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Message: <blockquote data-quote="maddman75" data-source="post: 4991365" data-attributes="member: 2673">This is the tricky part.  One of John Wick's articles talked about the John McClaine Principle.  Essentially, almost all PCs want to be John McClaine from Die Hard.  They want to be outgunned, outnumbered, but because they are clever and fighting for What's Right, they come out in the end.  But only after getting punched, kicked, tossed around, ducking under machine-gun fire, running barefoot across broken glass, and jumping out of a 40th floor window crashing into another window and yelling 'Yippie-kai-ay, MFer!' before laying the bad guy out.  They're bruised, bloody, and limping, but they came out on top.So how do we get that in a game?  The more 'old school' style RPG says the way to get there is to focus on the outgunned and outnumbered.  Throw machine guns and broken glass and see if they can do it.  Some of us find that deeply unsatisfying though.  Either we try to act like John McClaine and get killed, or we tread carefully, cautiously, downright paranoid.  But that doesn't feel like John McClaine either.The solution is to disassociate 'character death' and 'defeat'.  My players know that I'm a downright evil bastard, and cackle madly as they flail under my torments.  However, I don't tend to kill PCs very often.  In many games I upfront tell them 'your character isn't going to die if you don't want them to.'  Since I'm doing all this character driven conflict and drama, killing a PC is much more disruptive.  But I can find ways to make them pay for failure.</blockquote>

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