The occasional TPK and bad ending is good for the hobby.

[Previn]

No, the former creates distrust in the rules. When the party freak TPKs in an encounter which was just meant to drop a clue, it's the game's fault for allowing that to happen. If this were any other kind of game, you could restart from a save point and play that again, retconning the TPK away.

TTRPG have the amazing thing called improvisation, which is this amazing ability to simply move the clue or restructure itself around the wiped encounter. Unless your DM sucks and can only run rail roads full stop, the game should continue just fine.

Even a TPK isn't the end of the story in a TTRPG, it's a curve ball with multiple ways to handle it.

[infected slut princess]

You can go on ignore after this for the sheer pointlessness of that post

What the hell. My post was soooo pointless you had to explain yourself. If my post was really pointless, you wouldn't have "wasted [your] time]" on my "shitty comparison" with an explanation at all. So congrats on your incoherent rage.

But you know what? Let's make the contexts a little more equal. What if the player says "man, I wanted to cast command undead... Sure is a shame," and all the other players say, "yeah, you're right. Vancian resource management is kind of shitty." And then they start discussing alternatives, and as a group come to the consensus that they want to adopt an at-will resource management system. And they do. And I would say that's totally appropriate because it mirrors exactly the situation I'm describing about retconning death and it even sounds like a good idea; if your group hates vancian magic getting rid of it is a good idea.

I think your explanation makes a reasonable enough distinction. Maybe Lago will explain the distinction PhoneLobster is asking about, with his dogshit monk and Chrono Cross and all that. That would also be interesting to me.

But come on, saying "if your group hates X, getting rid of X is good" is so trivial as to be ACTUALLY pointless. Like, "people hate eating shit, so not eating shit is good!" Not exactly a mind-blowing revelation, dude.

I might be wrong but I don't think that's what this thread is about anyway.

The issue is not "should people change rules they don't like?" -- it's "does a game get any benefits from having the possibility of TPK?" Apparently, empirical data shows that some people like the possibility of death and TPKs. Empirical data also shows that some people don't. I think it would be better for the default rules to enable that possibility and allow groups to houserule it out if they want, for reasons of fun and roleplaying that I mentioned earlier.

[FatR]

I'll leave you to argue to yourself, DSMatticus, until you somehow indicate a capability of actually reading my posts and comprehending their content.

[infected slut princess]

TTRPG have the amazing thing called improvisation, which is this amazing ability to simply move the clue or restructure itself around the wiped encounter. Unless your DM sucks and can only run rail roads full stop, the game should continue just fine.

Even a TPK isn't the end of the story in a TTRPG, it's a curve ball with multiple ways to handle it.

While true and important, I think the discussion is more about the type of TPK where you DON'T improvise an "out" to the TPK/ultra-fail situation (because if everyone wants, you CAN totally do that in any TPK situation).

Lago wrote in post 1:

I mean in a full-throated 'you tried your very best and played it beautifully but this time it just wasn't good enough. The princess gets sacrificed, the zombie apocalypse consumes the kingdom, and you rot in a ditch; hand in your character sheets' sort of way.

So I don't know if "you can improv a solution" is a good argument to use against the opponents of "TPK should be possible."

[DSMatticus]

On A Plane has said a lot of shit, so let's summarize it:
1) Character choice should be predicated on system mastery. If you aren't good enough at the game to play the characters you want to play, then you don't deserve to play the characters you want to play. Instead, you should play a druid. If you want to play Conan, but aren't good enough to make Conan, On A Plane has no sympathy for you or that situation. Conan is a character for people who have earned it, apparently. We must be playing WoW; you get rewarded for the amount of time you're willing to put in reading optimization boards and splat books.

2) If you can't correctly identify a monster's difficulty by the GM description, you deserve it when you explode. You should be rewarded for researching the monster manual and understanding exactly how much of a threat a given monster is and in what ways.

These are his actual positions on the matter. It's dressed up nice and pretty, but that's the core of it.

