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

[DSMatticus]

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.

Okay, you're doubling down on being obnoxiously retarded. I'm going to have to make this really easy for you to follow.

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

Is that 'something specific' enough for you? Because that part is stupid. That is not what it all boils down, because the cooperative roleplaying experience you're referring to is still a game. If people wanted to do a 'cooperative roleplaying experience' that wasn't a game, that's called Magic Tea Party and it takes exactly zero rules (except even that is, realistically speaking, going to end up some kind of game a la cops and robbers). But the people you're referring to are looking for a systematic way of producing the results they're looking for; they're looking for a game.

Which means the entire premise of your post (game or cooperative storytelling) is faulty. Because in the context of this discussion (TTRPG's), those are the same thing.

[PhoneLobster]

...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...

...And one of those, the one I was talking about, the one we are ALL talking about... was "Don't Die".

I was generous to assume your argument about not dying being something requiring risk/cost "parity" was being presented by you as a per encounter issue.

If you are saying that monsters and PCs need actual parity in risk of death per attack roll. That is... no different as even if the risk parity per attack roll is low as long as it is PARITY then by the end of the encounter there is still an equal chance that the monsters/PCs are defeated. And as such still reliably generates a dead PC within the first encounter and a TPK easily within 20 or less encounters.

So anyway nice job of wording your own post very poorly, then going off your nut on the most useless and irrelevant possible Semantics argument.

Hell you COULD have had a Semantics argument where you argued that when you said "Parity" you meant something utterly different and therefore WEREN'T outlining a scenario where in your campaign would be lucky to last 1 combat encounter without half the Players going back to character generation.

Unfortunately you were so stupid you couldn't even manage THAT and instead ran with a "reading comprehension" argument which, amusingly, in no way invalidates a damn thing I said.

edit: But if you are suddenly unable to "ignore me" perhaps since Lago is apparently a stinking coward of a hypocrite YOU could explain HIS issues comparing his "Do as I say not as I do" with his Chrono Cross and Monk Story bad endings. Because that is STILL what his proposition is missing to have ANY credibility at all.

[DSMatticus]

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.

Okay, we can ditch the analogy. Let's go back to your original argument.

- 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.

For one, the examples you're providing don't even have parity.

Look at the goblin stabbing; when you fail to stab a goblin in the face, that doesn't mean they succeeded to stab you in face. Every miss is not an auto-hit from the opponent. Both the Goblin and the PC can move to the failure state together or the success state together.

Look at the don't die example: your party survives by casting cause fear on the goblins. They run away and survive. You didn't die and neither did they. That puts both groups in the success state you defined. And the hilarious part is that this is surprisingly fatal to your argument, because if you redefine the failure state to include non-fatal defeats your own parity argument kicks in to allow for non-fatal party defeats!

And then, let's show examples in D&D where your parity is already defied: the lich. The phoenix. The ghost. They don't fail "not dying" when they hit 0 hp.

Oh, okay -- so the only way to model a good story is to remove the existence of the "death" condition from the fucking game?

For someone who talks so much about strawmans you seem to think everyone you're arguing with is Fuchs. There are basically three positions you can hold here; "PC death has to be on the table" (Lago) "PC death has to not be on the table" (Fuchs, with the caveat that he has said that's just his cup of tea, though he is very adamant that the games he play in be the right kind of tea), and "PC death doesn't have to be on the table" (basically fucking everyone here). Note that the last two are distinct. "Doesn't have to be" is not the same as "has not to be." I may be wrong, but I don't think stubbazubba is arguing you can't have PC death. But you are arguing you have to have PC death if and when you have NPC death (lol).

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.

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 can't stop laughing. It's too perfect. It's literally the next paragraph. It's amazing.

