What is with the entitlement? (shadzar stay out)

[Whipstitch]

It's a lesser of two evils situation as far as I'm concerned. Not being able to take action or rolling up a new character sucks but I'd prefer it over not risking failure. Really, the only deaths that I consider truly regrettable are the ones that come about through OOC pissing matches or come from the GM failing to properly communicate what is in the environment to the players.

[Maj]

If you can't enjoy making a game fun for other people, you should not be a DM.

Demanding absolute altruism from a person who automatically holds 50% of votes in any decision related to running the game, and, in nearly all cases I've seen, does more prep work related to running the game than everyone else combined, is not realistic.

This logic is so bullshit I'm speechless. It would be like saying that demanding a teacher effectively teach their students is unreasonable because they have to do a lot of prep work and have almost total authority of how they present the material required.

The DM's [voluntary] job is preparing and running a game. If none of the preparation goes into making it a fun game, there's no point.

Don't get me wrong, it's excellent to have someone want to do the job, but part of the job description is play. Anyone who says that playing shouldn't require fun kills a toddler somewhere.

On the other hand, there will be people whose idea of fun is entirely at right angles to the rest of the group, much like a disruptive student in a classroom. And after the teacher tries to bring discipline (communication and compromise in the case of the DM), they are allowed to kick the student out.

[Stubbazubba]

Here's the deal: your job as a DM is to make sure the players have fun.

So, when I'm going to be paid for my job as a DM?

And until that happens, just accept as a fact, that my primary mission as a DM is to entertain myself, and that the same applies to the great majority of DMs out there. If my entertainment involves running campaigns with considerable chance of PCs' defeat, players have no right to object, as long as I was straightforward about what they can expect from my game.

This is the one of the most unintelligent things I've seen said on this board. Who are you channeling here, shadzar? Because that should give you a hint of how you look not only wrong, but mentally deficient to boot. When's the last time you had fun arguing with one of your players about character choices? That should give you a hint that your primary mission as a DM is not 'run the game and get your way,' but 'create a fun play experience,' from which you indirectly derive entertainment, because this is a collaborative effort and that's how those work.

This is not a video game, it's not porn, it is not a self-gratifying pastime. This game is played with others, people who have come together to have fun, and any pig with the barest understanding of social interaction will realize that there is an inherent give-and-take in such an endeavor. If you're not OK with that, whether you are a DM or a player, then you need to go play a video game or watch porn, where no give-and-take is required. Besides revealing yourself to be a sociopath who can't grasp the basic notion of 'cooperation,' the real problem with your statement is that you can switch out the word DM for the word Player, and the 'running campaigns' bit with 'playing a Core Monk,' then you have merely recreated the argument for so-called "player entitlement." Your ability to create an argument is on par with that of a dead cat, and your equally frightening level of social ineptitude leads one to believe you're either just a troll or so mentally unscrewed that you should be institutionalized.

EDIT:

Demanding absolute altruism

That is not absolute altruism and you know it. When we demand that you pay for transportation, food, and give us your wife and daughters to play with after, then you can cry to me about absolute altruism. What K is "demanding" is that you come out of your cave and learn to cooperate with your players. D&D works best when everyone is focused on contributing to the collaborative game experience, and not focused on doing whatever you want as much as you want. Players can have varying levels of this "selfishness tempered with altruism," but if a DM can't stand this mingling of their desire for power-wanking gratification with the altruism required to focus on everyone's play experience instead of purely their own, the group has every right to get a new DM.

[K]

Not everyone has what it takes to be a good DM. Heck, Gygax created this game and he didn't have the chops to be a good DM, so don't feel bad if you don't have the necessary personality traits that would allow you to enjoy making other people have a fun evening.

Just out of couriosity, did you ever play in a game with Gygax as the DM (and I don't mean at a convention, lots of DM's get a killer attitude at a con because it's not a long term campaign)? Then how can you tell if he sucked or not? I never played with him as a DM in any manner, so I have no opiions one way or the other, but he did run a campaign for several years. I'm sure those people liked the game or else they wouldn't have continued playing.

I've read articles he's written on the games he's run. The man literally made his own children cry because of his DM decisions, and he's quite famous for his rants on punishing players for not making characters he approves of.

If your DMing sessions are traumatizing your children and revolve around punishing people, you should not be a DM. You should also probably seek out a mental health professional for counseling.

