would be a better solution than enforcing first level. I've just had multiple 5e games crash and burn because the DM doggedly insisted on starting at 1st level because it was 1st level. It's pretty frustrating to be Cassandra predicting disaster, warning folks about it, being ignored, and doing everything you can to prevent it...only to have it happen anyway.</blockquote>

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