[Chamomile]

Ogre #3 is just another carbon copy of the Monster Manual entry and should not be treated as being worth just as much as Sir Martin of Forthshire, the level 4 Fighter who took forty five minutes to create and has been in the campaign for 20 hours of playtime. I am fine with Ogre #3 being treated as more expendable by the rules than Sir Martin, because he is more expendable. I am also fine with deathproofing the NPC Black Baron of Morlen until suitably climactic encounters the same as the PCs. This would be a system wherein TPKs cannot happen until climactic encounters.

[RobG]

OK, let's triple down.

What do you do when your chocolate gets into your peanut butter? When your Game (TPK) gets in the way of your Cooperative Storytelling?

[Stubbazubba]

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 ...

?? Are you kidding??

I agree with Bihlbo, too, that if it's merely an arcade-feeling, dungeon-running little game, y'know, if it's Gauntlet, the RPG, then yes, making characters should take 10-15 mins, and PC death is acceptable in pretty much any situation. And that would be fun, I would have fun with that.

If D&D insists on a risk of player death in every encounter, then it's not a cooperative storytelling medium, because it is not trying to tell a story; it's a single-piece, open-ended, cooperative wargame, and can be enjoyed as such. I would love to spend ten-fifteen minutes designing a piece and moving from combat to combat in a dungeon which will be over in an hour or so, with some scripted narrative in-between for flavor and the chance of death higher so survival is an accomplishment. That's totally fine.

meatgrinders are completely viable option for the game

if you want to houserule more stringent death rules, or if 5e has an optional 'death' module, then that's fine, make it a distinction for your playgroup that everything is on the line and the DM is really going to push you to your limits and probably kill you off,

I would also be leary of a game with no chance of TPKs

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.

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.

This is me, in this very thread, saying that I'm totally cool with there existing and me personally playing a variety of playstyles, seven times. One True Way-ism, huh? You have deliberately misinterpreted one thing I said and then ignored the rest in order to attack my character in some vain attempt to convince everyone that what I'm saying is a facade to mask my insecurity about my fantasy characters, and you have completely failed.

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.

No, it's fine. Almost every action game, video game, and pretty much anything that isn't two human beings directly competing one with another already makes this the case. When you get killed in a video game, you reload and try again, you get right back in there and try it again. The monster doesn't get that privilege. Is there something wrong with this setup?

Regardless, by focusing in on such insignificant details as resolution parity, you're missing the forest for the trees. The game experience is more than just the sum of its resolutions, and you've got to take a step back and say, "Are these death rules accomplishing what I want when I sit down to play D&D?" The answer to that question will vary according to your personal preferences, and that's fine.

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.

Oh, please, grow up. I've never complained about a character dying. I'm saying there is room in this hobby for more than one playstyle, but the rules need to reflect that. Anyone who insists on a One True Way is the real problem with the hobby.

There needs to be three "difficulty" settings for D&D, printed in core;

• Easy - Characters never die, only get KO'd for 1/2 XP loss in a low stakes encounter (minor encounter), or 100% XP loss in a high stakes encounter (climactic boss fight or other major encounter).
• Normal - Characters don't die in low stakes encounters, but accrue some kind of penalty or limitation going into future encounters. In high stakes encounters, death rules as presently constituted. Tie-in with XP is encouraged. See the system I outlined on the bottom of this page, went into further detail on the next. Something like that.
• Hard - Death rules as presently constituted.

Groups can play in any difficulty they want, and switch between them at whatever time they want. Easy will create very heavily-invested games, for those who like that, and will play out like A:tLA, or Star Trek, or pretty much any episodic show where no one really dies. Normal will play out like an action movie; someone important might die at the end, but that's dramatically appropriate. Hard plays more like a game than either of the others, players probably won't get that invested in their characters, but will have a great time optimizing and trying to outwit the DM.

Of course you wouldn't want to actually call them difficulties, because then people would think that as you get better you should move up the difficulties. That's not the case, they're actually just different playstyles encouraged by a certain variation on death rules.

EDIT:

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.

Then why are you opposed to making failing in-universe objectives count? That's an honest question, I want to hear your thought process.

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.

