Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6210485" data-attributes="member: 2067">Totally. Death is a very binary result. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> In my own 4e games, I've taken to minimizing death and using something like a <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?977-Shoot-for-the-Goal" target="_blank">goal tracker</a> instead, where failure basically affects the end state more so than the immediate process -- let the goblins reduce you to 0 hp, and the goblins earn a success toward their goal and begin to over-take the city and now it's less about crushing the goblins and more about saving the city, for instance.Personally, I think those kind of suck. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I mean, it does little real harm, but it's missing out on the more interesting potential of having your heroes fail, and dealing with the fall out from that. I can totally imagine a sandbox game where checks revealed plot-hooks, it just means you're going to need 3-10 different plot hooks bopping about at any one time (which is a LOT of pre-prep for most D&amp;D e's!). It's easy to default to a DM mode of &quot;roll this meaningless check while I figure out the answer to this question,&quot; but it just eats up time, if there's no real option for failure.Well, I did say failure state. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 6210485, member: 2067"] Totally. Death is a very binary result. ;) In my own 4e games, I've taken to minimizing death and using something like a [URL="http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?977-Shoot-for-the-Goal"]goal tracker[/URL] instead, where failure basically affects the end state more so than the immediate process -- let the goblins reduce you to 0 hp, and the goblins earn a success toward their goal and begin to over-take the city and now it's less about crushing the goblins and more about saving the city, for instance. Personally, I think those kind of suck. ;) I mean, it does little real harm, but it's missing out on the more interesting potential of having your heroes [I]fail[/i], and dealing with the fall out from that. I can totally imagine a sandbox game where checks revealed plot-hooks, it just means you're going to need 3-10 different plot hooks bopping about at any one time (which is a LOT of pre-prep for most D&D e's!). It's easy to default to a DM mode of "roll this meaningless check while I figure out the answer to this question," but it just eats up time, if there's no real option for failure. Well, I did say [I]failure[/i] state. ;) [/QUOTE]

Verification