What is with the entitlement? (shadzar stay out)

[Username17]

First off, I want to make sure you understand that I agree with you on the following points:

• People who are calling for character death in the event of "player stupidity" are nine times out of ten actually indulging in fucked up power fantasies where they want to murder the characters of players who disagree with them. That is not OK.
• D&D in particular, and many games in general, are way too fucking lethal as written and they should encourage retreats, captures, and just plain people who are "left for dead" getting up on battlefields way more than they do.
• The D&D culture of murdering everyone on the other side in even a minor victory in a minor skirmish is bad and should be revised. It's bad for stories and it's bad for character continuity. And it isn't even realistic, since even fucking Imperial Japan took a lot of prisoners of war.

But this is not acceptable:

The argument breaks down into two general camps:

There are the wargamers who think DnD is some kind of wargame that can be objectively beaten. They want permanent character death as a punishment for not beating the challenges of the game for any reason ("bad" character builds, choices the DM thinks are dumb, bad luck, etc) because anything other than permanent character death as a consequence for failure is considered "cheat codes" or "invulnerability."

The other camp is the roleplayers who think that beating challenges in DnD is at the discretion of the DM and the challenges he designs and choices he makes, so any punishments for not "beating the game" are arbitrary and cruel for no reason. They also object to permanent character death because they are then forced to RP a new character and permanent character death makes it harder to invest in characters and tell the story because of the narrative backflips you need to do to put a new character into the game that's as entangled as the dead one (and you exclude a player for an extended time before those backflips can be performed in game).

Go fuck yourself. You seriously just made a "Role Players vs. Roll Players" argument. You didn't even dress it up pretty. That kind of horseshit is not acceptable when Davane does it and it's not acceptable when you do it.

The fact is that wanking to no player character death in a deadly system is actually just as bad as the people who accuse players with different ideas than theirs of being "stupid" and then killing their characters. The moment your power fantasy crushes the social contract created by the rules of the game we are in non-consensual dick waving territory. It doesn't matter whether the power fantasy is being played out by the MC who insists on killing your character because he doesn't like your choices or by the player who insists on living because he doesn't like his die rolls. Either one is wholly unacceptable.

Yes, D&D would be a better game if it was less deadly and more people were taken prisoner. But you make it be a better game by changing the rules. You do not make it a better game by playing it as is and then fudging the results that you don't like. Fudging away the results you don't like destroys the game.

-Username17

[Winnah]

A machine wherein a sensitive player crawls inside upon the death of a character, and is squashed by giant labial folds, thus producing the feeling of being loved.

[Fuchs]

My social contract in my games clearly states "I don't kill PCs unless the player chooses to die (or risk death) after a clear out of character warning". How would that be "unacceptable" in any sane reality?

DMs have been fudging rolls since Gygax sold the first edition. Everyone knows that. The game did not die for it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Frank, if you were designing a ridiculous heroic/romantic fantasy pastiche centered on combat, how lethal would you make the average encounter both from an in-universe and a metagame standpoint?

As I said earlier, personally I like it when (every now and then) the heroes die an inglorious, soul-crushing, even downright anti-climatic death. That kind of thing is infuriating in movies or books but in a game it's a good way to emphasize the seriousness of player choices and also to create 'what if?' perspectives that never get explored in a book.

That also said, I don't think that it's a good idea for characters to be retired or die individually without personal or party consensus. The DM cutting the game short and showing exactly what your failure has wrought can be kind of cool before breaking out the Super Smash Bros. (or starting another campaign or doing a 'meanwhile in an alternate universe' thing), but one or two people just sitting the game out while the story continues apace is lame. Yes, this generally means that when it comes to player death I think TPKs are more acceptable than individual character-sheet ripping up.

[Shadow Balls]

And there is but one answer to that. Tell him to eat a bowl of dicks, and then man the fuck up. Because while people like Fuchs might suck so much that they need a special helmet to play D&D, not everyone does. In fact most don't. That isn't me strawmanning him, he actually said he likes his safety nets, which is literally what that means.

So in Fuchs land a pack of wild animals attack you, and defeat the party, and they wake up in wolf jail instead of becoming Scooby Snacks. Seriously, what the fuck is this shit? Some sort of Saturday morning cartoon? Or a game meant for people over the age of 5?

Oh, the "heroes" speak. Cute.

Newsflash, internet tough guy: No one sane thinks you are tough for playing a RPG "hard core", it's still all pretend-risks - if the GM did play hardcore he'd kill your characters each time. You've got a safety net all around you, it's called "DM playing nice".

Yes, I like safety nets. I like not having to worry about losing a character. That's why I play games - to have fun. Others have different tastes, I don't fault them for it - I fault some of them for talking shit like some braindead teeanger unable to understand that not everoyne has fun their way.

ITT: Fuchs has sand in his mangina because a shitty player was called shitty.

D&D is a game. Would you like a cookie Sherlock? However the risks are still real to the characters. And that is what we are talking about. At least they are unless you are playing with your special helmet on.

Interestingly enough, if you build competent characters and play them at least decently well, you can deal with anything level appropriate thrown at you without having to specifically build solutions into them. Because the party will use the abilities they have to get the job done. It might be in an expected way, it might not be expected but still successful, but you can survive without a special helmet unless you are in fact special.

Even if you deliberately ramp up the difficulty to very high levels.

Even if they did. You become conscious again with 1 hit point and your weapon was probably left back where you were initially because you got KOed and dropped it. So what are you going to do, beat the wyvern to death with your fists?

There's more to the game than combat. You sneak away. You trick it into a corner it can't get around, you pull out your Light of Earendil and blind it to make your escape. The thing is, it's not aware of you when you gain consciousness, so you might even be able to sneak up on it and stab it in the heart (assuming there's still a weapon on you). It might even have fallen asleep. Who knows? My point is, the nature of the encounter has changed when you are captured, so the fact that you are even less likely to be able to defeat it in single combat in round 2 is irrelevant; that's not how you're supposed to undo your first failure, it's not supposed to be a round 2, it's supposed to be a 'think of some way to escape so you live,' sort of thing, a realization so obvious that really, I should not need to point it out to anyone with the mental faculties to post on this board. When you fail in combat, whatever your saving grace is, it should not be squandered by jumping into combat again, it should be used to escape. Is that really so hard to figure out?

Skills are based on HD. Enemies have more HD than you, and also more senses than you. It detects you sneaking away and eats you, or alternately throws you back in Fuchaduck's wolf jail. Assuming you're even capable of stealth in the first place, which you probably aren't for a number of reasons.

But even if you do escape from Fuchaduck's wolf jail without the hounds being released after you, you're at 1 HP, and you have no equipment, and you're in bumfuck nowhere. Explain how you get yourself back in a playable state in less time than it would take to delete and reroll, without being finished off by a stray cat and having the decision made for you.

Because while people like Fuchs might suck so much that they need a special helmet to play D&D, not everyone does.

