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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 4713331" data-attributes="member: 26473">Sulking is right out with me. It’s just a game, after all. You and I have different ideas of what’s “fair.”I believe that if the rules of the game are applied impartially by all the participants, then the game is fair. Quod erat demonstrandum.Creating an encounter within CR±2 of our party level doesn’t enter into it unless the rules state that encounters must fall within this range, without exception.Let’s take one more quick look at the privateer encounter above. Please note that this is an absurdly contrived example offered for the purposes of discussion; the likelihood of players jumping their starship into a system without knowing at least the potential for warfare exists are pretty low in my games, even given Traveller’s communications lag between star systems. In my games this would more properly termed a ‘commerce raider’ encounter; privateers make their money off the prizes take, so they are not prone to indiscriminate destruction any more than pirates are.Using the random starship encounter tables in my Traveller campaign, the chance of generating an encounter with a commerce raider in a war zone and getting the lowest possible reaction score is one-in-46,656. If the war zone is the result of a random event, which is pretty likely in my campaign, then the chance is another order of magnitude smaller still. (Per my encounter tables, the ship type of the raider varies quite a bit, but that’s a whole ‘nother level of detail not necessary for this discussion.)With that in mind, if the rules of the game we are playing generate this encounter, then I consider it fair, from either side of the screen, even if the chances of escape or survival for the player characters are miniscule. In my experience the game doesn’t end with the deaths of the player characters. The players generate new characters, and the game continues.The idea of “pointless deaths” bugs me, to be honest. It presumes there is a “point” to the game, a desired end-state, a foregone conclusion accepted by all at the start of play. In the games I run, I ask the players to develop goals for their characters as we play, but at no time is the adventurers’ successful achievement of these goals presumed. Again, skill and luck alone determine a character’s fate in the games I run, and in the games in which I enjoy playing. Some referees don’t like to overrule the dice.When I’m behind the screen I consider myself to be a player at the table as well, in that I’m bound by the rules of the game, too. For me to just start making stuff up that should, per the rules of the game, be decided by die roll, isn’t “fair” to me. It’s also why I don’t like to play with referees who fudge. Let’s all play the same game together.This is an excellent point, one that I think is overlooked by referees with a tendency to fudge the dice when an encounter is moving away from the ‘desired outcome’ the referee has pre-selected.Simple rule of thumb: if you don’t want the player characters to die, don’t present them with encounters in which they can be killed. And this I can’t agree with at all.Once more to the privateer encounter. In the example, the player characters are operating an unarmed free trader when they encounter the 800 dton raider-cruiser. Here’s the problem I have with your argument: the same encounter would occur is the player characters arrived in system crewing a 2000 displacement ton freighter with twelve triple turrets of flaming death, an armed pinnace, a pair of fighters ready to deploy from a makeshift hanger in the hold, and a section of mercenaries aboard as security troops.If my goal was to kill the player characters, then the raider would suddenly become a 20,000 dton destroyer instead. But it doesn’t. The rules under which we are playing the game turned out a raider which is in fact outmatched by the freighter crewed by the adventurers. That raider could in fact still destroy the player character’s ship – remember that patrol cruiser example – but now the edge lies with the players and their characters. This is what it means to run an impartial game.The point of a sandbox game isn’t to kill the player characters; it isn’t even to make them more likely to die. It’s to provide the players with a sense, to the extent practicable, that the game-world functions by its own natural laws, its own social forces, independent of their characters. In my experience, random generators are a useful tool in achieving this goal.</blockquote>

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