[K]

So I assume you don't play in card tournaments (Euchre or CCG or whatever), because in those there is a chance that you will be knocked out of the running and spend the rest of the night watching other people play?

Who the hell watches card tournaments? When you get knocked out, you then grab some other knocked-out players and go play your deck against them.

There is literally no way you can't be assured of a night of CCGing.

I don't really play Risk or Axis and Allies because those games are dumb, but the answer to those really is "play Smash Brothers until they are done." They are nothing like a DnD session where being knocked out might mean not getting to play for several weeks because the party is in the middle of an adventure in some deserted location and inserting a new character is not possible.

[DSMatticus]

So I assume you don't play in card tournaments (Euchre or CCG or whatever), because in those there is a chance that you will be knocked out of the running and spend the rest of the night watching other people play?

When you finish those, you go play with the other people who've lost or didn't enroll. Or you go do trading. (Talking about CCG conventions mostly, here.)

You also don't play long boardgames like Risk or Axis & Allies or etc., because in those there is a chance that your faction will be destroyed, and then you will spend the rest of the night watching other people play?

Do people finish games of those? I'm sure they do, but I've never seen the legitimate end of one.

Either way, D&D is not those games. Those games are adversarial. If they didn't have elimination conditions, they wouldn't make very good adversarial games. Players dropping from the game directly contributes the game towards it conclusion. D&D is not adversarial, and the only thing dropping players from the game is drop players from the game.

Sometimes you lose games.

And this is not about losing: this is about dying. If you lose a fight, fine, whatever: that's a failed objective and a handful of consequences to deal with (escape capture, get your shit back). Things that meaningfully advance the story. Dying can be used to meaningfully advance the story, but mostly it's just a time out card to a player. You can have loss without exclusion, and that means the only thing the exclusion mechanic is adding to the game is a fetishization of gritty realism, at a hefty expense.

Decoupling loss and PC death do this. Other solutions are "save PC death for the session's climactic battles," or "have players keep spare characters around, or keep some spare characters around yourself."

If your attitude is "I spent my valuable time to come here, so I better be able to play every minute, regardless of what I do or what my dice rolls are"...fuck that, and fuck you.

If you have players doing stupid shit like fighting dragons naked and blindfolded, you may have a problem. But that problem isn't "that character needs killing," that problem is "this player is doing stuff that is kind of detracting from the game and story here." (Or if you're playing something silly, maybe it's not a problem at all. All about context.)

[RadiantPhoenix]

And this is not about losing: this is about dying. If you lose a fight, fine, whatever: that's a failed objective and a handful of consequences to deal with (escape capture, get your shit back). Things that meaningfully advance the story. Dying can be used to meaningfully advance the story, but mostly it's just a time out card to a player. You can have loss without exclusion, and that means the only thing the exclusion mechanic is adding to the game is a fetishization of gritty realism, at a hefty expense.

So, what about, "you are dead. Escape death and get your stuff back"?

[DSMatticus]

So, what about, "you are dead. Escape death and get your stuff back"?

Also totally works. Death isn't an end so much as a relocation: now you're adventuring in hell! Making death not-death solves the problem.

[A Man In Black]

I've never met those players, so I suspect they don't exist.

I've met players that said they wanted that, usually to get into a game being advertised as such, but those guys tend to not come back to the game after they get killed off and then they don't play RPGs for a few months at all. This is hardly a good thing.

I've run with a few of them, but you need to make accommodations to keep people from wandering off and playing Halo. Play a lightweight game, have people roll up a stack of characters, make sure the setting allows for new people to just show up, etc. It's hardly a standard case the way people are making it out.

So I assume you don't play in card tournaments (Euchre or CCG or whatever), because in those there is a chance that you will be knocked out of the running and spend the rest of the night watching other people play?

You mean the tournaments that are almost always Swiss-style or double-elimination, just because of this concern? I don't know a thing about Euchre, but most CCG tournaments don't run single-elimination unless they have qualifying rounds or fuck-off huge player pools, for this very reason.

It's a lesser of two evils situation as far as I'm concerned. Not being able to take action or rolling up a new character sucks but I'd prefer it over not risking failure.

There are failure states short of dismemberment. Are you saying you can't imagine any tension without the risk of imminent death, and can't imagine any setback short of being murdered?

[Swordslinger]

Don't get me wrong, it's excellent to have someone want to do the job, but part of the job description is play. Anyone who says that playing shouldn't require fun kills a toddler somewhere.