TTRPG have the amazing thing called improvisation, which is this amazing ability to simply move the clue or restructure itself around the wiped encounter. Unless your DM sucks and can only run rail roads full stop, the game should continue just fine.

Even a TPK isn't the end of the story in a TTRPG, it's a curve ball with multiple ways to handle it.

I think you're having a definitional problem. If the party gets back up after the TPK, it wasn't much of a TPK, was it? That is the kind of retconning I thought was being discussed; not hitting a rewind button, but modifying the results of an encounter from "TPK" into "not TPK, but the encounter happened, the loss caused problems, and we'll go that route."

[On a plane]

I'll leave you to argue to yourself, DSMatticus, until you somehow indicate a capability of actually reading my posts and comprehending their content.

I'll follow your lead. The more I see this anyone who makes a character die is a terrible person attitude the more I understand the mindset of the Stop Having Fun Guys.

[RobG]

Is it a Game or is it a Cooperative Roleplaying Experience? This is what all of this boils down to.

If you ask the question that way the answer is clear: Of course it's a Game, read the rules, take too much damage and you're dead. It's always been a game going back old-school.

Now of course it was the only game in town, going back old-school. Now we have Games that are resolved 50 times faster with no math to do. They are clearly superior.. as Games.

The one advantage TTRPGs have are as a Cooperative Storytelling Experience. If you were introduced to DnD lately it is likely that you weren't sold on the Game (which isn't better) but on the CSExperience. From this perspective it is entirely logical to think that taking the Random Death out of it makes the game better.

I'm an old-school-let-the-dice-fall type, but I may be behind the curve here. Is it a Game or Cooperative Storytelling? Is it something weird like Cooperative-Storytelling-until-your-luck-runs-out?

[mean_liar]

Can't we all just agree that both playstyles are legitimate and that some of us may have preferences that strongly lean towards one side or the other?

[Stubbazubba]

If you're talking about me you're way off, I've been in TPKs that I brought on myself and I never complained. It was exactly what my character would have done and the DM was clear that he wouldn't pull punches. It was anti-climactic, to be sure, and I would have preferred to survive, and thus let my character learn not to do 'crazy things,' because that would be a more compelling story, but I wasn't upset about it.

Then why say the things you are?

Because, as I described, I think it would have been cooler if he had been captured, imprisoned, and eventually got out, and had the chance to learn something, instead of me, as a player, learning nothing. I knew I didn't have much of a chance in the fight I picked, but my character's motivations would be totally meaningless if I let it slide. My character learned nothing, because he died. I didn't learn anything either, because I was role-playing, not meta-gaming. The gameplay would have been more engaging if the options list included more than just "win" and "die." That's as far as TPKs/meaningless deaths go. I argue against calling the desire for such a change wussy or the whining of a manchild because I recognize there is value for the consumer and the hobby for appealing to both role-players, meta-gamers, and others, and to deride people who do it differently than you is, in fact, bad for the hobby. It's fine if D&D can be both a meatgrinder and a cooperative story for two different groups, in fact, it's a strength. Insisting that only one or the other is legitimate is short-sighted, biased, and an idea that is made of fail.

Incomprehensible? It's quite simple. People are taking having their fictional character die so seriously it's almost as if the threat was directed at the person sitting at the gaming table. So seriously that even the guy who can deal with entire groups of Stop Having Fun Guys without being bothered thinks they're taking things too seriously.

If individual players are not on the same page as the rest of the group, there is always a problem, whether it's death, the tone of the campaign, or whatever else. Turn the situation around, though. If the rest of the group chimed in and said, "Yeah, DM, we've just barely left town, there's nothing even important going on, it was a random encounter," and want him back alive, the DM is not helping anyone or anything by teaching them that that's just how the game goes sometimes, pussies, thus becoming the individual player not on the same page as the rest of the group.

Because deaths cannot exist in cooperative story telling games, else you wouldn't present that as the opposite choice? That was bad and you should feel bad.