So would it be better if there were several varieties of objectives in the rulebook? "Rescue," "Eliminate," "Retrieve," that sort of thing, which each have their own variation on how you accomplish them? I can see the appeal there, I'm just not sure it would be significantly different from MTP'ing it. Am I way off on your position on this?

[Previn]

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).

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."

I'm not arguing for or against TPKs, I'm pointing out the reason that 'killing an encounter and missing a vital clue' doesn't work as a reason say that TPK aren't valid because the system can specifically handle that outcome.

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."

I didn't say anything about the party getting back up. In fact you could now have an entirely separate group of characters rolled up who take up where the last group of PCs failed. Maybe the TPK shifts the story from it's current venue to being partitioners attempting to get back. Maybe you could actually shift the story to the NPCs that killed the PCs (I've actually had that happen and work in RttToEE).

[Stubbazubba]

I'm not arguing for or against TPKs, I'm pointing out the reason that 'killing an encounter and missing a vital clue' doesn't work as a reason say that TPK aren't valid because the system can specifically handle that outcome.

The premise of this thread is that TPKs where you actually lose, Game Over, there is no more playing this story, is good for the hobby. So saying that DM's can fix the fallout from an unexpected TPK by having new characters pick up the quest, while yes, is a virtue of the system (not really the system, but the medium), is not very relevant in this specific discussion. In fact, Lago is saying that deliberately refrainingfrom doing that really needs to happen for the rest of your campaigns to be more fully appreciated.

But furthermore, if you expect the game to be story-based, then yes, having a TPK at the beginning of Act II and replacing all the protagonists with other guys who just happen to be equally interested in the quest strain's the game's credibility as a story game. You can improv around it, but then you're telling a story in spite of the rules, not with their help. I suggested that rules regarding death could be varied in order to account for these different focuses in different games.

[DSMatticus]

In fact you could now have an entirely separate group of characters rolled up who take up where the last group of PCs failed.

This is a way to keep playing, but it has all the problems of a TPK; disruptive, time-consuming, destroys built up character investment, etc, etc. You can do it (in the same way you can have TPK's) but I'm not seeing too many solid advantages of this over an actual TPK (except maybe GM preparation? Yeah).

Maybe the TPK shifts the story from it's current venue to being partitioners attempting to get back.

That's not really a TPK at all; that's the story where the players are banished to the outer planes, and they just happened to be banished by a sword to the face instead of plane shift or something. It's something I would do, but I wouldn't really call that PC death. Yes, in the context of the setting they died and went to the afterlife, but when we talk about PC death we mean something more along the lines of "that player is no longer active in the story." If the camera follow them to the afterlife, they're still active; it's just a temporary setting change.

But furthermore, if you expect the game to be story-based, then yes, having a TPK at the beginning of Act II and replacing all the protagonists with other guys who just happen to be equally interested in the quest strain's the game's credibility as a story game. You can improv around it, but then you're telling a story in spite of the rules, not with their help.

It's actually a commonly-used storytelling device. Open up with some protagonist-ish people, convince people they're the protagonists, make them die as part of revealing the big bad to the reader.

It's just that when it's not intentional, it doesn't solve any of the problems TPK's might potentially have.

[DSMatticus]

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.

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.

I already responded to this. Because I knew you would say it, and I knew it was fucking stupid, and I wanted to save the time of this particular back and forth. But apparently, you are insisting on making me go through the motions and repeat myself, so let's do that.

Your argument applies anywhere that the game requires GM input. Story design, dungeon design, encounter design, NPC actions in combat, NPC actions out of combat, the weather. If the game doesn't explicitly detail what all those should be, the GM has to supply them or make decisions, and defending that is, acccording to you, the Oberoni fallacy. So when every D&D player ever says 'it's okay when a GM has to create his own story,' your response is 'Oberoni fallacy.' Basically, by your own argument the only game system you can defend without committing the Oberoni fallacy is one in which the GM's role is replaced by an algorithm or script. I suggest you get together with PhoneLobster and discuss ideas; he hates GM's too, right? Or am I confusing people?