You know what, let's hear this one out. You believe that if D&D doesn't have PC death, you may as well wear a special helmet. List the videogames you've played. Tell me how many of them you wear your special helmet for. Explain why videogames not having permanent failure states is acceptable (and the norm), while D&D not having permanent failure states is unacceptable.

Let's hear the coherent argument.

You're probably trolling, but I'll bite anyways. Video games have an entirely different sort of paradigms than tabletop games. So when you suck at a video game, and you die, that's not that big of a deal most of the time, but when you suck at a tabletop game, and you die, that's much more of a deal. Of course at the same time, because it is more significant, you also have more incentive to learn how to play properly. Interestingly enough, that also applies to the video games that have meaningful consequences for failure.

Which is why while some of the games I've played impose no real death penalties, and also have no real incentives to learn how to play them others do impose significant penalties up to and including permanent death should you ever die for any reason. And that is MORE severe than D&D, where non reversible death is the exception and not the norm. And interestingly enough, it only took one fuck up to know what to never do again. If it took that long.

That isn't what people are talking about though.

What people are talking about ranges from wanting player actions to matter, which is only possible when smart actions are rewarded and stupid actions are punished in a coherent manner, and due to the nature of adventuring this typically involves dying, but sometimes involves something worse - Me.

What people are talking about is wanting to always win, no matter what, no matter how fucktarded they are or how shitty of a player they are - various basket weavers.

What people are talking about is they want to never die no matter what, even if it makes no fucking sense that failure in this situation would not result in death, such as being thrown in wolf jail because some wild animals took your party out and nevermind that this is worse than them just making Scooby Snacks of you - Fuchs.

And nevermind that death being permanent is the exception whether than the norm. Basket weavers, like Fuchs cannot stand on their own merits. They cannot play without their special helmets. Conversely people like me have always played without the helmets, and if someone dies they die.

Number of years playing D&D: 10.
Number of characters of mine that were killed: 1 (level + 10 encounter, contingency immediately revived and restored to full HP).
Number of characters of mine dropped to negative HP but not killed: 0.

As it happens, competence goes a long way in any profession, particularly that of Murdering Hobo.

Now some people are shifting the focus a bit away from the death itself and onto exclusion. The problems with this are that:

Character generation doesn't take THAT long. You probably sit out more from getting Glitterdusted than you do from getting Finger of Deathed.
The other things people claim to want instead of death mean sitting out of the game a lot longer, with a lot less involvement during that time as making a new character is more engaging to both the player and everyone else around than watching their captors go at it from behind the bars of Fuchaduck's wolf jail.

Like this dumbass for example.

@Tussock, that's actually not actually a defense of Shadow_Balls' claim unless you'd like to go so far as to say "non-hardcore Diablo is for retards." Shadow_Balls did not say, "permanent death is one way to play the game," he said, "not having permanent death means you are retarded."

I dunno who the fuck Shadow_Balls is, but Shadow Balls (space, not underscore) said is that not having people die when they are killed is retarded. That death can very well be permanent, if no one is willing and able to raise you but it is not inherently so.

You're saying something completely different than what he did. Though I'd like to respond to you: failure in those games is not expulsion. Dying in a hardcore Roguelike is annoying, but you can start playing again almost immediately. And given the randomized nature of most of them, and specifically the ones with quick character generation, it's all of a minute before you're back in the middle of playing something relatively new. You can spend more time waiting for your turn in a D&D combat than you do starting a new game in a roguelike.

Your strawmen aside, if you die in a roguelike you start over from the beginning. To make a D&D parallel from that, you'd have to make a campaign where you go through a tomb, fight some wolves and later undead and various other things, gain 2 levels, and then die to the trap at the end and then have to start over at level 1, and fight the wolves sleeping in the entryway again. That is more severe than D&D, and not less as even if your D&D character is killed, your new one will be jumping in at the end of the tomb, or right after it and at a level that is appropriate to be there.

It is certainly far more severe than what special people like Fuchs want, who claim literally that worrying about their character poisons the experience, even though said character is doing incredibly dangerous things, which means:

1: Said character is incredibly competent. As in overly so.
2: You damn well should be worried about them, as the risk is real to them.

The first can be safely ruled out, both because he's a basket weaver, and because of his direct quote, so that just leaves the second.

Which means he is saying flat out he wants there to be no meaningful consequences for failure, because if the game had those, he would worry about his character, and that would cause him to enjoy the game less. He just wants to cruise through on godmode with no effort. Just like a basket weaver.

If you can enjoy a typical action movie, you can enjoy a D&D game without character death. Same suspension of disbelief.

Action movies are shit, and no one takes them seriously for the same reason no one takes single author fiction seriously - it's just one guy jacking off to his bullshit, and everyone else watching.

DMs have been fudging rolls since Gygax sold the first edition. Everyone knows that. The game did not die for it.

No, it didn't die. But it has bred an ever increasing number of shitty players that need to be protected from themselves, and everyone else needs to be protected from them.

• People who are calling for character death in the event of "player stupidity" are nine times out of ten actually indulging in fucked up power fantasies where they want to murder the characters of players who disagree with them. That is not OK.

Ok. So here's this melee only enemy. It's very big, and very strong. It is level appropriate for you. It is also 50 feet away. You are up on initiative.

Now you could Leeroy Jenkins in there, and it would probably rofflestomp you.

You could start flying, and then do whatever you want to it from the air, where it can't touch you.

Or you can pick some other option between the two. One of these extremes is very obviously stupid. One of these extremes is obviously very smart. The other options land at various places on the spectrum between these two extremes.

When you choose the Leeroy Jenkins route, and attack it once for no real damage, and then it full attacks you and rofflestomps you into the ground, that's not the DM seeking to murder the characters of players that disagree with him. That's the DM presenting a clear challenge with an obvious solution, and the player contracting the herpaderpies in response to that, and choosing the worst possible outcome, which has painful and likely lethal consequences. And then those things happen, and the player, who it apparently never occurred to that fighting the enemy on their own terms is mind numbingly retarded gets sand in their mangina and whines about it, and claims that the DM is being unfair and out to get him. The DM didn't make them play stupid. Had they taken a smarter course of action, they'd get better results.

Most importantly though, that isn't some bullshit troleplayer argument of the DM disagreeing with you. It is the clear and objective result of fighting an enemy on their own terms, allowing them to bring their full power against you.

It is only a small step away from this:

http://pressxordie.files.wordpress.com/ ... retard.png

[Fuchs]

Oh... Shadowballs is having trouble separating character and player... cute. I guess once you grow up some and learn that you can play a character that fears death without actually fearing for the character you'll also mature enough to be more tolerant of others and can accept people playing differently without insulting them.

Maybe you need a bit more experience to realize you're posturing about imaginary monsters the GM decides to pick and play in special mode so you can beat them, and do not get stomped.

