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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5206371" data-attributes="member: 42582">I really do not like this sort of play. I don't like it as a player, because it subordinates my priorities to the GM's. And I don't like it as a GM - if I wanted to write bad fantasy fiction I'd do that, rather than referee an RPG.This describes me and my group reasonably well, although the optimisation is only half-hearted by CharOps standards (but also a bit more rules-as-intended rather than rules-as-cheese).I'm very happy to go with the results dice, and I play my monsters as tactically well as I can within the reasonable parameters of their Int and cultural/behavioural write-ups. This doesn't harm the story, though, because the game I play is sufficiently well-designed that the action resolution mechanics support the unfolding of story.I'm not sure what to make of this. If the GM introduces the villain into the narrative at a certain point, then I guess there is a possibility of the PCs getting the jump. I play a system, however, in which this sort of possibility can be pretty-much excluded. For example, in a recent session, the PCs saw the primary villain flying off on a flying carpet while they were sneaking into the basement of his fortress to kill the hobgoblins there and rescue some prisoners. The PCs themselves had no way to fly, and no way to defend themselves against the large numbers of hobgoblins celebrating a funeral who would have noticed any arrows being fired at the villain. And the rules of the game make a one-shot kill of the villain via an arrow impossible (he has too many hit points) and the players know this. I was therefore very confident that the sight of the villain on his carpet would add some colour, and flesh out the background a bit more, but would not lead to his untimely demise. And unsurprisingly, it turned out as I expected. (EDIT: if they had tried to take him down, by coordinating all their ranged attacks to hit simultaneously, and had succeeded, then the session would have played out very differently from how I expected, and I would have had to stat up a whole bundle of extra hobgoblins, but I still think it would have been a pretty interesting story!)I just don't agree with this. For example, in high level Rolemaster many PCs have access to Self-Keeping, a spell which preserves the body and soul in the event of death short of brain destruction, meaning that only healing but no resurrection is required for recovery. I've GMed RM combats in which some of the PCs had access to this spell, all did, or none did - which is to say, with wildly differing degrees of possiblity that the PCs might die. I never saw any evidence that it made any difference to the drama.The possiblity of losing the combat is a different thing. But there are all sorts of loss conditions for a combat besides dying - unconsciousness being an obvious one.My players get a sense of accomplishment from engaging the mechanics well. And the fact that the mechanics are about warriors, wizards, dragons, demons etc - in short, the flavour text - certainly adds some spice to that sense of accomplishment. But again, I don't think that the characterisation of the loss conditions as PC death, as opposed to PC defeat in various other forms, makes a lot of difference.Now I believe that, and I've had similar experiences GMing. But at least in my own case, it hasn't turned out either that other villains are less engaging, or that PC death is the only way to generate intense emotions. My last campaign ended with the players trapping a Voidal entity, the Prince of Hell and a petty demon lord in a dead star that they magically reignited (the idea of the dead star and its reignition is from Monte Cook's Beyond Countless Doorways). The Voidal entity they had fought twice in various forms. The Prince of Hell they had been struggling against for many sessions. The petty demon lord they fought only once - when they captured him - and he had never killed a PC. Nevertheless, I think imprisoning him gave the players the most satisfaction, simply because (i) he was the longest running of the foes during the campaign and (ii) he had therefore racked up the biggest number of niggling annoyances for the party.A lot of things, including unexpected little things, can make a villain be the one that the party especially hates, and I think it's very hard to generalise from a particular campaign to scenario design in general.</blockquote>

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