Should the players always win?

[questing gm]

Should the players always win ? I leave it up to the dice

When i want my players to save the day, bad luck kills them. And when i face them against encounters that they should learn how to never underestimate their enemies, lady luck kills them too...

 

[GQuail]

Conversely, my Evil DM had only an abstract concept of play, and it was never fair. Since he never gave experience points, he just arbitrarily leveled us every few meetings., I can fairly say we were being cheated actively. On top of that, he regularly changed the BBEG from something believable and manageable (a Lich) to something more powerful (a wererat lich!) to something insane (an undead god-foetus who is bent on destroying all of time itself) At the end he was burnt out, so he put all the PC's on a bridge and had them face off against four OTHER PC-built monsters (A fighter-class cloud giant was one, a Sorcerer Pit Fiend was another. Nasty stuff.)

As someone who is often vague about XP with players, I just wanted to single that out as not being intrinsically "cheating" by itself: and depending on the situation, I can imagine why a Lich might not be known to in fact be a Wererat lich. Then again, I get the feeling your DM was just mince in general, and the specifics are irrelveant. :>

I prefer players to always have the chance to win, but by no means should it be definite. I've put my current group up ahainst plenty of swingy encounters, and while they've not lost a PC yet they definatly know they've come close: the only time it almost happened was when a player forgot something realtively obvious and I decided to give him a bit of leeway since doing so would have lead to basically insta-death. Still, I feel mst people wouldn't enjoy a game that didn't have some sort of risk of failrue, so a game where the PCs /always/ win sounds a bit silly to me.

Then again, the opposite (where the PCs can't win) isn't fun either. But it depends on what you class as "win". A Cthulhu group can never kill Yog-Sothoth, but they can still "win" by stopping the ceremony tos ummon him and saving their town from immediate destruciton. A game can be bleak and still allow the players to "win", evne it'[s a small victory.

IN most tales, some sort of failure often appears as a dramatic point. Boromir dies, or Luke loses his hand and barely gets out from Vader alive, or Batman doesn't get there in tim to save Robin from the Joker, or..... Constant success would be bad because all these great plot hooks would never be open to you, IMHO.

 

[jasper]

.... If he dies in a kamikaze attack to stop it that's a really good death.

If the character rolls a 1 on a saving throw and a kobold child cuts his throat while the character is unable to defend himself that's a really crappy death. The players should never be killed by mooks, random encounters, or low level traps.

Put another way PCs shouldn't be killed by Stormtroopers or Jawas but Vader and the Emperor should be lethal.

I TOTALLY disagree. To use your monsters, one my characters took out Vader only to be shot by stormtrooper while leaving. Now some times it sucks because the dice hate me but that what dice are for.
The pcs are not A list actors who have script immunity and rewrite permission. But only players on the stage who strutt their stuff. And the crowd sometimes throws tomatoes and occassionally anvils.
Or to sum up. Always give the monster an even break.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I see your point, of course - the aim is to have fun, so having fun equals successful play. But that's separate from the act of playing a game (any game) with rules which can which can be exploited to modify the player's chance of success or failure. In that regard, canny use of tactical rules to achieve greater rewards for the PCs is, by definition, skill.

I can see that.
I just rankle when I see that applied as the only/best thing about playing, just like the old White Wolf implied attitude that if you weren't having angst and dark social drama you weren't really roleplaying. To me someone who is a great roleplayer, and makes all tactical decisions based on personlity, approach and knowledge of the character is as "skilled" a player as someone who does the best tactically, because it is the player good at tactics, even if the character is dumb as a post.
Which is, of course the classic game/story split. And it will vex the hobby until it's death because for everyone that line is somewhere different. Me I do tend to lean on the story side. So I find myself arguing that side of the arguemnt on these boards, when the tone and approach is a more game oriented one... but I am enough on the game side, that when I run into hardcore RP only types, I end up arguing the game side.

 

[Hairfoot]

Okay, those are good points.

I'm clearly approaching it more from a wargame point of view, but I still think that the threat of loss is what makes a game fun. I can't accept that D&D (or any RPG) is worthwhile (as written) when the players are assured that they will get everything they want.

Roleplaying is a skill in itself, and can be done well or poorly, but D&D revolves around violent acts of heroism. If the elements of chance and bad decision are removed when the characters interact with the campaign world physically, it becomes an expensive - if enjoyable - exercise in fiction writing.

Even if, as Firelance says, "what sustains interest...is not [the] players' skills...but the simple fact that the outcome is uncertain", I cannot agree with the philosophy of games in which the outcome is uncertain, but irrelevant. So that, in FL's example of a game of snakes & ladders, it doesn't actually matter what you roll because the DM (S&LM?) changes the board to ensure you always land on a ladder.

Personally, I like it when my PC avoids a trap or dodges a death blow because I chose a dull saving-throw feat over an exciting combat one, or used the statistical bonuses of cover and terrain to my advantage. It makes me feel clever.

I wouldn't feel clever at all to know that my character could have taken the feat "skill focus: profession" six times over and spent every combat lying prostrate and weeping because it's in-character, and achieved exactly the same result.