But it's even worse than that, because your basic premise that my proposed rules don't contain failure states is wrong. Let's compare:
D&D's failure state description: "When you hit -10 hitpoints, you die."
DSM's 007 failure state description: "When you hit -10 hitpoints, you {generate penalty from accompanying table}. When all party members are at -10 hitpoints or less, {generate amount of game world time that passes}, reduce their mission budget by 20%, and the party begins play at MI headquarters." (The mission budget being some resource pool they use to get cool gadgets from Q).

My failure state is exactly as complete and present as the one you're drawing from D&D. And in both cases, it's up to the GM to create the encounters and narrative which lead to those failure states.

So no. It turns out you have no idea what the Oberoni fallacy is or how to identify it. I suspect the aforementioned thrashing you referred to was just a rage-induced stroke at your stupidity.

P.S. You could have argued that my proposed failure state requires GM creativity in order to not be disruptive, and that's true. At which point I would have told you yes, being a GM involves thinking of things to do with the story. Welcome to TTRPG's. That's a misguided complaint coming from a perspective of "well, I want a game that emulates the action hero genre, but I want it to be believable," which is dumb and not happening. James Bond has outlandish escapes and survivals.

[Fuchs]

Oh, okay -- so the only way to model a good story is to remove the existence of the "death" condition from the fucking game?

For someone who talks so much about strawmans you seem to think everyone you're arguing with is Fuchs. There are basically three positions you can hold here; "PC death has to be on the table" (Lago) "PC death has to not be on the table" (Fuchs, with the caveat that he has said that's just his cup of tea, though he is very adamant that the games he play in be the right kind of tea), and "PC death doesn't have to be on the table" (basically fucking everyone here). Note that the last two are distinct. "Doesn't have to be" is not the same as "has not to be." I may be wrong, but I don't think stubbazubba is arguing you can't have PC death. But you are arguing you have to have PC death if and when you have NPC death (lol).

Yeah, I don't say my way is best for everyone - but it's best for me. I really do not have much fun playing a RPG where I can lose a PC for good without my consent.

What I take offense with is the arrogant attitude some people have that I'd have more fun playing with PC death. I tried that, it's not true. What I take offense with is the attitude that anything less than playing a meat grinder where one's system mastery is challegned each encounter is wrong. What I am taking offense with is the stupid belief that just because one cannot lose a PC means one autowins all the time, and has no risk in the campaign.

For the record: PC Death is used as meaning "that PC is gone, make a new one", NOT as meaning "ok you died, but you'll be resurrected/fight your way back from Hades' realm".

And for the slut princess: If a player is actually unable to play his character as fearing death while knowing the character won't die without his consent, then that player is not someone I will play with. Separating character and player knowledge is a must for me.

[Fuchs]

You could have argued that my proposed failure state requires GM creativity in order to not be disruptive, and that's true. At which point I would have told you yes, being a GM involves thinking of things to do with the story. Welcome to TTRPG's. That's a misguided complaint coming from a perspective of "well, I want a game that emulates the action hero genre, but I want it to be believable," which is dumb and not happening. James Bond has outlandish escapes and survivals.

That's one thing people miss also: I am not playing "Grim&Gritty: The Dark Medieval Life". I am not looking for a realistic simulation of lethal fanatsy combat. I am looking for an action movie like experience.

[wotmaniac]

First, I can't believe that you guys are getting so caught up over a single word.

par·i·ty  [par-i-tee] noun
1. equality, as in amount, status, or character.

I didn't think that it was so hard to extract contextual meaning. I guess I should have actually typed out "resolution parity"; or even gotten all verbose about it and typed it out with qualifying prepositional phrases, i.e., "parity in how the rules are applied". And then done that over and over so that the context wasn't forgotten. I'm sure that there is probably a better word to use, but it's the one that happen to have come to mind at the moment, so that's the one I used -- get over it.

