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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6860500" data-attributes="member: 42582">In general I've got nothing against it.For instance, as a player, it helps to remember that the game is a game, and so - for instance - choosing more-or-less on a whim to enter a dank dungeon full of dangerous enemies is part of what is needed to make the game work.As a GM - which is the role I most often occupy - I am not going to decide via random die roll whether or not, inside the dank dungeon, the paladin of the Raven Queen encounters minions of Orcus. Of course I'm going to put those minions there, because that's what drives the game forward!In the context of combat, I expect my players to pay attention to how many hit points their PCs have remaining. That's metagaming (the characters in the fiction have no way of knowing how much of their luck and "divine protection" has been ablated). And in designing an encounter, I think about how it will play out. In my most recent 4e session, for instance, I had the PCs' archlich nemesis conjure forth another lich from the phylactery one of the PCs was (inadvertantly) carrying around because I though it would be fun. That's metagaming too.When it comes to the players committing there characters, I want the to know that, as a GM, I'm committed to keeping things moving forward. So the outcomes of failure might be adverse to the interests and desires of the PCs, but in general the shouldn't be adverse to the interests and desires of the players, to have an enjoyable RPGing experience.That depend heavily on who the enemy is, and how "realistically" vs "cinematically" the GM adjudicates being hunted down.For many D&D characters, for instance, it's far better (in mechanical terms) to be ambushed in armour than to be attacked while sleeping and unarmoured.Spending inspiration to earn an escape is playing it out too (assuming that's a rule of the game). It's just at a higher level of abstraction.I don't agree that rolling a d20 to see what happens in this 6 seconds of melee exchange is "natural" or "organic", but spending a resource to abstract that out to a 10 minute escape scene is "artificial" or "not playing it out". In both cases, it's expending resources that the game provides me with as a player, in order to make a move in the fiction.But there are other mechanics that could be used too. D&D characters have attack bonuses, and ACs, and hit points; why not "escape bonuses" and "escape points"? Give players a mechanical lever for retreating from combat, and they'll do it more often.</blockquote>

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