Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7346182" data-attributes="member: 82106">Do you think its a good idea to put an unbeatable monster into a combat with a PC? I doubt it (granted that there can be some particular cases where this may be acceptable, but as a general concept its frowned upon by all), right?So isn't that an indication that there's an agency problem associated with creating no-win situations where a character will presumably die? I would say they DO take away player agency (again accepting some cases where this may actually be a price that a player accepted as part of stakes). In classic D&amp;D a player would of course not be upset by the appearance of an unbeatable monster if they had deliberately put themselves in a situation where this was known/likely to come up. For example if a level 1 PC in OD&amp;D insists on trekking into the mountains and gets eaten by a 10HD dragon that would provoke nothing but shrugs, but if that dragon appeared on level 1 of the dungeon and simply ate the character without any possible recourse, then it would be considered not 'kosher'. The player had no chance to exercise skill in saving the character, thus the cost extracted was against conventions of play.So clearly the overwhelming majority of D&amp;Ders would IMHO think that an unkillable monster violated player agency, though they might arrive at that conclusion by different routes.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 7346182, member: 82106"] Do you think its a good idea to put an unbeatable monster into a combat with a PC? I doubt it (granted that there can be some particular cases where this may be acceptable, but as a general concept its frowned upon by all), right? So isn't that an indication that there's an agency problem associated with creating no-win situations where a character will presumably die? I would say they DO take away player agency (again accepting some cases where this may actually be a price that a player accepted as part of stakes). In classic D&D a player would of course not be upset by the appearance of an unbeatable monster if they had deliberately put themselves in a situation where this was known/likely to come up. For example if a level 1 PC in OD&D insists on trekking into the mountains and gets eaten by a 10HD dragon that would provoke nothing but shrugs, but if that dragon appeared on level 1 of the dungeon and simply ate the character without any possible recourse, then it would be considered not 'kosher'. The player had no chance to exercise skill in saving the character, thus the cost extracted was against conventions of play. So clearly the overwhelming majority of D&Ders would IMHO think that an unkillable monster violated player agency, though they might arrive at that conclusion by different routes. [/QUOTE]

Verification