Read before you reply. I said death happening at any boring time. When it's completely meaningless to the character or the plot, just frustrating to the player or party, if it's a TPK. A proper storytelling game would have the stakes increase throughout the plot, not be universally set to "death is on the line!" for every speedbump you drive over. Y'know, because stories are like the former, not the latter. Characters dying in important, climactic battles I fully support, just not every piddly random encounter. D&D rules, as-is, do not differentiate between the two.

[DSMatticus]

I'll leave you to argue to yourself, DSMatticus, until you somehow indicate a capability of actually reading my posts and comprehending their content.

I'll follow your lead. The more I see this anyone who makes a character die is a terrible person attitude the more I understand the mindset of the Stop Having Fun Guys.

Oh for fuck's sake. I'd love to stop talking to you, but I can't let this obvious strawman slide. Quotes from this thread by me:

And that means identifying what everyone wants out of the game (not necessarily what they say they want, but what will make the experience fun) and then giving them that. There are cases where the answer will still be grind their characters against a harsh, unforgiving world.

Fuchs is the extreme example here who always seems to become an almost strawman for the position as a whole, because he genuinely wants PC death to always be under the control of the players. And I disagree with that being elevated to a "universal rule." But there are some games at some tables where PC death fits better there than anywhere else, and that's not entitlement. It's just a different social contract where some portion of the GM's authority has been transferred to the players. That authority isn't innately the GM's.

TPK's belong in certain games at certain points, depending on group. Climactic, story arc-ending fights? Those are great points for a potential, gloves-off TPK. Call of Cthulhu-esque games where the entire point is that your character is an insignificant monkey fighting terrible cosmic horrors who can disappear him with a blink of their eye? Probably going to need PC death, though psychologically speaking it turns out that repeated death diminishes the fear of it. If your group wants to get together and play a high-mortality D&D dungeon meatgrinder? By all means, and death is an important part of that.

and more. That last quote is directly to you, by the way. I flat-out told you my position and you still got it wrong and tried to pin this "everyone who disagrees with me is Fuchs" strawman on me. That is fuck-off terrible.

Apparently, you don't understand what I'm criticizing you for. I'm not criticizing you for killing players. I'm criticizing you for having stupid ass reasons to kill players and your "it's the player's fault if they die" attitude. Because the game is a collaborative experience over which the GM almost always has the largest say.

Wanting a game with 'approximately this much mortality' and wanting to 'adhere to the results of the dice' are potentially valid reasons to kill a player. But when you design the encounters to have a certain probability of killing players, and then turn to the players and say "don't look at me, it's your fault you died," that's just a blatant falsehood. If you design the adventure with a significant non-zero death chance, someone will die and that's not their fault; that's statistics. And that can be fun, but the "blame game" you're playing is immature and inappropriate and yes, it makes you a terrible person to game with. It's a really old school "system mastery should be rewarded with MORE FUN than everyone else at the table!" and that line of thought needs to go away. It doesn't help bring people into the hobby, it doesn't make the game better, it's just a way to wave your penis around at the table about how optimization is the BEST THING EVAR and "I GET MORE D&D'S THAN YOU BECAUSE I'M GOOD AT IT."

Do you want everyone to bring the cleric archer to your table? Because that basically minimizes their chance of death. It's almost the optimal solution if the goal is "not die." If you don't want everyone to bring a cleric archer, how do you justify blaming them for the disparity in mortality rates? Wouldn't that be the system's fault, and not their's?

If you ask the question that way the answer is clear: Of course it's a Game, read the rules, take too much damage and you're dead. It's always been a game going back old-school.

That doesn't really matter. We can still have discussions about what the rules are, and what the rules should be to make the most fun of the game. Setting up a game/cooperative roleplaying experience dichotomy is false. It is a game that allows you have a cooperative roleplaying experience, and it should have the best rules possible to facilitate that cooperative roleplaying experience.

Different groups want different things out of their cooperative roleplaying experience. Some people want it to be a murderfest, and more of a tactical wargame than roleplaying at all, and our cooperative roleplaying experience may be a bit of a misnomer, but that's fine, whatever. The point is, they want a game where death is on the table and that's cool. Some people may want to have a non-wargame more-cooperative roleplaying experience with high mortality rates (Call of Cthulhu). And some people may want no mortality at all.

