What is with the entitlement? (shadzar stay out)

[fectin]

The folks supporting never killing PCs ("pro-lifers"?) are arguing from three distinct fallacies (ignoring the ad hominem and well-poisoning):

First: that anything which could happen, inevitably will happen, given enough time. That's simply not true. Even if you really did have infinite time, some series converge, and I have yet to see anyone who has done anything for infinite time.

Second: from the first, a false dilemma. Either kill characters constantly and viciously, or never at all.

Third: improper distribution of descriptors (an "illicit minor"). It's not very fun to fall to your death, but people still enjoy free-climbing overall. Character death may not be fun, but that fails to demonstrate anything about whether games that include character death are unfun. Personally, I hate losing Twilight Imperium, but would never play if I couldn't lose.

[tussock]

Random encounters are always a waste of time and i never use them. If the players have gone off the rails, as they invariably do, I will come up with encounters on the fly to entertain them with. As for fudging, you hardly need to. You are the DM and you can make the monsters be and do whatever you choose.

So very many different assumptions there.

See, I use random encounters to save me time, in the planning stages. They're not a waste for the game, as they can act as warning signs, appropriate scenery and foreshadowing, walky-talky clues, charm-fodder or undead-in-the-making, all in an easy-beat fight/skill package that lets the PCs seem powerful, unless they push too far. They also act to push the pace of the game along.

There are no rails. There's a hook (treasure, bounty, player request), with abundant clues to chase (and random scenery the players turn into clues of their own making), often a BBEG the players will wish to cut up; but I make plans for the monsters, not for the players. It's not a set of rooms for the players to raid, it's a home for a tribe of marauding, Evil humanoids, who are expecting some vengeance to come calling eventually.

It'll be super-hard if you wander in at level 2, and super-easy if you wait 'till level 10, because updating it much is boring, anti-sim, and thwarts the player's accomplishments anyway.

There is no fudging. Players hate it, and I will not do that to them. As DM it is my job to present reasonable collections and alliances of monsters (and treasures) in reasonably foreshadowed places, prepared as if living their lives, have them coordinate a response and fight back and as well as they might manage, within the limits of their information and community morale.


I get there's other schools of thought around this, the narrativists and what have you, but eeeeew. I may not be the enemy of the players, but I do play them during the game.

[Swordslinger]

It's impossible to impartially run an adventure in any sense. The MC is choosing which tactics the monsters use based on his own knowledge of PC strengths and weaknesses, is deciding which PC actions have a chance of success, and is altering the narrative to fit his own preferences and sense of verisimilitude.

No, it's seriously not. You can go by what the monster would logically know and go from there. Now some DMs are better than others at doing that. Obviously DMs are human so they will sometimes make mistakes in this regard, but it absolutely doesn't mean they can't try and get pretty close. You're using some kind of crazy All-Or-Nothing fallacy.

Approach what your monsters do from a logical point of view based on the monster, not on your desire to save/kill PCs, and you'll do pretty well. It's not nearly the herculean task you think it is. You can absolutely try to play the game as though you were impartial, and in fact, you should.

The fact that human beings are naturally bias does not stop us from trying to use referees, judges or any number of human arbiters who are supposed to remain detached from the situation. If most cultures feel like it's okay to have one of these guys influence whether someone goes to prison for murder, I think it's probably okay for us to use a person with a similar role for running a fantasy simulation. But you know, that's just me.

I realize in your vision, none other than a flawless computer AI could ever run your games, because you can't accept the idea that the DM might be flawed.

That's the whole game. Sure, the individual combat rounds may be determined by dice rolls and the overall options may be limited by character builds, but at the end of the day all meaningful results are determined by the MC. You don't have a chance to Diplomacize NPCs the MC doesn't want you to make friends with, you don't get to fight monsters the MC has not planned for you to fight, you don't get treasure he hasn't placed for you or decided you can buy, and even character advancement is subject to the material he wants to let into the game.

So long as the adventure doesn't change parameters to fuck you or help you, PC choices matter. If there's an adventure with a puzzle or riddle and that puzzle has a fixed answer, then the PCs can either come up with a right answer or a wrong one. So long as there's a right choice and a wrong choice, what PCs do matters. They can either fail or succeed based on what they opt to do.

Now there's a caveat to this, The only time their actions cease to matter is if the DM is railroading and forcing a set outcome. If they fail the puzzle and the DM solves it for them anyway, then suddenly their actions cease to matter. And dude, fuck that shit. As a PC, I want my choices to matter.

If I did something stupid and got myself in a situation where I should die. Let my character die. The threat of character death makes the game more exciting. Once the DM takes that off the table, the game loses a lot for me. I don't want my success to be preordained, because that takes away any value from my choices.

[A Man In Black]

The folks supporting never killing PCs ("pro-lifers"?) are arguing from three distinct fallacies (ignoring the ad hominem and well-poisoning):

First: that anything which could happen, inevitably will happen, given enough time. That's simply not true. Even if you really did have infinite time, some series converge, and I have yet to see anyone who has done anything for infinite time.

Second: from the first, a false dilemma. Either kill characters constantly and viciously, or never at all.

Third: improper distribution of descriptors (an "illicit minor"). It's not very fun to fall to your death, but people still enjoy free-climbing overall. Character death may not be fun, but that fails to demonstrate anything about whether games that include character death are unfun. Personally, I hate losing Twilight Imperium, but would never play if I couldn't lose.