[Shadow Balls]

Oh... Shadowballs is having trouble separating character and player... cute. I guess once you grow up some and learn that you can play a character that fears death without actually fearing for the character you'll also mature enough to be more tolerant of others and can accept people playing differently without insulting them.

Maybe you need a bit more experience to realize you're posturing about imaginary monsters the GM decides to pick and play in special mode so you can beat them, and do not get stomped.

Aw, how cute. The little basket weaver thinks the rest of the world is as incompetent as himself. And then it claims that I can't separate player from character, while claiming that any DM who plays enemies intelligently is out to get the players, instead of separating character from himself. This totally isn't just more basket weaver drivel to cover his own incompetence.

Truly, Fuchaduck is a Real Man of Genius(tm).

[Fuchs]

I am not the one who tried to explain to others how to hunt dragons, and failing to convince anyone of his claims.

[DSMatticus]

Video games have an entirely different sort of paradigms than tabletop games. So when you suck at a video game, and you die, that's not that big of a deal most of the time, but when you suck at a tabletop game, and you die, that's much more of a deal

This is the problem statement. I am asking you to justify this state of affairs, not restate it. Why should dying at a tabletop game be more of a deal? Is it necessary, and if so, why?

Interestingly enough, that also applies to the video games that have meaningful consequences for failure.
...
What people are talking about ranges from wanting player actions to matter, which is only possible when smart actions are rewarded and stupid actions are punished
...
What people are talking about is wanting to always win

You obviously are not making a distinction between failure and PC death. It's a set-subset relationship. PC death is always a failure, but not all failures include PC death. So if you're bitching, "No PC death means nothing anyone does ever matters ever!" then I point out that the PC's can still fail to save the city of Blahberbia from rampaging Gobbowobbets and if you have any kind of engrossing story in your game at all that is something people will care about and is an effective punishment.

And nevermind that death being permanent is the exception whether than the norm. Basket weavers, like Fuchs cannot stand on their own merits. They cannot play without their special helmets. Conversely people like me have always played without the helmets, and if someone dies they die.

Seriously, what the fuck is this? Are you just trying to boast I'm good at D&D? Everyone who knows "planar binding" exists has already won D&D. Everything beyond that is sandbagging. Intentionally. Because the only way to get sane results out of D&D is to play it suboptimally. Do you want a cookie for recognizing that core casters can make everyone else small in the pants, and then deliberately doing just that to everyone else at the table?

D&D is a lot like Hero - breaking it is trivial. Intentionally and accidentally. The only way to get a good game out of it is if everyone actually pays attention to eachother and deliberately tries to play at the same level. Refusing to do that is not an exercise of skill (because it's actually really easy to do; you chose wizard, +20 points!), it is just you being a douchebag. If this were adversarial and you were actually competing with them, that would be understandable but it's not. It's a cooperative game.

Now some people are shifting the focus a bit away from the death itself and onto exclusion.

That has been part of the focus since I left the thread for ~10 pages and came back. Not that I fault you for not catching up on all 20 some pages of this thread before joining in, but that is not a new claim. That has been a core claim since this conversation started, and the only reason this death talk has been so relevant is that people keep introducing bullshit strawmen about how anti-death is anti-failure.

Exclusion is a (large) subset of PC death in D&D 3.5 which is a (small) subset of failure in D&D 3.5. The anti-deather's have said "exclusion sucks," or "PC death sucks," depending on who they are, and the response has been "so you want to get rid of failure, huh? That's stupid," and that is totally fallacious and it's a response you actually just made right now. And that's why we have to dig up all these examples; to try and show you that you can have failure without permanent/significant PC death. And we have examples from inside D&D and from other games.

not having people die when they are killed is retarded

What is this? This is hilariously circular. "If people are killed, they should die" does not answer the question "should we kill PC's?" Irrelevant.

both because he's a basket weaver

Ad hominen that is getting really fucking old. Completely irrelevant to the claim "PC death is unfun."

he wants there to be no meaningful consequences for failure, because if the game had those, he would worry about his character

Slippery slope or strawman. "I don't want to worry about PC death," "oh, so you don't want to worry about failure at all, then?" Failure is broader than PC death, and as long as that is true your interpretation does not follow from his statement.

He just wants to cruise through on godmode with no effort.

Again, failure is broader than PC death. Removing PC death does not remove failure. The comparison to god mode is worthless.

same reason no one takes single author fiction seriously

... Wat?

ever increasing number of shitty players that need to be protected from themselves

Reading this and the rest of your post, I think I get it now. You seriously want to punish people for being bad at D&D. As in, "if you lack system mastery relative to the other players, you don't deserve fun." That's pretty fucking awful, but explains a lot about the posts you've made.

[RobbyPants]

ever increasing number of shitty players that need to be protected from themselves

Reading this and the rest of your post, I think I get it now. You seriously want to punish people for being bad at D&D. As in, "if you lack system mastery relative to the other players, you don't deserve fun." That's pretty fucking awful, but explains a lot about the posts you've made.

That's pretty much what he's been saying for the past year or two. He doesn't tolerate players worse than him and he believes they're bad for The Game.

[K]

The argument breaks down into two general camps:

There are the wargamers who think DnD is some kind of wargame that can be objectively beaten. They want permanent character death as a punishment for not beating the challenges of the game for any reason ("bad" character builds, choices the DM thinks are dumb, bad luck, etc) because anything other than permanent character death as a consequence for failure is considered "cheat codes" or "invulnerability."

The other camp is the roleplayers who think that beating challenges in DnD is at the discretion of the DM and the challenges he designs and choices he makes, so any punishments for not "beating the game" are arbitrary and cruel for no reason. They also object to permanent character death because they are then forced to RP a new character and permanent character death makes it harder to invest in characters and tell the story because of the narrative backflips you need to do to put a new character into the game that's as entangled as the dead one (and you exclude a player for an extended time before those backflips can be performed in game).

Go fuck yourself. You seriously just made a "Role Players vs. Roll Players" argument. You didn't even dress it up pretty. That kind of horseshit is not acceptable when Davane does it and it's not acceptable when you do it.

The fact is that wanking to no player character death in a deadly system is actually just as bad as the people who accuse players with different ideas than theirs of being "stupid" and then killing their characters. The moment your power fantasy crushes the social contract created by the rules of the game we are in non-consensual dick waving territory. It doesn't matter whether the power fantasy is being played out by the MC who insists on killing your character because he doesn't like your choices or by the player who insists on living because he doesn't like his die rolls. Either one is wholly unacceptable.

Yes, D&D would be a better game if it was less deadly and more people were taken prisoner. But you make it be a better game by changing the rules. You do not make it a better game by playing it as is and then fudging the results that you don't like. Fudging away the results you don't like destroys the game.

-Username17

Who gives a fuck about fudging rolls when in 99% of the circumstances it's the DM directly killing the PCs by his actions before any dice are rolled?