Basically, it's always a game. But people want different things out of the game (which is fine). And the game fails (that particular group) when it doesn't give them those things. I find it hard to believe that anyone is a hardcore enough wargamer to want the option "uber-heroes died to level 1 goblins," but I also find it hard to believe that any one can't stand the thought of having a climactic campaign-ending battle going the way of the villains.

Edit: What I'm saying is that the discussion should be approached from the context of rules (or house rules) design; whether or not death should be mechanically on the table, and when. This 'retcon' discussion was an interesting tangent, and lead to some... extreme responses that totally make no sense to me at all. I wasn't aware applying house rules mid-game was so controversial, since it's something that's happened in every campaign I have ever played ever. But that's not the point; we can just talk rules design and avoid all this pointless shit.

[ModelCitizen]

So, wait, my goal is to:
1) Make players afraid of events that would result in PC death, but...
2) Not actually kill players?

Well, since James Bond is about thwarting villains and accomplishing specific missions, most of which are going to be obviously time-constrained or non-repeatable because this isn't a videogame and there are no quick-saves and quick-reloads... Replace "death" with "down-time hospitalization." Story checkpoints are passed during this down-time, and you fail any checkpoints you can't participate in. You receive rewards for successfully accomplishing checkpoints/missions (experience, gadgets, whatever), but nothing for failing. We have now incentivized party success without putting TPK on the table.

Somehow I knew this was coming.

Time constraints are the same excuse grognard fanboys use to justify large pools of daily spells in D&D. The system is balanced around four encounters per day so the DM is supposed to structure every part of the game so that the PCs can't afford to stop and rest. In 40 years and like five editions of D&D that has never worked.

The actual bigger problem (in this case) is handling individual death. Because since this is a TTRPG, there are probably multiple wannabe James Bonds' working together, not just one player. And one of them can go down in a firefight while the rest of the party is just fine and successfully finishes the mission. If the answer is "kick them out of the session because of down-time hospitalization," that's rather problematic, and if the answer is "the whole party fails every checkpoint from them on, despite that they could probably do it without the additional party member," that's not much better. But it would encourage not letting any party member 'die.'

So hospitalization doesn't work for single deaths, huh? That's interesting, because by any reasonable standard it also doesn't work for a TPK. You are in the secret missile base. You all get hit for all of your life. Your body is lying on the floor in enemy territory, you don't just teleport back to the fucking hospital. So if hospitalization downtime doesn't work for single deaths and it doesn't work for TPKs either, then it doesn't work for anything. Despite blathering about how easy it is to replace death, your proposed solution is nonfunctional by your own admission.

I notice you took the 007 RPG thing and ran with it because it's easier to design a solution for one game than for all games, but remember your actual position is that replacing death is so easy that anyone who doesn't see how to do it is stupid. For this to be true, your solutions have to work in the vast majority of games D&D. Your (non-)solution is pretty similar to resurrection in D&D - downtime while the cleric prepares Raise Dead instead of hospital time, level / con drain as a permanent penalty - and we know raise dead doesn't satisfactorily replace PC death. (PCs still die and lots of people think resurrection is cheesy.)

TLDR you've got nothing. You've worked your way back around to D&D resurrection and DM imposed time constraints - things we already have that don't work very well.

[DSMatticus]

Time constraints

You need to read the rest.

you fail any checkpoints you can't participate in. You receive rewards for successfully accomplishing checkpoints/missions (experience, gadgets, whatever), but nothing for failing. We have now incentivized party success without putting TPK on the table.

The actual incentive is character advancement and campaign objectives. If you don't actually do anything, you don't get rewards and the Russians assassinate the hot mysterious woman. Yes, that means part of your incentive comes from getting players invested in the story.

Your body is lying on the floor in enemy territory, you don't just teleport back to the fucking hospital.

