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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4514721" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is the bit I don't get. Less dangerous to whom? Not less dangerous to the player, who is (I hope) not especially in danger at any gaming table. And within the conetext of the gameworld, not less dangerous to the PC, whose world is as full of peril as the next one. There is a reduced likelihood in the real world of the player having to change PC due to PC death - but the claim that this harms suspension of disbelief is not one I accept as anything like a universal truth.If I had to diagnose a cause for disengagement in this sort of 2e play, it would be the railroading. Death flag mechanics expressly avoid railroading and engage the player by fostering protagonism rather than deprotagonising.As I said upthread, this has the problem that it preserves game/metagame tranpsarency at the cost of removing the danger in the gameworld. Death flag mechanics reduce game/metagame transparency but permit the gameworld to remain chock full of peril.The only adventure type stories I have read in the past many years are REH Conan and Kull stories, in which I do know from the first page that the protagonist will survive. What is key is that the obviousness isn't itself part of the fiction. As I noted upthread, death flag play requires the same sort of non-breaking of the fourth wall. If players want to go all Order of the Stick (bathing in lava, etc) the game has broken down (just as an AD&D game has broken down when the fighter describes his daily routine of jumping off a 200' cliff before breakfast, then having his friendy cleric Heal him up).Fair enough. I'm personally sympathetic to some of Hussar's arguments that SoD has problems that go beyond implementation by poor GMs, but that's not why I'm here. I'm here to defend the claim that death-flag play can be fully meaningful roleplaying without lava-bathing nonsense or other failures of suspension of disbelief.This again is an empirical claim that I'm not sure about. WoTC are taking a punt with 4e that it's not as hard as you think - it just requires a different mind-set (or, to use some jargon, a different set of metagame priorities).</blockquote>

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