Shadow Balls has given us his scenario: he picks a monster that in his own words he knows is a closet troll, he's is going to describe it as "strong" or "bloodthirsty" and expect the PCs to figure out it's a closet troll from just that, then he's going to execute any player to melee it even if he knew beforehand that one or some of his PCs are specifically melee characters and their default action to encountering some new monster is to try to melee it.

The DM's vast ability to preserve character life is exercised well before a single die is rolled by the nature of the challenges. I mean, a PC can't die if you choose to make a 50 ft' cliff for the encounter that can't kill a PC even if the dice come up Yatzee instead of a 100 ft cliff that has a 15% chance of auto-killing a weak PC. You can choose traps that drop curses or survivable damage amounts and not SoD or auto-death traps. You don't use closet trolls. You have monsters switch to another target when their damage might kill a PC, or they finish a PC with nonlethal damage because they want to capture the PC for a story reason you insert later. You don't have random encounters happen when the party is wounded and would obviously die. You provide healing by dropping healing treasure or a friendly NPC.... (This list is endless, but I'll assume at this point that you understand.)

Fuck, this is fucking DnD and just making a raise dead item fucking available is so far into DM agency territory that you can argue that any PC permanent death is directly the DM's fault 100% of the time.

The wargamers specifically have said that they want to set up the adventure beforehand, and if it grinds the PCs to death by the DM specifically trying to do that, then "who cares, they should have made better characters or be less stupid."

That's not just fucked up power fantasy bullshit where the DM is trying to wank on how awesome he is, but it's specifically against even the point of playing a RPG where challenges are supposed to be set in a way that promotes the telling of a heroic story and not set in a way to randomly gank PCs permanently for the amusement of the DM if some hidden win condition is not intuited by the PCs.

Hell, this behavior is against the point of a fucking wargame because you can't even pretend the challenges are fair when the adversarial DM controls the threat level of every challenge.

It's basically combining the flaws of a wargame and the flaws of a RPG and creating a perfect storm of a single player's power-wank bullshit and that player is the DM.

[Swordslinger]

This is a separate argument that has nothing to do with punishment.

No. Actually it's just another premise to reach the conclusion. I know this is complicated for you, because there's more than one premise here, but let me lay this out for you as simple as I can.

Code: Select all

1. In games, it's necessary to have some means of punishing bad actions (or in some cases bad luck) and rewarding good actions (or in some cases good luck). This makes people care about the game. 

2. In a cooperative storytelling game, you want the outcome of your actions to make for a good story. Verisimilitude is important. 

Conclusion: Character death is a suitable punishment in D&D as it fits #1 and #2. 

Wolf jail does not fail based on #1, it fails on #2. It's fine as a punishment for failure but it's terrible as a storytelling device and would offend people's verisimilitude. In fact, the majority of solutions people have suggested generally fail on #2.

Hopefully that breakdown has laid out my argument more clearly for you so you understand instead of holding this misconception that I think every single game out there, including solitaire and tetris, needs to involve some kind of character death.

Who gives a fuck about fudging rolls when in 99% of the circumstances it's the DM directly killing the PCs by his actions before any dice are rolled?

Isn't that the basics of D&D? It's a game of descriptions and storytelling where you're supposed to figure shit out from the descriptions. Yeah, I realize you want to sit back and point the fucking finger at the DM whenever you fail to notice or ignore clues.

It makes you feel better to believe that the DM is some omniscient god that can predict exactly how you're going to react to any stimuli and set up this careful convoluted deathtrap to fool you. And you're totally helpless because you're DM has intelligence and prescience far beyond any mortal man. You can't hope to outwit this psychic mastermind who has robbed you of all free will and set up inescapable death traps.

Or maybe he's just another dude like you creating puzzles that are probably human solvable.

Yes, there exists some bullshit puzzles, no doubt about that. But to say that 99% of situations have no player input and no means of escape. Dude, fuck that. That's just you being unwilling to ever believe that you're capable of making a mistake. You're like the know-it-all NFL receiver who constantly blames the quarterback when he drops a pass.

I know, it's never your fault when something bad happens. You never make mistakes, your shit smells like roses and every decision you make is perfect. If something bad happens in D&D, obviously it's the DM's fault for designing an impossible scenario. Since if you couldn't get the right answer. Nobody can, right?

I wonder why you'd even bother playing if your trust in your DM is so low. Seriously dude. If your DM is throwing that many tomb of horror scenarios at you, then just find a new damn game, because he's an awful DM.

Either that or maybe you need to start admitting some accountability for your actions.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Wolf jail does not fail based on #1, it fails on #2. It's fine as a punishment for failure but it's terrible as a storytelling device and would offend people's verisimilitude.

You mean like that scene from The Empire Strikes Back where the ice monster drags Luke back to its lair to eat him later?

[Stubbazubba]

Skills are based on HD. Enemies have more HD than you, and also more senses than you. It detects you sneaking away and eats you, or alternately throws you back in Fuchaduck's wolf jail. Assuming you're even capable of stealth in the first place, which you probably aren't for a number of reasons.

All of this is completely arbitrary. Change it, and no one has to die. You've already lost valuable time both IC and IRL, possibly items, possibly some campaign objective, taken a blow to your pride and your character feels like they should have died; you've been punished enough.

But even if you do escape from Fuchaduck's wolf jail without the hounds being released after you, you're at 1 HP, and you have no equipment, and you're in bumfuck nowhere. Explain how you get yourself back in a playable state in less time than it would take to delete and reroll, without being finished off by a stray cat and having the decision made for you.

Who says you have to be at 1 HP? We're talking about house rules, Shads, you can't just assume these things. I mean, we already know you're one deranged player from your defense of dragons' CR, and...everything else you post, but here, I'll solve it for you; when you wake up after being unconscious, you're at 1/4 HP. Bam, now you should be able to get back to camp. Maybe your adrenaline gives you temporary HP? Or, you know, maybe among the remains of the wolves' last meal, you find a healing potion. No, you can't fight the wolves all over again, but you should be able to survive any run-ins with stray cats.

Action movies are shit, and no one takes them seriously for the same reason no one takes single author fiction seriously - it's just one guy jacking off to his bullshit, and everyone else watching.

In case there was any doubt in anyone's mind about just how skewed your perception of entertainment culture is, thanks for the reminder.

[Dominicius]

I like how K attacks SBs argument because it is easy as fuck to take apart. Seriously, the example that SB gave has nothing to do with what Frank said.

Because if you even take one moment to think about it not all systems actually have mechanics that allow you to kite monsters and in some stories/systems charging that monster head on IS the best tactic. This is the stuff that the DM needs to talk out with the players so they understand what kind of story/system/world they are playing in.

[Swordslinger]

I like how K attacks SBs argument because it is easy as fuck to take apart. Seriously, the example that SB gave has nothing to do with what Frank said.

We already know K is playing a novel. He's not using rules or PC actions to generate a story, he knows how his story will end and talks about how he doesn't want characters dying "before they got to complete their part in the story."

