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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 3818716" data-attributes="member: 31454">The PCs could always lose. They almost lost a few weeks ago fighting a few low-PL mooks with armor-piercing ammo when the two toughest members of the group kept flubbing their (low-DC) toughness saves.And as your wording suggests, you also recognize that there are many different consequences of defeat ("lose" not "die"). The GM who took over for the current arc in our M&M game ran an encounter on Saturday where there was absolutely no significant penalty for defeat (other than bragging rights). The players got to play students at the school founded by the team's psychic ninja in a training exercise: using their powers and skills, keep the ball away from the other team for 30 seconds. There were scrambles for the ball when someone dropped it or had it knocked away from them, and skirmishes to try to take down the girl on the other team who was an absolutely amazing soccer player (and thus the one most likely to steal the ball away (and be hard to steal the ball back from). This encounter was quite mechanically significant, as evidenced by the extreme shift in tactics from a normal fight to focus on a new target (knowing when to pass the ball and when to hold it, or using your powers to try to fake out the other team).There's nothing necessarily wrong if the PCs lose encounters sometimes (which you seem to be implying is a threat to the game). If every encounter ends in loss=TPK, then yes, it could be disruptive to the game. But if there are various consequences for defeat, this isn't too much of a problem, and can lead to much more interesting adventures. Capture, forcing a retreat, the villain getting away, loss of clout, are all perfectly acceptable consequences for defeat which don't carry the game-ending hammer of a TPK.But I'm glad to see that you seem to recognize that your definition of mechanical significance from way back upthread is flawed. This encounter had no net change of expendible personal resources after the encounter relative to before it, and yet it was indeed mechanically significant.However, I should also point out that we were discussing the 9-9:15 adventuring day, not the ratio of victories/defeats PCs should expect.It depends on the encounter. Are these four basic kobolds just ambushing them on the road with shortspears? Or are they sitting behind a fiendishly-clever trap that they might not even remember how to use? Or are they running away from the PCs through a huge clockwork maze, where the whole landscape is shifting on any given turn? Or are the four kobolds making their way through a set of tunnels underground, using hit-and-run tactics like the Viet Cong, knowing that most of the PCs can't follow them through the tunnels? If an encounter requires a thoughtful approach and some clever use of abilities on the part of the PCs, it doesn't matter how weak the enemy is. Two 20th-level fighters alternating full-attacks on each other is just as mechanically unfulfilling as a 20th-level party steamrolling over an EL1 challenge.</blockquote>

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