Oh, wait .... it appears that Stubbazubba got it. Thank you, Stubbazubba.
For the rest of you, if you need me to use a different word, then just tell me which one you want me to use. (of course, I guess at this point, "the rest of you" really only applies to PL and DSM ... huh, oh well)

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 ...

?? Are you kidding??

That was a response to that specific post. Particularly, this part:

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.

Surely you can see how that can be honestly interpreted as being your thesis for this thread?

As for all the other quotes you have just presented .... look, there's been a lot of stuff thrown around over the last 11 pages; it's easy to forget everything a specific person said and just as easy to mix up exactly who said what (and no, I'm not going to filter through the entire thread to cross-reference everything that everybody says). And, to be fair, I think that I did indeed lump you and Fuchs together as holding the same position. Even-stevens on this one?

You have deliberately misinterpreted one thing I said and then ignored the rest in order to attack my character in some vain attempt to convince everyone that [...]

I thought that was the way shit was supposed to happen around here.
On a serious note: I deliberately did no such thing. IOW, see the above mea culpa.
Further, in that last defamatory bit, the word "you" was meant to be generic; however, after having gone back and re-read it, I can certainly see how that would not be apparent.

As to the rest of your post ..... yeah, just see above. That one quote of yours is what really caught my attention, and I really zeroed-in on it. Everything of mine that you're rebutting at this point is indeed based on that.
That being said, go back and look at my first post -- it's the 3rd reply to the OP. I think it might have been Fuchs (or someone arguing something similar) that sent me over the edge -- which, incidentally, has colored my entire approach to this thread. When I saw that one bit from you, I quadrupled-down and got lost in the weeds in the process.



@ModelCitizen:
I don't think that Oberoni really applies here -- Oberoni is about "it ain't broke because I can fix it"; this is more just about "this is how I adapt the game to my own purposes". There is a distinction.

Look at the don't die example: your party survives by casting cause fear on the goblins. They run away and survive. You didn't die and neither did they. That puts both groups in the success state you defined. And the hilarious part is that this is surprisingly fatal to your argument, because if you redefine the failure state to include non-fatal defeats your own parity argument kicks in to allow for non-fatal party defeats!

Semantics issues aside .... the point of that was, in part, to simply explicate the fact that I do indeed recognize that "life/death" is not the only success/failure states in the game -- that was in response to the continual strawmen that keep popping up. The other part of the point was to try to tie this in with an over-all bigger picture of the game as a whole, in an effort to draw similarities. In the end, I was trying to show the importance of having the system be consistent in applying its rules.

And then, let's show examples in D&D where your parity is already defied: the lich. The phoenix. The ghost. They don't fail "not dying" when they hit 0 hp.

Exception fallacy. These are specific creatures that happen to have their own rules for certain things. This does nothing to discredit my point -- "exception creatures" have a specific role in the game that is outside the scope of this discussion.

Oh, okay -- so the only way to model a good story is to remove the existence of the "death" condition from the fucking game?

For someone who talks so much about strawmans you seem to think everyone you're arguing with is Fuchs.

No, that's both the legitimate converse and necessary implication of what he actually said.
That being said, I think that I've already covered anything else that I might need to say about this.

There are basically three positions you can hold here; "PC death has to be on the table" (Lago) "PC death has to not be on the table" (Fuchs, with the caveat that he has said that's just his cup of tea, though he is very adamant that the games he play in be the right kind of tea), and "PC death doesn't have to be on the table" (basically fucking everyone here). Note that the last two are distinct. "Doesn't have to be" is not the same as "has not to be." I may be wrong, but I don't think stubbazubba is arguing you can't have PC death. But you are arguing you have to have PC death if and when you have NPC death (lol).

I'm saying that the game needs to be consistent in how it imposes outcomes.

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.

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 can't stop laughing. It's too perfect. It's literally the next paragraph. It's amazing.