Basically he has a chosen output of how the combat or adventure is going to go. The players are only along for the ride.

K does not believe in player agency at all, believing that the DM automatically holds all the cards in an adventure and player choice is irrelevant, he has stated this many times. You're just on board for his railroad. At that point, I wonder why he bothers with rules at all, because he's just playing magic tea party, and his players apparently all know it according to him.

[K]

I like how K attacks SBs argument because it is easy as fuck to take apart. Seriously, the example that SB gave has nothing to do with what Frank said.

Yes, I'm specifically telling Frank that I'm not talking about what he is talking about.

I honestly don't care if the dice come up at 56 points and the DM tells you that you just took 56 points; I care about setting up the game so that those 56 points don't permanently kill someone's character because of any number of DM-directed actions that don't require changing even a single rule.

Those DM-directed actions range from a raise dead scroll to the simple technique of not using a monster capable of 56 points of damage if that's going to mean permanent death for a character and a hundred other techniques.

I'm also saying that it's actually harder to tell hero stories where permanent death is the only failure condition, and my exhaustive earlier post of famous characters that he took issue with should prove that. I mean, those were just the characters I could name off the top of my head in five minutes.... I can't even imagine how many action heroes I could list who should be dead in Failure Equals Permanent Death Universe if I started pulling up lists of actions movies and listing them out.

[Shadow Balls]

I am not the one who tried to explain to others how to hunt dragons, and failing to convince anyone of his claims.

Get off of Likadik's balls. No one wants to see that.

This is the problem statement. I am asking you to justify this state of affairs, not restate it. Why should dying at a tabletop game be more of a deal? Is it necessary, and if so, why?

More of a deal than just walk away? Well that's easy. You're supposed to be invested in what is happening. And while you can play a video game and blow up mobs and not care if they blow you up, in a game you are supposed to take seriously it is an objective requirement that actions have appropriate consequences. And that means when you pull a Leeroy Jenkins, you get everyone killed. But instead of being a staged event for the lulz, it's an actual problem.

Now most of the problems with death are being drastically overblown, both by people claiming that raising the dead is not an option when it most likely is unless the group is unwilling or unable to do so, and by people claiming that it puts you out of the game far longer than it actually does, presumably because it takes them several hours to add a few numbers to their character, so making an entirely new one takes weeks. The solution to that though isn't to flip the fuck out, miss the fucking point and ban death and replace it with something worse from both a "you are not playing now" and a game immersion standpoint though. The solution to that is to stop playing with Republicans.

You obviously are not making a distinction between failure and PC death. It's a set-subset relationship. PC death is always a failure, but not all failures include PC death. So if you're bitching, "No PC death means nothing anyone does ever matters ever!" then I point out that the PC's can still fail to save the city of Blahberbia from rampaging Gobbowobbets and if you have any kind of engrossing story in your game at all that is something people will care about and is an effective punishment.

Except for the part where I didn't say that, and if you actually read my posts you will understand what I said. Except for the part where Team Fuchaducks wants to always win, no matter what and that not only means no death, but nothing worse than death as well, and not even the things better than death that still mean that you fail.

Seriously, what the fuck is this? Are you just trying to boast I'm good at D&D? Everyone who knows "planar binding" exists has already won D&D. Everything beyond that is sandbagging. Intentionally. Because the only way to get sane results out of D&D is to play it suboptimally. Do you want a cookie for recognizing that core casters can make everyone else small in the pants, and then deliberately doing just that to everyone else at the table?

The point of this is that he is derping about how because he is incompetent, everyone must be equally incompetent. Responding to that by saying that no, I'm fucking not and that even one example is enough to disprove that point (and there are many that are not entirely incompetent) is called a rebuttal.

That has been part of the focus since I left the thread for ~10 pages and came back. Not that I fault you for not catching up on all 20 some pages of this thread before joining in, but that is not a new claim. That has been a core claim since this conversation started, and the only reason this death talk has been so relevant is that people keep introducing bullshit strawmen about how anti-death is anti-failure.

You are aware that I started this thread right? Now I stopped posting for a while, because people were trying to derail it from post 2, and after a while I just gave up on it and let people babble incoherently, but then I came back to it and gave it another nudge back to the actual topic.

Exclusion is a (large) subset of PC death in D&D 3.5 which is a (small) subset of failure in D&D 3.5. The anti-deather's have said "exclusion sucks," or "PC death sucks," depending on who they are, and the response has been "so you want to get rid of failure, huh? That's stupid," and that is totally fallacious and it's a response you actually just made right now. And that's why we have to dig up all these examples; to try and show you that you can have failure without permanent/significant PC death. And we have examples from inside D&D and from other games.

It is hardly a strawman when you have people like K literally saying that if a monster kills a PC, that is the DM being a dick. Not the player being stupid, not the character being stupid, weak, unlucky, or any number of other things. Not the monster being vicious and powerful. Nope. We can't have that separation of IC and OOC, even as we blabber on about the importance of stories. If a monster kills a player that is instant and immediate DM dickery.

What is this? This is hilariously circular. "If people are killed, they should die" does not answer the question "should we kill PC's?" Irrelevant.

It is entirely relevant. You have people like Fuchaduck who is seriously claiming with a straight face that in situations in which the only possible consequence for failure is death, and you die, you should not be killed. So the soul stealing undead, that are incorporeal drag your unconscious but living body off instead of stealing your soul and turning you into a Spectre. Or the pack of wild animals, rather than going for the throat bite to be sure and then eating you drags your unconscious but alive body all the way back and puts you in wolf jail.

And even if you look at the situations in which the party can be defeated in manners other than killing all of them, you still have to explain, you know for the sake of that story the anti deathers love wanking off to why the enemies are putting themselves at increased risk to take something that is ultimately a liability. And before any smart asses say information, Speak With Dead, Dominate (then kill)...

It's funny because as much as the anti deathers claim they like story, and claim that is the motivation for their actions that is actually the strongest point against them.

Ad hominen that is getting really fucking old. Completely irrelevant to the claim "PC death is unfun."

This is the Den. Expect people to not insult each other and you are in for a disappointment. With that said basket weaver is an accurate description of him.

... Wat?

"Aim for the horn!"

Reading this and the rest of your post, I think I get it now. You seriously want to punish people for being bad at D&D. As in, "if you lack system mastery relative to the other players, you don't deserve fun." That's pretty fucking awful, but explains a lot about the posts you've made.

No, what I want is for actions and choices to matter. And that means that if you do something stupid, bad things happen. In order to get to that point you'd have to both not know that a stupid thing is stupid, and ignore the more elaborate form of "Are you really sure you want to do that?" We've been over this.

