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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7289000" data-attributes="member: 4937">I guess, now that I read the thread and notice people are fighting over these things, I should say I feel there is no "right answer".  Everything is a trade off, and the only real question you have is, "What consequence for my game am I willing to live with?"If you don't want death to occur except when it is narratively meaningful, you are ultimately - however much you want to argue otherwise - giving up on the aesthetic of challenge in the traditional sense.  You are now playing a fully cooperative game where you are cooperating together to tell the story that is collectively preferred and most especially preferred by the player.  In that sense, if the player doesn't want death, then he's not going to die.  But this means that the game really has no victories.  If the player "wins" the scenario, defeats the bad guys, saves the world, and gets the girl - it's because that's the story he ordered at least in its broad outline.  No real challenges were overcome, because one of the social contracts here was that they would be overcome because overcoming them leads to the story everyone considers most satisfying.  In theory, such a priority of play should lead to stories with narrative arcs that closely resemble the narrative arcs of other story-telling mediums.And all of that is perfectly fine, unless everyone at the table highly prioritizes challenge as an aesthetic of play, in which case being protected by the power of plot feels like being robbed of victory, glory, and shining moments of awesome because there was no real adversity to overcome.  Everyone was going to get the participation trophy in the end and while set backs and failures will and did occur, your ultimate victory was in some sense assured.On the other hand, if you leave life and death up to the vagaries of random chance then you introduce Gygax's notion of skilled play, where the player is facing an adversary, and the character is exposed to risks of every sort, and outcomes of every sort including a short life and a meaningless death.  In theory, this can lead to shining moments of awesome where the player can revel in the victory every bit as much (or more) than his avatar in gaming world.  In theory, your survival and heights of power are something that can in some sense be said to be earned, because another player facing the same problems might not have succeeded.But, as a consequence, you must give up the idea that the majority of play will process stories that closely resemble the majority of stories produced in other media.  Your characters awesome story arc might be cut short at a completely meaningless moment, or may pitter out and never go anywhere.  You might at times have to deal with 5 hours of play to get 15 minutes of fun, and situations where no matter how skillfully you played you lose the game to random bad luck.Pick your poison.  There is no perfect answer.</blockquote>

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