It's all in definition of fun.

I don't think playing a game with invulnerability activated is all that fun. What's the point of having a battle if the only meaningful question is if the opponents die on round 2 or round 3? Why do I even care? It's just as exciting as rolling out a battle with a training dummy.

Victory is meaningless if there's no chance of defeat. If I wanted to mindlessly grind nearly risk free battles, I'd play a MMORPG. But I think those games are terrible so I don't do that.

[RadiantPhoenix]

There are RTS missions that can be lost even with invulnerability on.

[Seerow]

Don't get me wrong, it's excellent to have someone want to do the job, but part of the job description is play. Anyone who says that playing shouldn't require fun kills a toddler somewhere.

It's all in definition of fun.

I don't think playing a game with invulnerability activated is all that fun. What's the point of having a battle if the only meaningful question is if the opponents die on round 2 or round 3? Why do I even care? It's just as exciting as rolling out a battle with a training dummy.

Victory is meaningless if there's no chance of defeat. If I wanted to mindlessly grind nearly risk free battles, I'd play a MMORPG. But I think those games are terrible so I don't do that.

I want to point out most MMOs have a MUCH higher chance of dying than anything in any tabletop game. I don't know many tabletops that think an awesome encounter has a overall .01% success rate, and generally will kill even the best coordinated most optimized groups a dozen times before they win.

MMOs tend to do that. Tabletops don't. Because with an MMO, your group TPKs, you get back up and try again 5 minutes later.

[Swordslinger]

I want to point out most MMOs have a MUCH higher chance of dying than anything in any tabletop game.

On raids and such yes, but not in your every day camp + grind, unless you want to count things like disconnects where your character sits there and doesn't defend himself.

[Gx1080]

@Swordslinger

Nobody cares about those, so the point is still valid.

[Swordslinger]

@Swordslinger

Nobody cares about those, so the point is still valid.

There's a reason people don't like those. Because they're boring as fuck. So you're saying that the adventures with a chance of dying are better and more exciting.

That's what I've been saying all along.

[K]

@Swordslinger

Nobody cares about those, so the point is still valid.

There's a reason people don't like those. Because they're boring as fuck. So you're saying that the adventures with a chance of dying are better and more exciting.

That's what I've been saying all along.

MMOs are actually the perfect example. You can fail all you want, but you can't truly die.

Even if you screw up a special monster fight that drops awesome loot and you lose hours, days, or months of work, you can get back to playing instantly. Sure, your failure hurts because you didn't get the loot and your character doesn't get a power-up, but you can go back to doing some other in-game activity immediately(even if that activity is just redoing all the effort to redo the fight you just did).

And that's the model that people like. Risking loot is one thing, but risking your character has to be off the table.

I mean, as far as I know, Diablo II was the only game that risked true character death, and only when you played Hardcore Mode. I played that mode for some time, and then after my fourth character was PKed and I lost everything, I stopped playing Diablo II forever (even though I could have gone back to the non-Hardcore option).

It's a simple rule that the more sadistic your game, the quicker people burn out. I mean, I played Paranoia gleefully as character after character died, but I honestly never cared a lot about the game or the character... I can't even tell you now what the adventure was or what we did because it made so little impact on me.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I mean, as far as I know, Diablo II was the only game that risked true character death, and only when you played Hardcore Mode. I played that mode for some time, and then after my fourth character was PKed and I lost everything, I stopped playing Diablo II forever (even though I could have gone back to the non-Hardcore option).

You have obviously never heard of roguelike games.

[Whipstitch]

There are failure states short of dismemberment. Are you saying you can't imagine any tension without the risk of imminent death, and can't imagine any setback short of being murdered?

No, I'm saying I do not expect or require that death be taken off the table. Perhaps this is in part due to my history primarily as a Shadowrun player, but I'm pretty OK with the notion that some opponents play for keeps and should be approached accordingly.

[K]

I mean, as far as I know, Diablo II was the only game that risked true character death, and only when you played Hardcore Mode. I played that mode for some time, and then after my fourth character was PKed and I lost everything, I stopped playing Diablo II forever (even though I could have gone back to the non-Hardcore option).

You have obviously never heard of roguelike games.

Yeh, shitty ASCII games from the 70s don't seem to have anything to teach me.

The fact that permanent character death was discarded as soon as computers had enough memory for a Save file is a pretty strong argument for why it's a shitty mechanic.

