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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8924177" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've not played BitD - but based on my understanding of it, that last sentence isn't true.Eg the PCs want something that is inside a building. The players declare some appropriate action (eg we sneak in through the upper story ventilation hatch; we bribe the guard). If they succeed, the PCs make it inside the building. Perhaps something else then happens (eg while squeezing through the hatch a bit of gear catches and falls, and is now lying visible on the roadway outside; the guard takes the bribe, but also extracts a promise to try and get their child an apprenticeship with one of the PCs' cousins who runs a bakery), but the PCs position is improved - instead of having a wall between them and what they want they are now inside the building with it.In more structural terms, and alluding back to the OP: all RPGing depends upon situations being framed which pose questions to or challenges for the PCs, and thus the players. Or, at least, when a PC ceases to face any such situations their "story" is done. So in any ongoing RPG, the players (and their PCs) are always going to have unsatisfied desires, reasons to do things, causes for concern. BitD isn't unusual in having this be the case; what makes it and (to various extents) PbtA, and Torchbearer, and Burning Wheel, distinctive is that the GM's introduction of such things is gated via the players' dice rolls. It is not "at large" to the same degree as in (say) DL-style or 2nd ed-era AD&D.To me, this seems consistent with [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s remark about "the only way to win is to not play".As best I can tell, the way you win in BitD is by achieving the consequences that are narratively preferred. Look, for instance, at [USER=70468]@kenada[/USER]'s post:In this respect I would say the game compares to 4e D&D, Torchbearer (as I've experienced it), Burning Wheel, and MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. There is no point at which the game is beaten, in the sense that the core mechanical/system framework is overcome such that players, via their PCs, can obtain what they want without risk of consequence. (An exception: I think MHRP/Cortex+ risks degeneration when there are too many d12 abilities on the PC sheets, although I haven't fully tested this conjecture by playing any of the Annihilation scenarios which are build around such characters.)This would contrast with AD&D or B/X, where somewhere around 7th to 10th level, especially if the PCs are predominantly casters, the players overtake the ostensible game system and essentially dictate outcomes, with playing the fiction being the only real resolution mechanism left (Tomb of Horrors is an especially stark manifestation of this tendency, but I think it manifest in more "organic" ways also).</blockquote>

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