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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9757100" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Because then you can do things that aren't about survival, but instead about achieving other goals. That's...literally what makes Superman an interesting character. His story is a firefighter's story, not a warrior's story. Against any Kryptonian with actual combat experience, he straight-up loses almost all of the time. (It's worth noting that he almost always defeats such opponents with trickery, technology, or weakness exploitation.) Where he shines is when he's put in a situation where he has to grapple with lots of variables in order to save as many people as possible. That ceases to be a hard binary, and instead opens a huge space of possible results.Sure it is. You just have to care about things that aren't PC death in order to have "smart and clever person with no weapon" matter. Because when the only thing the player cares about is whether their own character lives or dies, they will stop caring about being a "smart and clever person with no weapon". Because a smart and clever person with no weapon doesn't survive the way a smart and clever person with a weapon would.When you run your game with all of the focus pointed at <survival is an extreme challenge>, you are specifically selecting for players who will not want to play "smart and clever person with no weapon". Because a smart and clever person with no weapon will just die. A lot. Over and over and over again, in fact. The smart and clever person WITH a weapon, on the other hand, is significantly more likely to survive. Your brutal "Hard Fun" campaign style specifically selects for players who view the world through a lens of needing to fight--specifically fight, as in kill their enemies--for every possible advantage they can get. It is the very brutality of your game which makes this happen.It's a simple hierarchy-of-needs thing. People aren't going to care about highfalutin principles or self-actualization when they're worried they won't physically survive the day. You expressly describe your game as being one that puts players into a "paranoid" state. And yes, I am using quotes there because you have specifically said this previously: "<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-great-railroad-thread.714887/post-9747476" target="_blank">I agree that as a standard PCs should be paranoid and take repercussions.</a>" Paranoia prevents people from getting to the point where they care about being a "smart and clever person with no weapon".When you actually develop stakes and contexts that your players care about, for their own reasons, not simply because survival of their PC is involved, being a "smart and clever person with no weapon" actually becomes a valid space to consider.</blockquote>

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