Yes. James Bond always dies when he's incapacitated in enemy territory. He's never imprisoned and escaped before. Or been rescued before. Or been left to die before.

Look, do you want to talk genre emulation or realism? Because if realism is the stated goal of your RPG, James Bond is actually Contact; the Talkening. Spies in real life are kind of boring. If we're talking genre emulation, then the tools at our disposal to turn death into not-death are... fuck, it happens in every James Bond film! Every single one! I don't think there is a single story where James Bond has not been defeated totally and left at the hands of his enemies then survived it. If your game can't tell the story where the party is totally wiped out, captured, and then turns it around to save the day your James Bond story has failed. It's not only a potential replacement for death, it has to coexist with and be more frequent than death to begin with!

Now, would you like to try a new round of complaints?

[wotmaniac]

Okay, let me try a slightly different approach:

Throughout a campaign, a given party will face, several thousands of times, instances that will produce a success/failure outcome. There needs to be parity in how the internal fiction functions:
- Race for the McGuffin:
-- success = party gets to McGuffin first
-- failure = someone else gets to McGuffin first
* your failure means someone else had success = parity in how success/failure is determined
- Get the Princess safely to the Castle -vs- Ogres want to Kill the Princess:
-- success = princess arrives at castle in one piece
-- failure = princess gets killed en route to castle
* your failure means someone else had success = parity in how success/failure is determined
- Stab Goblin in the Face -vs- Goblin Stabs You in the Face:
-- success = d20+mods exceeds target AC
-- failure = d20+mods does not exceed target AC
* d20+mods vs. target AC = parity in how success/failure is determined
- Don't Die:
-- success = health levels remain above 0 = didn't die
-- failure = health levels fall below 0 = dead
* monsters conform to this success/failure rule, while your murder-hobo of a PC can never experience the failure state = no parity = shenanigans.

That last example is a case of removing "fair play" from an element of the game -- you've removed internal-consistency; and this removal necessarily de-legitimizes that aspect of the game; and that de-legitimization is just plain bad on principle.
Now, if you have a game where nobody really dies -- well, irrespective to anyone's personal opinions on that type of game, the "no death" rule in this case would be legitimate because it's presented in a way that is consistent.
Furthermore, if you don't have a standing "no PC death" rule, but it gets implemented on the fly as a kind of deus ex machina, that's even worse -- that's flat-out losing fidelity in the social contract, and a breach of trust. Sure, it might make you feel good in the moment, but now you're just pointlessly going through the motions.

you should know how bad game rules can be. Why would you want to enslave everyone at the table to them when something stupid happens?

I think that you're conflating separate issues here.
Ostensibly, you label a rule as being "bad" because it gets in the way of the game -- right? Reduces fun? Or whatever subjective measure you want to apply -- I get it.
But why does it get in the way? What makes it less fun?
- a rule that doesn't actually accomplish what it tries to accomplish
- make doing what it's supposed to do overly-complicated
- produces unexpected/dysfunctional results
- isn't internally-consistent with other aspects of the game, or otherwise conflicts with other rules
There are others, I'm sure; but you get the idea. If you're gonna change a rule, it needs to be for objective reasons.
Notice that I did not include on that list "undesirable outcomes" -- for 2 reasons: 1) too vague, and 2) too subjective. All of those would be "undesirable outcomes".
"Because it doesn't make the players feel good" is subjective. In a game where the PCs go around murdering people, then the "no PC death" rule is objectively bad (explained above). Hell, if their ego is that fucking fragile, then fine -- let them come back in as Landfill's twin brother Gill, or some shit.

[Stubbazubba]

I notice you took the 007 RPG thing and ran with it because it's easier to design a solution for one game than for all games, but remember your actual position is that replacing death is so easy that anyone who doesn't see how to do it is stupid. For this to be true, your solutions have to work in the vast majority of games D&D.

