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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8679089" data-attributes="member: 4937">My preference as well.Yeah, but that sort of thing could happen in any system where you had permanent negative consequences as a potential outcome to the character's story.  Even in games without explicit permadeath, it's very hard for me to see how you get around having outcomes the player does not want unless the player is the sole storyteller.  Even Indy games are typically rigged to put characters in negative outcome "death spirals" wear the math tends to favor the narrative ultimately being tragic.   I don't know that your story proves that the problem is anything other than a dysfunctional player, as there is a class of player going back as long as the game has been around whose aesthetic of play is self-affirmation and what they really only want from the game is the GM repeatedly telling them, "Yes, you win.  You are so cool."  That isn't necessarily functional play in any system.Yes, that's true, but that's not literally what "system matters" means in Forge Speak so maybe let's just avoid jargon.  The plain meaning of "system matters" tends to be "rules matter", and so that's why I countered with Celebrim's Second Law which in essence says that no matter the game system, if you prepare and think about playing it as if it were D&D it will play much like D&D.  That is if you prepare a keyed map filled with monsters and traps and treasure and expect the focus of play to be skilled and potent adventurers exploring that, you can fully play D&D using CoC rules.  Conversely, you can play CoC using D&D rules.  I think people tend to underestimate how completely flexible game systems are.  I'm not a particular person and I have certain sensibilities as a GM, and the one time I tried to run Paranoia it came out as a highly disturbing Horror RPG.The classic bad examples for me are in VtM first edition (and really all 1st Edition White Wolf games), where all the examples of play involve interactions between a single player and single GM and as such don't actually describe the game that is in all likelihood going to be played with the rules.  It's very unlikely that the game described by VtM rulebook was ever played on a wide basis.  (Ironically, the frustration with that spawns Ron Edwards and his school of thought about what was wrong.)  I had the exact same problem with Mousegaurd, and I have this problem in spades with Monsters and Other Childish Things.  And to a large extent I see similar disconnects showing up in FATE and PbtA games.If you go back to my first post on the subject in this thread you'll see that's the opposite of what I argued.It wouldn't be a terrible idea, and certainly you should set out the standard that the game is intended to be cooperative.  PC vs. PC violence is 99% of the time player dysfunction and it should be strongly discouraged.  The only reason I don't ban it is that protection from retribution only tends to encourage the dysfunctional troublemakers who would otherwise be afraid the rest of the players would band against them.</blockquote>

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