And yes, that means some basket weaver, defined as someone who refuses to learn the game is going to get destroyed in it. Quickly and repeatedly. Same as someone who refuses to learn any game. You can try to bring up video games here, but the only thing relevant about them is that by imposing no real consequences for failure for the most part, they encourage a basket weaver mentality towards gaming. Apathy, laziness, lack of effort... these are all things that are objectively negative qualities even if you entirely ignore mechanics! Even freeform, which is adults playing Cops and Robbers still requires you to care about, and put effort into the game. Otherwise you're just kinda there.

You could argue that I'm trying to punish basket weavers specifically. You'd still be wrong, as I'd prefer not to deal with idiots in the first place, and due to that neat thing called separating IC and OOC I'm not out to get the basket weaver, I'm just running my game. And the basket weaver is a chew toy, and everyone else is just fine.

All of this is completely arbitrary. Change it, and no one has to die. You've already lost valuable time both IC and IRL, possibly items, possibly some campaign objective, taken a blow to your pride and your character feels like they should have died; you've been punished enough.

Ah yes, the old power trip them out of jail, because they couldn't do it on their own. Because that will totally help, especially when death as a result of player actions or unrelated factors such as luck is regarded as the DM being out to get them, so having the DM actively dick them around is an excellent solution!

Who says you have to be at 1 HP? We're talking about house rules, Shads, you can't just assume these things. I mean, we already know you're one deranged player from your defense of dragons' CR, and...everything else you post, but here, I'll solve it for you; when you wake up after being unconscious, you're at 1/4 HP. Bam, now you should be able to get back to camp. Maybe your adrenaline gives you temporary HP? Or, you know, maybe among the remains of the wolves' last meal, you find a healing potion. No, you can't fight the wolves all over again, but you should be able to survive any run-ins with stray cats.

Because you were knocked unconscious, and that is how recovery works. But even if you insist upon your retardation and more of your houserules and less of the rules, ok you're at 25% health. Congrats genius, you're still one hit away from going down again. You've accomplished exactly nothing but making a fool of yourself. Just like the people who responded to "dragons are tough, but totally beatable" with "WAH DRAGONS ARE UNSTOPPABLE JUGGERNAUTS OF PC DESTRUCTION!"

Show us on the doll where the Great Wyrm touched you.

In case there was any doubt in anyone's mind about just how skewed your perception of entertainment culture is, thanks for the reminder.

Aim for the horn!

Who gives a fuck about fudging rolls when in 99% of the circumstances it's the DM directly killing the PCs by his actions before any dice are rolled?

Ah yes, the blame shifting game. Because nothing is ever your fault right?

Shadow Balls has given us his scenario: he picks a monster that in his own words he knows is a closet troll, he's is going to describe it as "strong" or "bloodthirsty" and expect the PCs to figure out it's a closet troll from just that, then he's going to execute any player to melee it even if he knew beforehand that one or some of his PCs are specifically melee characters and their default action to encountering some new monster is to try to melee it.

Ah yes, the closet troll that you start 50 feet away from, and that flying is specifically stated to be an entirely safe solution, which among other things means that it is possible to do so. Truly, this is a closet troll, given that you have so much room to maneuver.

No you fucking dumbass fucker bitch. I specifically included those details of the encounter so that I wouldn't have people derping about closet trolls raping their faces off, and you fucking did it anyways! You're not even pretending to read the posts anymore before making a nice snack of your foot.

Which means you see the massive thing with no flight, and a melee weapon, and you have time and ability to get out of close range, and apparently the DM is being unreasonable to expect people to do that? And that isn't even the only solution, simply the best one. Just Leeroy Jenkins will get you killed.

The DM's vast ability to preserve character life is exercised well before a single die is rolled by the nature of the challenges. I mean, a PC can't die if you choose to make a 50 ft' cliff for the encounter that can't kill a PC even if the dice come up Yatzee instead of a 100 ft cliff that has a 15% chance of auto-killing a weak PC. You can choose traps that drop curses or survivable damage amounts and not SoD or auto-death traps. You don't use closet trolls. You have monsters switch to another target when their damage might kill a PC, or they finish a PC with nonlethal damage because they want to capture the PC for a story reason you insert later. You don't have random encounters happen when the party is wounded and would obviously die. You provide healing by dropping healing treasure or a friendly NPC.... (This list is endless, but I'll assume at this point that you understand.)

Ah yes, if the encounter has any chance at all of killing someone, and it does so, that means the DM is being a dick. It does not mean that everyone runs around at 1 HP on purpose, and then the enemies, upon seeing the party kill themselves as any other actions would kill them, meaning that the badly wounded but still fully mobile party succeeds in defeating absolutely everything without the slightest bit of effort. And you aren't allowed to use melee only enemies even if you can easily keep well out of reach, and you deliberately play all enemies incredibly stupid by having them pull back just before they might kill someone, and you insert more obvious DM dick waving while bitching about the same...

You are so full of strawmen I can only assume that you shit actual straw.

Fuck, this is fucking DnD and just making a raise dead item fucking available is so far into DM agency territory that you can argue that any PC permanent death is directly the DM's fault 100% of the time.

Two questions: Have you played D&D, like at all and were you dropped on your head repeatedly as a small child?

The wargamers specifically have said that they want to set up the adventure beforehand, and if it grinds the PCs to death by the DM specifically trying to do that, then "who cares, they should have made better characters or be less stupid."

You are so full of strawmen that I can only assume that you shit actual straw.

That's not just fucked up power fantasy bullshit where the DM is trying to wank on how awesome he is, but it's specifically against even the point of playing a RPG where challenges are supposed to be set in a way that promotes the telling of a heroic story and not set in a way to randomly gank PCs permanently for the amusement of the DM if some hidden win condition is not intuited by the PCs.

ITT: K fails once again to separate IC and OOC while bitching about story. Fucking troleplayers.

I honestly don't care if the dice come up at 56 points and the DM tells you that you just took 56 points; I care about setting up the game so that those 56 points don't permanently kill someone's character because of any number of DM-directed actions that don't require changing even a single rule.

So in other words, everyone makes 6 Con gimps, all of the enemies use 1 nonlethal damage nerfbats, and everyone runs around with buckets over their head and wins the fucking game?

[Fuchs]

I am not the one who tried to explain to others how to hunt dragons, and failing to convince anyone of his claims.

Get off of Likadik's balls. No one wants to see that.

Hit a nerve?

[Fuchs]

In a bit more serious way (and not aimed at the hot air balloon, since he's pretty much out of it already, and spewing insults in lieu of actual arguments): I've played "hard core" with permadeath D&D and Shadowrun back in the 90s. I was not bad at it, a mixture of smart/paranoid tactics, optimisation, rules lawyering and pure BSing the GM got me out of all scrapes.

Thing is, it was no fun. Playing it smart all the time, optimizing all the time, always picking the best option whenever it came to gear, tactics or builds... It was simply not that much fun to me.

And when it comes to games they need to be fun. Simple as that. Always having to worry about losing my character, always having to pick the safe option... that's not fun for me. Nor for a number of others.