Pfft. In D&D:

Each time you would legitimately die, you lose 1/4 of the XP and/or loot at stake. After the fourth time, you begin losing real XP. But you're only ever knocked out and/or captured for TPK. You come to when someone successfully makes a DC 15 Heal check, or 1d20 minutes after the encounter ends, with 1/2 HP + bonus based on Constitution. If you were wiped, you've been captured, unless somehow your side still won without you, or you were just left to die, up to DM/die roll. Also, you get no XP from total party wipe.

If the fraction of XP at stake seems too small to be a deterrent, just increase it to 1/2 or even all of it. Yeah, maybe all of it is good. That way doing something that will get them KO'd is a last resort, since at that point the only thing that's worth doing it for is the absolute success of the mission. And they can still fail missions, fail campaigns, bad things can happen, and life goes on. Maybe the PCs vow to set things right, maybe they learn some hard life lessons, but cool stuff keeps happening, the story evolves.

This disincentivizes players from dying while taking death off of the table. If they get KO'd, they don't level up as fast, they don't get new toys and abilities, but everyone keeps playing. This is barely even a change.

As for complaints against realism, see what DSMatticus said, you can't use realism as a metric if you want to model fiction. You can't make a simulator consistently tell good fiction.

EDIT:

- Don't Die:
-- success = health levels remain above 0 = didn't die
-- failure = health levels fall below 0 = dead
* monsters conform to this success/failure rule, while your murder-hobo of a PC can never experience the failure state = no parity = shenanigans.

Right, because in Mario, Bowser gets 5 lives you have to get through, as well. Otherwise it's shenanigans, right?

you should know how bad game rules can be. Why would you want to enslave everyone at the table to them when something stupid happens?

I think that you're conflating separate issues here.
Ostensibly, you label a rule as being "bad" because it gets in the way of the game -- right? Reduces fun? Or whatever subjective measure you want to apply -- I get it.
But why does it get in the way? What makes it less fun?
- a rule that doesn't actually accomplish what it tries to accomplish
- make doing what it's supposed to do overly-complicated
- produces unexpected/dysfunctional results
- isn't internally-consistent with other aspects of the game, or otherwise conflicts with other rules
There are others, I'm sure; but you get the idea. If you're gonna change a rule, it needs to be for objective reasons.
Notice that I did not include on that list "undesirable outcomes" -- for 2 reasons: 1) too vague, and 2) too subjective. All of those would be "undesirable outcomes".
"Because it doesn't make the players feel good" is subjective. In a game where the PCs go around murdering people, then the "no PC death" rule is objectively bad (explained above). Hell, if their ego is that fucking fragile, then fine -- let them come back in as Landfill's twin brother Gill, or some shit.

OK, yeah, when I say the ever-present chance of PC death is a bad rule, I mean it doesn't accomplish what a cooperative storytelling game should do; model a good story. I think I said that in, like, my first post in this thread.

Edit: quote tag fixed.

[RobG]

Apparently, you don't understand

Why would you intentionally quote someone out of context who was making the point better than you were in a fraction of the time? Just like to argue?

Troll is Troll I guess..

[PhoneLobster]

...will face, several thousands of times, ... needs to be parity...
... Don't Die:... * monsters conform to this success/failure rule, while your murder-hobo of a PC can never experience the failure state = no parity = shenanigans.

Er. Parity don't mean what you think it means. If PCs have genuine risk/cost parity with individual monsters when it comes to "don't die" and do it "thousands of times" they individually die like in the first two events and TPK well within the first I dunno 20ish?

Of course if you recognized that a PC intended to last in your own words "thousands" of encounters and a monster that appears for ONE encounter do NOT in fact have parity in risk/loss when the result is "death do not appear again" since the PC just lost thousands of encounters... and the monster lost nothing because he wasn't coming back anyway. If you recognized that... then maybe you might have to admit your risk/cost "parity" argument needs to make exactly the compromises in regards to PC fatality rates that you seem to be trying to argue against.

Right, because in Mario, Bowser gets 5 lives you have to get through, as well. Otherwise it's shenanigans, right?

Actually. More accurately he just argued that the first Goomba you meet has the same starting lives as Mario and is just as likely to jump on YOUR head and flatten you to death as you are to him. And so on for every Goomba, Koopa Trooper, and enemy in the game.

