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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Mhoram" data-source="post: 3032078" data-attributes="member: 4789">Bit of a rant.. and this is the way I look at it. Liberally sprinkle IMO all thought it,.I personally hate the term referee, as that implies one side against another and to me that is not what should be going on. You have referees at sports games or wargames, not roleplaying.The GM should give challenges to players, but not to the detriment of enjoyment. In another thread someone kept mentioning that they wouldn't ever take sub optimal tactical choices in combat, even if it were in character to do so because he didn't want the time he spent playing and working on the character to be lost. I agree with that, in general, and think it is part of the GMs job to make sure that doesn't happen - so a player in that position can make suboptimal choices in character and never feel threatened that doing so will automatically cause the character to die. Failure =/= Death, and shouldn't.  The "I fail I die" attitude kills gameflow and game enjoyment worse than anything I have ever seen - to me  the game should not be a tacitcal exercise of player vs GM.  Too often players get so paranoid that they spend to much time at every door, level or encounter that it getts boring for other players of the GM. The characters should be challenged, but not neccessarily the players.The game is a co-operative story, as it unfolds. The GM is the guide to that story, but not the author- he is only one of 5 or 6 authors, with the players being the rest. The story is what unfolds by the characters reactions to npcs, setting and combat.Given, I gm primarily superheroes as a Genre, but I  did a 6 year long fantasy game, and in the last 16 years, I have never had a character die on me. The characters have lost fights, or failed in thier objective, but died... nope. And for those that might respond with "Well, if there is no chance of death, I'll just take extreme chances, because I know I won't die" - the responce to that is the idea that the character doesn't know that, and just like choosing to take suboptimal tactical choices is roleplaying within character, so is that.</blockquote>

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