[K]

I like how K attacks SBs argument because it is easy as fuck to take apart. Seriously, the example that SB gave has nothing to do with what Frank said.

We already know K is playing a novel. He's not using rules or PC actions to generate a story, he knows how his story will end and talks about how he doesn't want characters dying "before they got to complete their part in the story."

Basically he has a chosen output of how the combat or adventure is going to go. The players are only along for the ride.

K does not believe in player agency at all, believing that the DM automatically holds all the cards in an adventure and player choice is irrelevant, he has stated this many times. You're just on board for his railroad. At that point, I wonder why he bothers with rules at all, because he's just playing magic tea party, and his players apparently all know it according to him.

PC actions generate the story as much as DM actions, but the DM decides what actions can succeed.

I mean, are you going to cry "railroading!" when the DM tells you that your level 1 character can't seduce the Queen of the Great Kingdom because he's got a -4 to his Diplomacy roll and is 24 points away from even having a chance? How about when your level 1 character tries to kill a Great Wyrm? Maybe you think players should have the agency to suddenly determine what monsters and treasures are in the dungeons they go into and what spells enemies are allowed to cast?

Clearly, you don't believe that because it's crazy.

That's because the DM sets the stage and determines what chance of success player choices will have and what choices will be meaningful or not. If mean, if the DM decides that there is no lore on a magic disaster that is key to some mystery adventure, then it doesn't matter that you have a +30 to your Knowledge: Arcana check because your choice to hit the books is going to fail. Your choice to sneak into the castle won't mean shit if the DM decides that there is a +30 Spot creature guarding the gate the PCs are using. Your choice to enter the Banemire is suicidal if the DM stocks it with random encounters that can TPK the party and brilliant if he's decided that its danger is overhyped and it happens to be a shortcut you need to cut a villain off at the pass.

[Swordslinger]

That's because the DM sets the stage and determines what chance of success player choices will have and what choices will be meaningful or not. If mean, if the DM decides that there is no lore on a magic disaster that is key to some mystery adventure, then it doesn't matter that you have a +30 to your Knowledge: Arcana check because your choice to hit the books is going to fail. Your choice to sneak into the castle won't mean shit if the DM decides that there is a +30 Spot creature guarding the gate the PCs are using. Your choice to enter the Banemire is suicidal if the DM stocks it with random encounters that can TPK the party and brilliant if he's decided that its danger is overhyped and it happens to be a shortcut you need to cut a villain off at the pass.

Nobody is saying the DM doesn't have a lot of power. The problem comes in in the fact that you refuse to accept that player choice has any relevance.

Lets take a simple choice. You're in town and you hear word of the villain's location. You can go to the Banemire or you can take the longer way around. One way of deciding this choice is simply to guess or flip a coin. Okay, 50/50 either way. No real player skill. But if they're newbies maybe they don't know any better.

But lets see how an experienced group handles this.

A player might be smart and use a knowledge check. Maybe he has history or nature can tell you a little bit about the Banemire. So right there whether the PC decided to train his knowledges may have made a difference. If that doesn't work, well you might have a PC think to go around town gathering information and rumors to help him. Maybe one PC gets the idea to go ask the town lord or the ranger's guild for advice. Maybe the party cleric gets the idea to use the divination spell he prepared.

In all these cases, you have PC decisions helping to make an informed decision. Now that player skill and decision making seems a lot more relevant, doesn't it? Instead of relying on a simple 50/50 like a newbie would, an experienced player can likely get a right answer with nearly sure certainty because he takes steps not to play in the dark.

Now your PCs can go and flip the fucking coin and then blame the DM if they choose incorrectly. But it's not the DM's fault, it's the PC's fault for making a poorly misinformed decision.

What you want is that the PCs can effectively flip a coin and are rewarded as if they picked the correct decision. So the chumps that end up playing it smart get nothing and the guys who just decide to half-ass it don't pay for it. This leads to your PCs basically not bothering to do smart actions, because there's no pay off for it. The safe way is whatever they happen to choose and they're playing with a safety net.

[K]

That's because the DM sets the stage and determines what chance of success player choices will have and what choices will be meaningful or not. If mean, if the DM decides that there is no lore on a magic disaster that is key to some mystery adventure, then it doesn't matter that you have a +30 to your Knowledge: Arcana check because your choice to hit the books is going to fail. Your choice to sneak into the castle won't mean shit if the DM decides that there is a +30 Spot creature guarding the gate the PCs are using. Your choice to enter the Banemire is suicidal if the DM stocks it with random encounters that can TPK the party and brilliant if he's decided that its danger is overhyped and it happens to be a shortcut you need to cut a villain off at the pass.

Nobody is saying the DM doesn't have a lot of power. The problem comes in in the fact that you refuse to accept that player choice has any relevance.

Lets take a simple choice. You're in town and you hear word of the villain's location. You can go to the Banemire or you can take the longer way around. One way of deciding this choice is simply to guess or flip a coin. Okay, 50/50 either way. No real player skill. But if they're newbies maybe they don't know any better.

But lets see how an experienced group handles this.

A player might be smart and use a knowledge check. Maybe he has history or nature can tell you a little bit about the Banemire. So right there whether the PC decided to train his knowledges may have made a difference. If that doesn't work, well you might have a PC think to go around town gathering information and rumors to help him. Maybe one PC gets the idea to go ask the town lord or the ranger's guild for advice. Maybe the party cleric gets the idea to use the divination spell he prepared.

In all these cases, you have PC decisions helping to make an informed decision. Now that player skill and decision making seems a lot more relevant, doesn't it? Instead of relying on a simple 50/50 like a newbie would, an experienced player can likely get a right answer with nearly sure certainty because he takes steps not to play in the dark.

None of those actions make player action more relevant because the DM decided which of those actions had a chance to succeed.

He could have decided the ranger's guild had false information because they banned their members from going in and they spread misinformation in the town to keep others out. He could decide the spell would give a cryptic answer because of an ancient spell that created the Banemire. He could choose that PC knowledges weren't high enough to understand the true dangers of the Banemire (a DC 40 check that the PCs can't make to know that dread wraiths with PC levels that can rape the party are in there, but a DC 20 to hear that "shadowy creatures" live there.)

You are arguing that the DM should reward PCs for trying to be careful and more prepared by making those actions meaningful. I happen to agree, but that's off-topic to any issues we are talking about.

[Stubbazubba]

Reply to Shads spoilered for length:

Except for the part where I didn't say that, and if you actually read my posts you will understand what I said. Except for the part where Team Fuchaducks wants to always win, no matter what and that not only means no death, but nothing worse than death as well, and not even the things better than death that still mean that you fail.

No one has said this, you're trying to put words into others' mouths to paint them as "basket-weavers" so you can lash out at them. Very juvenile. You can't follow what's going on in this thread, so why don't you just leave?

You are aware that I started this thread right? Now I stopped posting for a while, because people were trying to derail it from post 2, and after a while I just gave up on it and let people babble incoherently, but then I came back to it and gave it another nudge back to the actual topic.