[ModelCitizen]

The actual incentive is character advancement and campaign objectives. If you don't actually do anything, you don't get rewards and the Russians assassinate the hot mysterious woman. Yes, that means part of your incentive comes from getting players invested in the story.

Campaign objectives, huh? So the game itself has no failure states and the DM is expected to impose them himself. Yeah, that's basically the same argument as the DM imposing time constraints. Your entire solution is a pile of Oberoni.

[Stubbazubba]

The actual incentive is character advancement and campaign objectives. If you don't actually do anything, you don't get rewards and the Russians assassinate the hot mysterious woman. Yes, that means part of your incentive comes from getting players invested in the story.

Campaign objectives, huh? So the game itself has no failure states and the DM is expected to impose them himself. Yeah, that's basically the same argument as the DM imposing time constraints. Your entire solution is a pile of Oberoni.

Ah, here it is. You don't think that D&D should have any other resolution states than "die" and "win." K, fine, but that's not what open-ended implies, and you can't possibly blame anyone for wanting to play an open-ended TTRPG with a failure state other than "die." The challenge in going from "die" to "win" is not what brings many people to play the game, it is in the theoretically open-ended nature that their interest lies. Why is letting D&D actually be open-ended unacceptable to you?

[ModelCitizen]

Ah, here it is. You don't think that D&D should have any other resolution states than "die" and "win.

HAHAHAHAHAHA FUCKING WHAT??

I've said otherwise repeatedly. You're failing the Turing test and the sad thing is as far as I know you're a person.

[Stubbazubba]

You've posted in this thread a grand total of 4 times, all to criticize DSMatticus' suggestion that a game without PC death is even tenable. Never have you said otherwise, not here.

Admittedly, you haven't really put forth a position either way, but since your only appearance in the thread has been to criticize the idea that you can have failure states without death, I assumed.

[DSMatticus]

Oberoni

Award for the biggest misuse of Oberoni I've seen so far.

The actual incentive is character advancement and campaign objectives. If you don't actually do anything, you don't get rewards and the Russians assassinate the hot mysterious woman. Yes, that means part of your incentive comes from getting players invested in the story.

Campaign objectives, huh? So the game itself has no failure states and the DM is expected to impose them himself. Yeah, that's basically the same argument as the DM imposing time constraints. Your entire solution is a pile of Oberoni.

The things your characters do are part of the game. That's definitional. If they save the princess, that is something that happened in the game. If the princess is eaten by the dragon, that is something that happened in the game. If the players had set out to rescue the princess, and the princess is eaten by the dragon, that is a failure state that the game has. The players tried to make something happen and it didn't.

What I think you're trying to argue is that the game doesn't have failure states because the GM had to come up with them. Which is exactly like arguing that D&D doesn't have encounters because the GM has to come up with them (bonus: and because D&D doesn't have encounters, you can't fail them, and D&D has no failure states anyway even with death! What a surprise). Depending on how you want to parse the semantics of it, it's either 1) false, or 2) true but meaningless.

Yes, the GM has to put work into the game. Why does this surprise you?

[DSMatticus]

Apparently, you don't understand

Why would you intentionally quote someone out of context who was making the point better than you were in a fraction of the time? Just like to argue?

Troll is Troll I guess..

I don't think I made my point well, and I think you took my rambling as more directed at you than it was intended to be. But I did and do have a legitimate disagreement with one aspect of your post: you were talking like "gamer" and "cooperative storyteller" are disjoint groups, and gamers care about rules and cooperative storytellers... don't. And that's a silly perspective. Cooperative storytellers (whatever traits they're supposed to have) are gamers. They want a game that produces the results which fit the sort of story they want to tell. That's not a disregard for the rules, that's actively wanting rules.

The division here isn't "this group cares about the rules" and "this group cares about the story." The division is "this group wants rules which say X," and "this group wants rules which say Y."

[RobG]

you were talking like

No one was "talking like". Someone was writing something specific.

