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<blockquote data-quote="ivocaliban" data-source="post: 2841253" data-attributes="member: 17596">Well, I voted yes, but I think &quot;winning&quot; is open to a great deal of interpretation. I do not think that PCs should always be successful, particularly if they make obviously foolish choices. However, I've been running a single player campaign for several years now and it's quite clear that the storyline has a certain arc that would be utterly destroyed if the one and only PC bought the farm. Because of this, and the background of the PC himself, there's a very slim chance of his dying on a random toss of the die. This doesn't mean that he wins every battle, that he's rolling in gold, or that he's even particularly happy with his life. It also doesn't mean his destiny, so to speak, will protect him if he decides to leap into the jaws of a dragon. It certainly won't. The point is, when a campaign focuses more on story elements than dungeon crawling it doesn't make much sense to have a character die a random death at the hands of a nameless peon. For some, campaigns and characters are a dime a dozen. A character dies, you roll up another and meet up with the group around the next corner. That doesn't work very well with one player, unfortunately. It also doesn't work very well when the PC's backstory and very existence is tied so strongly to the storyline. If Bilbo had been eaten by trolls, for example, The Hobbit would have been a rather disappointing short story, instead of the prelude to an epic. None of this means I'm against deadly campaigns or even hack-and-slash excitement, but for the purposes of my campaign...and for any campaign where the characters ARE the story...it's important that they survive, if not win...at least until the story can reach a satisfactory conclusion.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="ivocaliban, post: 2841253, member: 17596"] Well, I voted yes, but I think "winning" is open to a great deal of interpretation. I do not think that PCs should always be successful, particularly if they make obviously foolish choices. However, I've been running a single player campaign for several years now and it's quite clear that the storyline has a certain arc that would be utterly destroyed if the one and only PC bought the farm. Because of this, and the background of the PC himself, there's a very slim chance of his dying on a random toss of the die. This doesn't mean that he wins every battle, that he's rolling in gold, or that he's even particularly happy with his life. It also doesn't mean his destiny, so to speak, will protect him if he decides to leap into the jaws of a dragon. It certainly won't. The point is, when a campaign focuses more on story elements than dungeon crawling it doesn't make much sense to have a character die a random death at the hands of a nameless peon. For some, campaigns and characters are a dime a dozen. A character dies, you roll up another and meet up with the group around the next corner. That doesn't work very well with one player, unfortunately. It also doesn't work very well when the PC's backstory and very existence is tied so strongly to the storyline. If Bilbo had been eaten by trolls, for example, [I]The Hobbit[/I] would have been a rather disappointing short story, instead of the prelude to an epic. None of this means I'm against deadly campaigns or even hack-and-slash excitement, but for the purposes of my campaign...and for any campaign where the characters ARE the story...it's important that they survive, if not win...at least until the story can reach a satisfactory conclusion. [/QUOTE]

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