[K]

There are failure states short of dismemberment. Are you saying you can't imagine any tension without the risk of imminent death, and can't imagine any setback short of being murdered?

No, I'm saying I do not expect or require that death be taken off the table. Perhaps this is in part due to my history primarily as a Shadowrun player, but I'm pretty OK with the notion that some opponents play for keeps and should be approached accordingly.

Aaaa Shadowrun..... the game where you spend entire sessions planning a run that takes 30 mins to execute AND and where you usually have generous amounts of Karma to burn to extract any character from possible death AND you have rules to avoid character death AND the MC has to deliberately not do anything smart like use snipers or rig explosives or use deathtraps to kill runners or any of the unlimited ways to kill someone in a modern setting....

Seriously, that game is playable at all because the MC has to play enemies as dumb as possible.

[echoVanguard]

Here's the key point, gang, and it shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone: people like different things. Some people want to be assured that they can keep playing even if their characters die, while others are more interested in the verisimilitude of character risk and death and are perfectly happy to sit out a session if fate conspires against them. A well-designed system provides avenues for both styles of play, and groups should use whichever style appeals to the members of that group.

Personally, I would never play in a game where my character was unable to die permanently, nor would I ever want to participate in a game where I didn't feel my character's actions incurred risk. But I've gamed with several players over the years who became intensely, sometimes violently unhappy if their characters were even knocked unconscious for a round, and those players' desires with regard to types of play are just as valid as mine (even if their methods of expression could use some work).

The real problem at the core of this discussion is that there are difficulties in establishing minimum requirements for "fun" for some people. Some players want a game where they feel that there's a real chance for them to fail, up to and including the death of their characters. Others don't want their characters to die, but they're ok with having them disabled or captured. Still others always want to win, no matter what, and yet others are unwilling to countenance even temporary setbacks - some players become extremely upset when they lose control of their characters for part of a round, or have to waste actions on things they don't like doing instead of doing what they wanted. And there are yet more players who become miserably unhappy any time anything does not go their way, from a missed attack to suboptimal treasure to an NPC's attitude.

At what point do these preferences become constrictive? That's for each group to decide.

echo

PS - as an aside, there's an important semantic point to be made here - the core components of a game, according to Wikipedia, are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction - a game without all four of these things is not a game, it is something else entirely (usually collaborative storytelling).

[RadiantPhoenix]

(double post)

[RadiantPhoenix]

Yeh, shitty ASCII games from the 70s don't seem to have anything to teach me.

The fact that permanent character death was discarded as soon as computers had enough memory for a Save file is a pretty strong argument for why it's a shitty mechanic.

The latest version of Nethack is from 2003 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetHack), and still has a decent number of players. Please note that this is just the number of people playing on one particular server, which is actually generally less convenient than playing offline.

Nethack does have a save mechanic, it just deletes the save file when it loads it.

Nethack does have really quick and easy character generation, though, and you're not expected to get too attached to your characters.

[Gx1080]

If "no character death" is a thing, I rather have it built-in on the mechanics instead of being a result of the DM coddling players.

I would do it as an option of many. "When you character's hit points reach zero, X, Y or Z can happen". Beats being kidnapped all the time.

[K]

Here's the key point, gang, and it shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone: people like different things. Some people want to be assured that they can keep playing even if their characters die, while others are more interested in the verisimilitude of character risk and death and are perfectly happy to sit out a session if fate conspires against them. A well-designed system provides avenues for both styles of play, and groups should use whichever style appeals to the members of that group.

Seriously, cut the relativist bullshit.

We can see in this very thread what the problem is: some people feel entitled to ruin other people's fun for their own amusement because being a DM is such an imposition on them, and they think that because some people put up with that for a while, it must be what everyone wants.

Anyone who actually cared about verisimilitude would be offended that random people keep joining the party with the most contrived excuses. Anyone who cared about role-playing would be annoyed that all the character development they've sunk into their character just was flushed away. Anyone who cared about playing a tactical game would be annoyed that their best efforts were going to rendered meaningless because no matter how good their were, the DM is going to raise to difficulty to kill them.

I know I'd be offended if I optimized well, played well, RPed well, and still the DM raised the difficulty of encounters to render all that meaningless, killing my character permanently to add insult to injury.

Being a good DM is not just letting people fail, but it's letting people win as well. Permanent character death isn't even on the "fail"/"win" slider, it's on the "play"/"don't play" slider, and that's the core issue.