You further added "And that's a silly perspective", not toward something someone else said but about how you "thought" someone was "talking like". All without bothering to ask for any clarification.

You may not actually be a "Troll", however, if this is how poorly you are going to interpret other peoples statements that won't matter. The affect is the same.

Perhaps it would be better to just make your own points and defend them.

No malice intended and good luck.

[ModelCitizen]

You've posted in this thread a grand total of 4 times, all to criticize DSMatticus' suggestion that a game without PC death is even tenable. Never have you said otherwise, not here.

Admittedly, you haven't really put forth a position either way, but since your only appearance in the thread has been to criticize the idea that you can have failure states without death, I assumed.

You're confusing two different arguments:

1) Whether PC death should exist.
2) Whether failure states that are not PC death should exist.

DSMatticus is doing the same thing, incidentally. He insists that anyone who says yes to #1 implicitly says no to #2. That's complete nonsense.

You're right that I think you have to have PC death in a game where you play mortals and are regularly menaced with lethal weapons. But there's no reason death has to be the only way you can fail.

Award for the biggest misuse of Oberoni I've seen so far.

Everyone ever accused of Oberoni has thrashed around like an idiot trying to prove what they said wasn't Oberoni, and you're doing the same thing. Your ideal game has no failure states in the rules, because the failure states are based on "mission objectives" which have to be imposed by the DM. The rules are broken (they don't contain failure states) but it's not a problem because the DM can fix it (imposing failure states that are not part of the rules). That's Oberoni.

[wotmaniac]

Right, because in Mario, Bowser gets 5 lives you have to get through, as well. Otherwise it's shenanigans, right?

Who the fuck is talking about Mario? Certainly not me -- I've specifically gone out of my way to try to avoid analogies with other types of games simply to avoid the inevitable analogy abuse.
Besides which, it's a fucking 27 year old children's video game that's essentially a single-player and made on a fucking abacus of a platform -- other than the fact that it also happens to be a "game", there's nothing with which to make a comparison.

OK, yeah, when I say the ever-present chance of PC death is a bad rule, I mean it doesn't accomplish what a cooperative storytelling game should do; model a good story. I think I said that in, like, my first post in this thread.

Oh, okay -- so the only way to model a good story is to remove the existence of the "death" condition from the fucking game?
And even if you're not saying that, that statement is so subjective and myopic as to be complete gibberish.
Oh, but you actually did just essentially say that an enforced death mechanic is necessarily antithetical to modeling a "good story". Talk about your One True Way-isms ...
But anyway .... I already conceded that a "no death" rule is fine -- but that shit has to go both ways. If you happen to have a PC who's a murdering murderer, but you insist "PC death = wrongbad", that's bullshit. It's a demonstration of the character flaw in which you're perfectly fine with dishing it out but don't have the balls to take it coming back at you -- they teach that shit in goddamned kindergarten. "I win, or fuck you" is not a valid fucking position or attitude to have. Because whining about your character dying = wrongbad, you have dispensed with the storytelling mentality and reduced the exercise to win/lose game aspects -- and hiding behind the guise of "good storytelling" only exacerbates the issue by clouding the underlying petulance.

You don't think that D&D should have any other resolution states than "die" and "win."

Nobody is fucking saying that. Not once in 10 goddamned pages. Stop that shit.
I know that wasn't directed at me; but my head is about ready to explode over this particular strawman.

Of course if you recognized that a PC intended to last in your own words "thousands" of encounters and a monster that appears for ONE encounter

Okay, I've done a fairly good job of ignoring you up to this point; but I've really gotta say something with this one -- You utterly fail at reading comprehension.
What I actually said was "instances", not "encounters"; and went on to give examples to clarify .... and one of those instances for which I gave an example was a single fucking attack roll. Where the fuck did you get "encounter"? Oh yeah, you made it up, and for no other reason than because that's your standard M.O.
Given that you can't even be bothered with simple fucking reading, I don't even want to bother trying to walk your crippled mind through the actual point I was trying to make.