Virgil wrote:One element I'm noticing here is people quoting the chances of player death or even a TPK, citing stuff like 5%, 1%, or whatever. NOBODY here has that kind of precision in ascertaining encounter difficulty, and talking about setting encounters' death rate to 1% vs .01% is just so much talking out your arse.
Exactly. Not only are all these numbers asspulled to begin with, but they aren't even being used correctly. Wrathzog was fucking around with the chances of a character failing a saving throw, but he wasn't even accounting for the fact that he was talking about
a character, who presumably comes as part of a
party of four. Thus, even in his contrived scenarios, the chance that
you were going to bite the bullet needed to be divided by 4, because that bullet could just as plausibly been aimed at a different character, which would be experientially different.
But really, it just doesn't fucking matter.
All of the jerking off about numbers is just jerking off. It's a smoke screen to try to distract from the fact that Fuchs is
tautologically wrong when he says that something that has a chance to occur necessarily will. If something has a chance to occur, it also has a chance to
not occur. Period. If the chance to occur is anything less than 100%, then no amount of iterations of it will
ever bring it to 100%. That's just indisputable mathematical fact.
But while Fuchs is definitely provably and provedly incorrect there,
that doesn't fucking matter either, because even if he was right that the people who don't want to cheat would eventually stop playing because their characters died and apparently they live in a Chick Tract, that's still no excuse at all for the behavior he claims it inspires in him. If a player is definitely going to move out of town when the school year ends and you respond by passive aggressively refusing to integrate their character into the story in the here and now,
you're being an asshole!
I mean seriously, look at this shit:
Fuchs wrote:if a player wants the dice to fall where they may and risk his character dieing in every combat I will do that for his character - for his character only. I'll also tell him though that I'll not invest much in his character either
That's total douchebag behavior. The fact that the justification for this behavior is mathematically false doesn't make it any more or less bullshit. If we changed the scenario to one where the player actually would eventually leave the game in a deterministic fashion (active duty military, beginning or ending of school, temporary employment rotation, or
whatever), it would still be shitting on someone for no god damned reason.
Of course, Fuchs keeps up with his mathematically challenged point of view to continue to try to justify his outrageously shitty behavior, this time on the other end:
Fuchs wrote:Again, only some socially challenged guy like you would equate "not favoring one Player" with "punishing that player", or as you so eloquently state "being a flaming douche".
Huh? Yes, if you give everyone else a candy bar and don't give one to Bob, that is a net -1 candy bar for Bob. Also, it's totally being a fuckwad to Bob. This is not only simple mathematical tautology (getting less is the same as getting less!), it's the simplest Kindergarten lessons of human interaction. I am legitimately surprised that a grown man could seriously claim to not have learned the lesson "Only bring cupcakes if you have enough for all the children, because otherwise people will feel justified resentment." Did you fucking sleep through preschool? Were you raised by wolves? What the fuck?
-Username17