There is no actual topic. This thread was started as a soap box for you to froth at the mouth over people with less system mastery than you. The whole thing is a page out of a 5th grader's playbook. Because D&D is not competitive, there is no reason to kill PCs who don't get it, unless everyone in your group is just like you. If that's the case that's totally fine, go knock yourself out, but don't point to anyone who plays different in an extremely subjective, non-competitive game and say badwrongfun.

No, what I want is for actions and choices to matter.

No, what you want is for the actions and choices which you already know work in system X to matter. Anything else should be punished. You want system mastery to be rewarded, and anything less than that makes you a 'chew toy' for the DM to jizz on. If you played a character in an unfamiliar system, I don't think you'd enjoy yourself, because you seem to really only get off on power fantasies. You're the next shadzar waiting to happen.

You can try to bring up video games here, but the only thing relevant about them is that by imposing no real consequences for failure for the most part, they encourage a basket weaver mentality towards gaming.

Quick, someone call Congress! What are you inculcating in our children with these games of yours?!

Apathy, laziness, lack of effort... these are all things that are objectively negative qualities even if you entirely ignore mechanics!

Let's pretend that you didn't cross the line into delusional ideologue a long time ago; you just did here.

All of this is completely arbitrary. Change it, and no one has to die. You've already lost valuable time both IC and IRL, possibly items, possibly some campaign objective, taken a blow to your pride and your character feels like they should have died; you've been punished enough.

Ah yes, the old power trip them out of jail, because they couldn't do it on their own. Because that will totally help, especially when death as a result of player actions or unrelated factors such as luck is regarded as the DM being out to get them, so having the DM actively dick them around is an excellent solution!

What? What are you going on about? I'm talking about revisions to a game system, not just fudging results. Could you make sure you have a clue as to what you're reading before you reply with 'Ah, yes, (non sequitur),' please?

Because you were knocked unconscious, and that is how recovery works. But even if you insist upon your retardation and more of your houserules and less of the rules,

Hey, pro tip: this isn't an optimization board, this is a house rules forum. Glad we got that cleared up,

ok you're at 25% health. Congrats genius, you're still one hit away from going down again. You've accomplished exactly nothing but making a fool of yourself.

Do you just not read? Are you too busy wanking off to your amazing imaginary victories to get around to it? You're not supposed to engage it in combat once you come back! You're supposed to escape! I can't spell that out any more clearly, can I?

the badly wounded but still fully mobile party succeeds in defeating absolutely everything without the slightest bit of effort

There's no significant effort in D&D combat. When will you stop pretending? All there is is system mastery which tells you what all the trap options are and which ones actually work. That's not an accomplishment; the onus should not be on the player to avoid traps in the system, it should be on the designer to remove said traps from the system.

and everyone runs around with buckets over their head and wins the fucking game?

Living =/= winning. If you can take your hands off of your ears, you might hear this, I think it's been said about 6 times in the past 2 pages. I'll go through this explanation again, because...I dunno, here goes:

In D&D as it stands, the only really viable end states to an encounter are victory, meaning the other guy dies, or defeat, meaning you die. Typically, no one runs away, no one surrenders, there is no middle ground. So, if we made no other changes to the entire system and just said 'it is now impossible to die,' then yes, the game would get stupid really quickly, because you would win every time. Let me make this next sentence very clear, because Shads has more important things to do than read; No one is advocating this. What is being advocated is the inclusion of intermediate end-states; surrender, capture, incapacitation, retreat, and so on. The mechanics of how these work need to work better than they do in modern D&D, they need to be viable options at every level of play. Retreat, capture, etc., would all still be defeat states, you would get much-reduced XP, etc., but everyone could keep playing. When you get captured, you don't save the princess, you don't get the McGuffin, you don't prevent the next Elven War, you really do fail, but then you have the option to try and undo your failure. A hero can grapple with the angst of his failure, or deal with the loss of a love interest NPC whom he failed to save, or come to terms with their own limitations as human beings. These are character developments that are impossible in an 'all failure = death' system. A PC can still die, but at dramatically appropriate opportunities which the player and the DM have had some kind of communication about.

Assuming that, as you say, the game's mechanics influence how players approach the playing of the game, then instead of 'apathy, laziness, or lack of effort,' you would have careful consideration of the importance of what your characters are doing and more motivation to apply 'effort' towards completing objectives, because the fail state changes the world the same way the win state does, but in the opposite direction. I would contend, going along with the former tenuous assumption, that strict character death meted out as a punishment for 'stupidity' does not encourage 'effort' on the part of the players, but apathy towards their characters and the NPCs around them, at best, and OOC elitism and douchebaggery like every word which proceeds from your lips, as well as the accompanying resentment from anyone with more of a life, at worst. Gary Gygax is not who we all aspire to be, and to hold up Gygaxian DMing as the One True Way in defense of a system bias towards all-or-nothing defeat states only gets you put on Ignore.

To Swordslinger: The point is that that DM knows whether his players are newbs or not; if they are complete newbs and he thinks they're likely to just march into the Banemire, they probably deserve some strong hints, and if not, then, basically, yeah, I would blame the DM for not knowing his players or ignoring his knowledge of his players, and setting a trap for them which was basically unfair given his knowledge of the players. If I were DMing a bunch of newbs in that situation, I would make it obvious that the Banemire is something you need to find out more information about before proceeding into it.

[A Man In Black]

In D&D as it stands, the only really viable end states to an encounter are victory, meaning the other guy dies, or defeat, meaning you die. Typically, no one runs away, no one surrenders, there is no middle ground. So, if we made no other changes to the entire system and just said 'it is now impossible to die,' then yes, the game would get stupid really quickly, because you would win every time. Let me make this next sentence very clear, because Shads has more important things to do than read; No one is advocating this. What is being advocated is the inclusion of intermediate end-states; surrender, capture, incapacitation, retreat, and so on. The mechanics of how these work need to work better than they do in modern D&D, they need to be viable options at every level of play. Retreat, capture, etc., would all still be defeat states, you would get much-reduced XP, etc., but everyone could keep playing. When you get captured, you don't save the princess, you don't get the McGuffin, you don't prevent the next Elven War, you really do fail, but then you have the option to try and undo your failure. A hero can grapple with the angst of his failure, or deal with the loss of a love interest NPC whom he failed to save, or come to terms with their own limitations as human beings. These are character developments that are impossible in an 'all failure = death' system. A PC can still die, but at dramatically appropriate opportunities which the player and the DM have had some kind of communication about.

Exactly. If combat routinely ends in something other than brutal murder, then GMs don't have to pull their punches, because they don't risk alienating the players by killing their characters. Less-severe losses would mean that losses wouldn't be as game-disruptive, so the combat loss state would be something you could use in your game more often.

If you want a game where fights are really hard, and you risk getting taken out of combat every fight, then lower stakes makes that more practical.