The broader context is really important here.
First, I had just dedicated an itemized list (though not anywhere near exhaustive) to demonstrating that there are indeed more resolution states other than just "die" and "win". Second, I was responding to a particular kind of attitude -- a response that, in no way what so ever, neither precluded nor ignored the existence or validity of multiple resolution states.
So, I'm not quite sure what your real point is.




@PhoneLobster:
Just stop. I'm not interested in playing your silly fucking games. I'm not gonna spend 5 pages trying to lead you by the nose with further clarifications, because, as you have proven multiple times in the past, no amount of clarification will satisfy you; and the more I try to clarify, the more you will go out of your way to distract issues with increasingly-contrived semantics bullshit -- heavens forbid you actually approach a conversation with anything resembling good-faith intent.

[wotmaniac]

I really do not have much fun playing a RPG where I can lose a PC for good without my consent.

What I take offense with is the arrogant attitude some people have that I'd have more fun playing with PC death.

We're not necessarily saying that you would have more fun -- we're just ridiculing you over your type of fun.

What I take offense with is the attitude that anything less than playing a meat grinder where one's system mastery is challegned each encounter is wrong. What I am taking offense with is the stupid belief that just because one cannot lose a PC means one autowins all the time, and has no risk in the campaign.

Over-simplified and wrongly-binary on both counts.
1) there is a fluid continuum between "no death" and "meat grinder".
2) "auto-win" does not necessarily mean "insta-win". If death is not a possible outcome, then you have NI opportunities for reprisal -- given enough opportunities, you will eventually reach "ulta-win" .... which does equate to "auto-win" (dependent, of course, on how you define "auto-win").

If a player is actually unable to play his character as fearing death while knowing the character won't die without his consent, then that player is not someone I will play with. Separating character and player knowledge is a must for me.

There is a difference between separating character/player knowledge, and recognizing that you are indeed playing a game. ABSOLUTELY ZERO metagaming is fucking impossible.

[Starmaker]

edit: But if you are suddenly unable to "ignore me" perhaps since Lago is apparently a stinking coward of a hypocrite YOU could explain HIS issues comparing his "Do as I say not as I do" with his Chrono Cross and Monk Story bad endings. Because that is STILL what his proposition is missing to have ANY credibility at all.

Chrono Cross: You put as much effort as possible in the first game, won it as hard as possible, and then the premise of the second game takes a dump on that. There's no chance of success, it's pure fiat.

Monk Story: The monk isn't supposed to get peed on 100% of the time, both rules- and fluff-wise. Lago thought he knew what he was getting into - a fight with a 50% chance of victory (perhaps more, because the monk supposedly excels in close combat).

TL;DR

	TPK	Chrono Cross	Monk Story
Assumed chance of success	whatever (say, 95%)	100% with replays	50%
Actual chance of success	>80%	0%	1%
Does the difference matter?	Errrr mmmaybe	FUCK YES	FUCK YES
Reason of failure	Random chance	Systemic fuckery	Systemic fuckery

Holy shit why did you even bring up Lago's monk? A 1 on 1 inter-party fight (in a party that had more than 2 characters), can never ever result in a TPK.

[PhoneLobster]

First, I can't believe that you guys are getting so caught up over a single word.

OK. That is just impressive.

I handed you your incorrect use of the word "Parity" on a plate as a semantic argument you could have used to not be as stupid.

And you came back and instead doubled down big time on your stupidity by saying "Parity, no no, I mean it, really, PARITY".

So. Moron. We KNOW parity means equality, even commonly and specifically equality in amounts. You know, like YOU just quoted and ignored. That is why when you demand equality in death outcomes between PCs and monsters we suggest you are mind numbingly stupid. Your "Monster PC Death Parity Naow!" movement isn't going to gain traction it IS a return to character generation after one combat scenario. It is a joke, YOU are a joke for having stupidly said you wanted that, people are pointing and laughing at you because you DID say that same very stupid thing whether you intended to or not and you are STILL saying it now.

