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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7406009" data-attributes="member: 82106">I won't take the bait on the sport vs war thing, I have long held it to be a bogus dichotomy and not useful in analysis of games/gaming. That aside, I just don't see it as a problem. As a GM I'm a fan of the characters, but that doesn't mean I'm a fan of them WINNING ALL THE TIME. I should be an advocate for the possibility of them winning and of them being able to do cool and awesome things, but those can and should include 'fail awesomely'. I mean, I'm sure Jack Kirby was a 'fan' of all the superhero characters he wrote stories about over the decades, but he still wrote a lot of stories where they failed, sometimes even died. Usually they triumphed in the end, or someone got some justice for them, but not always. Failure was always an option in those stories, and fandom doesn't demand success.The above illustrates the sort of position of the GM, he's a fan of the characters, but he's not there to give them a cushy life, he's there to make them DO COOL STUFF! If they don't do cool stuff, the world 'gets worse'. Maybe you have a '2 dimensional' view of human nature! <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    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Fact is, I have not found this to be the case. I mean, the players are definitely going to try to succeed, but in my games the OBJECT of the game, what is held up as the ideal and made to be the objective, is not character success, but good stories and fun play. Character success is often pretty cool, but we do a lot of other things in our games besides just toss that out there as many times as possible every session. Again, this behavior is a consequence of thinking of the game as oppositional and fundamentally as a 'maze full of gold that you can only get by skill and guile', which is the Ur of classical D&D. You've projected it out beyond the literal dungeon, but you've not updated any of your goals or expectations in the slightest. You can sit down with Gary and have a beer, eat a pretzel, and play a dungeon level <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    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> That's not bad, at all, but there are other WORKABLE ways to play! I'm not saying that players should simply 'leap into the fire' with every move, that would be as equally silly as trying to declare some sort of 'I win button' with every move. Surviving isn't inherently 'dull' anyway. Remember, there are stakes in Story Now, its not just "do I run out of hit points?" When you make a move you're staking SOMETHING, there will be consequences! So there aren't any truly 'dull' moves. Some may be 'sensible' and even 'mundane', but there's nothing wrong with being the sensible guy who shakes his head and says "why the heck do they do this crazy stuff" and then jumps through the gate behind his buddies because the alternative is to leave the fate of the world to on the shoulders of other people and shirk his duty. Its like that.Well, that's the thing, if death is just "oops, a bad die roll" or "oh crap they're trolls..." then sure. Even in your kind of game though there's a certain sense of accomplishment when you held off the ogres single-handed at the gate for 4 rounds while your buddies hoofed it before they smashed you flat. Besides, death is kinda cheap in that sort of game, it should at least be notable, which that kind is.Well, I'm not saying that GMs and players in any game become ENEMIES, of course not. I mean that they don't even have to be '2 different sides'. The GM is going to PLAY some things that are on the 'other side' from PCs at times, yes. His goal is not necessarily to 'checkmate them'. His goal is good story, and fun play. Even hard core OSR Gygax play isn't REALLY opposed play, not fundamentally. All the participants are operating under a set of rules of conduct and implicit behavior which is intended to make the game work. In fact its clear this is so, as VAST tracts of this board have been taken up with the discussions of what happens when that conduct and implicit contract fails!</blockquote>

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