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<blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8476125" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Its not that simple, at least with D&amp;D, and never has been.&nbsp; &quot;Implied risk&quot; they do want; they just don't want it to actually happen.&nbsp; That's because they are looking at it through the lens of fiction where there's death around the main characters with some regularity, but the main characters pull through.&nbsp; They're trying for the same effect.&nbsp; And I'd argue as D&amp;D has evolved over the decades, it and its kin have, on the whole, leaned into that: death is still on the table (because a lot if not most people can't have that sense of risk unless it actually is) but the actual chance of it occurring has decreased markedly (as someone who got his start in OD&amp;D this is very visible to me).CoC is a bit of a different beast.&nbsp; Its based on a type of fiction where the survival of protagonists is not necessarily the default case, where the characters are chronically dealing with problems above their heads.&nbsp; Its not even a routine monster hunting genre (which by itself tend to be risky being at least horror adjacent), and people playing in it who don't expect there's a pretty good chance of loss have not engaged with the proper genre (which may be partly the GM's fault, since its a genre that in its purer forms really is out on the fringe of what RPGs usually address; horror games in general are, and true Lovecraftian horror is probably on the fringe of those).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Thomas Shey, post: 8476125, member: 7026617"] Its not that simple, at least with D&D, and never has been. "Implied risk" they [I]do[/I] want; they just don't want it to actually [I]happen[/I]. That's because they are looking at it through the lens of fiction where there's death around the main characters with some regularity, but the main characters pull through. They're trying for the same effect. And I'd argue as D&D has evolved over the decades, it and its kin have, on the whole, leaned into that: death is still on the table (because a lot if not most people can't have that sense of risk unless it actually is) but the actual chance of it occurring has decreased markedly (as someone who got his start in OD&D this is very visible to me). CoC is a bit of a different beast. Its based on a type of fiction where the survival of protagonists is not necessarily the default case, where the characters are chronically dealing with problems above their heads. Its not even a routine monster hunting genre (which by itself tend to be risky being at least horror adjacent), and people playing in it who don't expect there's a pretty good chance of loss have not engaged with the proper genre (which may be partly the GM's fault, since its a genre that in its purer forms really is out on the fringe of what RPGs usually address; horror games in general are, and true Lovecraftian horror is probably on the fringe of those). [/QUOTE]

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