Now I suspect you do NOT in fact want Parity or Equality in death outcomes at all. But that is STILL not what you are saying. Even when you try and clarify your use of the English language is so poor you say things like "resolution parity", which would mean resolving equal amounts of outcomes which would mean, yeah that's right, again equal death outcomes between PCs and monsters.

Even "parity in how the rules are applied" fails to actually mean anything distinct from your stupid equal death outcomes scenario. To the limited degree that it fucking means anything at all.

I suspect the problem here is you have a highly limited vocabulary and are trying to dance around without admitting certain things. Like how PCs being removed from the game is a much greater value of loss than a 1 encounter monster that gets removed anyway, or how what you really want (but are in fact either too stupid or too embarrassed to successfully describe) is to have an insanely low defeat rate at all for PCs and then make it needlessly punitive because you are a stupid petulant child who doesn't even understand the basic practical demands of social game play OR statistics.

[PhoneLobster]

Random chance

Odd that you should say that. Because, again, Lago very specifically said...

...and not just a 'oh, as long as you're not being stupid you'll be okay' way either. I mean in a full-throated 'you tried your very best and played it beautifully but this time it just wasn't good enough..."

He went on to discuss how this was a must have result you should go out of your way to generate in some minority of games for the "good of the hobby".

There was no, IS NO, random chance involved here or there. If random chance, player decision, whatever fails to generate your apparently desirable amount of OUTCOMES (not, I repeat NOT mere chance of outcomes, actual empirical RESULTS). Lago specifically demands you tell your players "Well you tried your best... but... ".

So in short. Try again.

Holy shit why did you even bring up Lago's monk?

For all the people on this thread who have been using "Fair resolution of the agreed upon rules" and "those who take trap options SHOULD be punished" as excuses for how awesome TPKs are and how everyone loves their TPK medicine for the monk that ails them. And yes. Those are real positions real posters on this thread HAVE stupidly taken.

[ModelCitizen]

But it's even worse than that, because your basic premise that my proposed rules don't contain failure states is wrong. Let's compare:
D&D's failure state description: "When you hit -10 hitpoints, you die."
DSM's 007 failure state description: "When you hit -10 hitpoints, you {generate penalty from accompanying table}. When all party members are at -10 hitpoints or less, {generate amount of game world time that passes}, reduce their mission budget by 20%, and the party begins play at MI headquarters." (The mission budget being some resource pool they use to get cool gadgets from Q).

Hahaha god you just can't figure out how to weasel out of this shit can you? So you changed your position and pretended it was what you were saying all along, but your new proposed mechanic has the party die and teleport back home for no reason. 20% of your mission budget for a Word of Recall sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Too bad it's completely out of genre (you know, Spy Movie being a genre where magic pixies don't whisk you back to headquarters because you took a rocket to the face) and you're once again back to the fact that you can't come up with a functional no-death mechanic for a game with theoretically lethal weapons.

[Chamomile]

ModelCitizen, no weapon pointed at James Bond is the slightest bit lethal. They can wound him or slow him down, but lethal weapons are physically incapable of hitting him in any unquestionably vital area, and he will inevitably recover from any wound that would be potentially (and probably instantly) fatal on a Russian guard. These are true facts of the James Bond universe. It is empirically true that James Bond is no more likely to die from gunfire than from fists, and that in both cases the odds appear to be 0%. James Bond has never actually died halfway through a movie, so if you create a James Bond game in which the party can die halfway through the plot, you are not being true to your source material.

[Foxwarrior]

James Bond has Regeneration?

PhoneLobster, thank you for choosing the most obtuse interpretation of the word "parity" in this context. I have to say, the idea that player characters are mechanically a type of creature like any other, and having "Player Control" not apply any mechanical bonuses or penalties, so an NPC Wizard does not become strictly better when it's taken over by a player, is my favorite reason for not introducing rules that let players, and only players, survive.

