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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nagol" data-source="post: 7477641" data-attributes="member: 23935">They may be pass/fail; they may not.  It depends on what I'm trying to avoid.  In one Fantasy Hero game, I was playing a thief and  I wanted to concentrate on heavy-planning big scores and not worry about fiddly little things like whether I could open a door so I bought my Lockpicking skill up to 23 or less on 3d6.  Even with a heavy penalty, I should still auto-succeed.  There's an example of pass-fail.  In the end, this attempt boomeranged because the GM saw how much I invested in the skill and assumed therefore I wanted to exercise it a lot and suddenly everywhere the character went there were really impressive locks on everything.In a Cyberpunk game, I was trying to avoid the Decker mini-game so I dumped a lot into powerful autonomous intrusion programs to limit the time spent and my participation in the minigame.  The optimization worked; we spent very little time on the mini-game throughout the campaign, but we still had some of the information advantages the mini-game could offer.Just because I find the tasks undesirable doesn't mean the group will want to forgo them.  The best way to handle such tasks is to overwhelm them.  The second best way is to sidestep them.The player's job is to have fun while providing fun for the other participants.  Depending on the game engine, genre, and expectations, working to keep your character alive can be fun.  The best a game designer can do to make certain the game expectations match the mechanics in place and that those expectations are clearly articulated to the audience.If I'm playing in a game where the expectation is risk of death/retirement is very real and I decide I want to be one of the last standing, I'll spend time working out how I can arrange that.  If the GM undercuts that risk without changing the expectation then he just robbed me. The worst example I have for this was another Hero Games campaign.  It was sold as a Traveler-esque science investigators with a ship.  I built an inexperienced highly curious teenager (extra Body, some armour, other specialty defences, inherent Regeneration...) and made him very survivable because I wanted to keep playing the character shoving his nose in the most wildly inappropriate places and learning things.  The character was destroyed anyway when the campaign turned out to be a bait-and-switch and his universe was erased while he was still inside it.I am unsure how you converted (paraphrasing) "I want to have a modicum of solo capability in case I need to take actions without the group" into "suppressed bloodlust".  The solo capability could at least as easily be covert or non-aggressive as much as it could be combative.</blockquote>

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