[PhoneLobster]

PhoneLobster, thank you for choosing the most obtuse interpretation of the word "parity" in this context.

Er. It is THE meaning of the word. The top one on the list. The list of very similar meanings. The meaning quoted no less by the guy who used the word first when he decided to try and clarify what he meant. Would it be less obtuse for us to ignore his quoted clarification and run down to the bottom of the list and assume he was talking about binary "Parity bits" or pairs of numbers both being odd or even? Would he suddenly make any fucking sense then?

I mean anyway sure call it obtuse and then... well then what? The rest of your post doesn't even parse in a manner that actually makes any clear or concise sense at all. I mean you actually manage to word it with an actual mother fucking TRIPLE negative.

TRIPLE negative.

My favorite reason for not implementing pointless random "bad story ending" events in my mechanics is because the people who advocate it are total idiots who can't even coherently state what they even think they want the game to do.

[ModelCitizen]

ModelCitizen, no weapon pointed at James Bond is the slightest bit lethal. They can wound him or slow him down, but lethal weapons are physically incapable of hitting him in any unquestionably vital area, and he will inevitably recover from any wound that would be potentially (and probably instantly) fatal on a Russian guard. These are true facts of the James Bond universe. It is empirically true that James Bond is no more likely to die from gunfire than from fists, and that in both cases the odds appear to be 0%. James Bond has never actually died halfway through a movie, so if you create a James Bond game in which the party can die halfway through the plot, you are not being true to your source material.

James Bond has been held at gunpoint and surrendered. He thinks he can die to gunfire under some circumstances. If the player knows his superspy can't die then (among many other problems) standoffs don't work. In a spy game that's pretty terrible.

Regardless, the only reason DSMatticus is still talking about James Bond is because it's easier to describe no-death rules for one game than for the vast majority of games. Which is, based on his shit-flinging earlier in the thread about how anyone who wants death mechanics to exist anywhere is too stupid to see that other failure states are possible or doesn't want any other failure state to exist, what he would need to do to crawl out of the hole he dug himself. The particulars of 007 RPG or any other single niche game are pretty much irrelevant.

[Fuchs]

James Bond has been held at gunpoint and surrendered. He thinks he can die to gunfire under some circumstances. If the player knows his superspy can't die then (among many other problems) standoffs don't work. In a spy game that's pretty terrible.

Only if the players are unable to separate character and player knowledge. If players are on board for a James Bond campaign one can expect them to be familiar with the game's themes and tropes, which includes surrendering at some times.

As a player I personally handle situations where I am not sure what course of action to take by asking "My character looks for a way out. Does refusing to surrender look like suicide?" That way the GM and the players are on the same page with regards to how lethal a threat is supposed to be.

[Chamomile]

If the player knows his superspy can't die then (among many other problems) standoffs don't work.

Yes, they do. If he attempts to fight, the player might not be killed, but that doesn't mean he can't get his arm chewed up by a machine gun, fall unconscious, then wake up in a cell anyway except now his left arm is useless for the rest of the session. This models the standoff and James Bond's effective immortality.

[Username17]

If the player knows his superspy can't die then (among many other problems) standoffs don't work.

Yes, they do. If he attempts to fight, the player might not be killed, but that doesn't mean he can't get his arm chewed up by a machine gun, fall unconscious, then wake up in a cell anyway except now his left arm is useless for the rest of the session. This models the standoff and James Bond's effective immortality.

No it doesn't. James Bond survives because he allows himself to be captured. Repeatedly. If he "fought on to the end", he would die. James Bond can't just Leeroy Jenkins at Goldfinger, because he will run out of lucky breaks and he will fucking die.

James Bond alternately dodges bullets, runs away, and surrenders when faced with gun-toting opposition because the player knows how many lucky break points he has left. Not because the character is actually immune to death. A character who was literally immune to death would berserk out on the final boss the very first time he showed his face - which James Bond almost never does.

-Username17