First off, character death (if at all possible) inevitably will happen in games, because there is essentially an infinite amount of any even moderately successful RPG. It won't necessarily happen in this game or even all the games played by Bob, but it will happen in some game and it will suck for that game for various reasons. If possible and practical, it's a good idea to change things so that game sucks less. It's also not a fact in evidence that all games have a trivial chance of character death when pretty much all of the crunch-heavy RPGs played by TGD regulars don't.

Second, it doesn't matter if characters die constantly or infrequently, it still sucks. In fact, if it happens rarely, it sucks even more when it happens, because there's more of a feeling of being picked on, singled out, and/or excluded. Being ejected from a game in baseball is more of a big deal to people than being ejected in hockey or basketball.

Third, a game can certainly be fun despite character death, but that is in spite of, not because of. If we could eliminate death and injury in climbing, we totally would, and freeclimbing would still appeal to people who enjoy higher-risk climbs because failure would mean that you lose more progress. Nobody's advocating that all things that people hate be eliminated, nor that all setbacks be eliminated, but that setbacks that mean a player sits in the penalty box for a session or three be eliminated.

[tzor]

And what's the story with this MC stuff? I've heard storyteller or GM before, but since when did we start working on the D&D rap?

It's a really bad inside joke. IIRC it comes from a retranslation of Dungeon Master from one language back to English which became "Mister Cavern." Somehow people thought that was interesting and adopted it here for common use. Such odd things seem common on gaming boards for some reason; I recall the common mispellngs that weres common on the old WoTC D&D boards, for instance.

[K]

The fact that human beings are naturally bias does not stop us from trying to use referees, judges or any number of human arbiters who are supposed to remain detached from the situation. If most cultures feel like it's okay to have one of these guys influence whether someone goes to prison for murder, I think it's probably okay for us to use a person with a similar role for running a fantasy simulation. But you know, that's just me.

In the US, judges are so heavily biased against blacks that, all things being equal otherwise, they give black men death sentences three times as often and sentence them to 50% more jail-time as white men regardless of the race of the judge.

That's the result of pretending that you can be impartial. It's a really shitty system that one can easily argue is fundamentally unfair (hell, you can actually influence judges simply by wearing the right color of clothing).

As for MCing, you can pretend that you are impartial, but you can't convince anyone of that fact because you literally choose the monsters that you then "logically play" which means you are choosing attack routines you favor for your own purposes, you set the stage that makes certain monsters and PC tactics more or less powerful, and have the power to decide which PC actions are smart or dumb.

Don't you see how "I'm going to kill the PCs if they do something dumb" is a self-fulfilling prophecy? The MC literally pre-decides which PC actions he find unacceptable based on his superior knowledge of the situation, then executes PCs for acting on their own limited knowledge. I mean, the example from this thread clearly was "well, they should have known it was a closet troll because of my completely unclear hint, so I was justified in killing them."

How is that even remotely fair?

Being impartial is an all or nothing enterprise, and in the case of RPGing it's clearly not impartial at all.

[tzor]

First and foremost, I can’t see how not knowing or spotting information can be considered dumb unless it’s so blatantly obvious. (The dragon flies towards you / I stand out in the open and strike a “Superman” pose.)

Extreme puzzle monsters where you die unless you know the secret code word is stupid and not fun.

High risk/reward maneuvers however should be allowed to happen and there should be an appropriate chance of character death. Yes the death still sucks, but it’s a somewhat expected death, so in general the suck value than a sudden death from out of the blue. Players who don’t like to do such maneuvers can have their characters live more mundane lives.

[echoVanguard]

In the US, judges are so heavily biased against blacks that, all things being equal otherwise, they give black men death sentences three times as often and sentence them to 50% more jail-time as white men regardless of the race of the judge.

That's the result of pretending that you can be impartial.

No, it isn't. You stated statistic A, then stated statistic A is "the result of intention B", but that's both superficially and factually untrue. Not only is it an irrelevant conclusion, it's correlation does not imply causation.

a whole bunch of other shenanigans

K, in all seriousness, you really seem to be advocating the viewpoint that TTRPGs are not a pastime you enjoy, approve of, or endorse in any way, because you think that as long as the TTRPG has a Game Master capable of deciding outcomes, the system is intrinsically unfair and biased in such a way that all non-optimal outcomes are personally reprehensible results of the Game Master's malice. If this is not true, can you please clarify your position? And if it is true, why are you posting on this board?

echo

[virgil]

First and foremost, I can’t see how not knowing or spotting information can be considered dumb unless it’s so blatantly obvious. (The dragon flies towards you / I stand out in the open and strike a “Superman” pose.)

Fun story. I was in a game where a player literally did this, though he didn't call it a Superman pose, he did mimic it and give a short monologue of how he'll bring the Great Wyrm Red Dragon (wearing full plate and plethora of buffs/gear) to justice. He actually chose to not to attack (was in melee range) so he could justify IC the length of his monologue.

He didn't die though. Before the dragon could act, it was blindsided by a furious storm of acid flasks from off-screen and died...

[Red_Rob]

K, in all seriousness, you really seem to be advocating the viewpoint that TTRPGs are not a pastime you enjoy, approve of, or endorse in any way, because you think that as long as the TTRPG has a Game Master capable of deciding outcomes, the system is intrinsically unfair and biased in such a way that all non-optimal outcomes are personally reprehensible results of the Game Master's malice. If this is not true, can you please clarify your position? And if it is true, why are you posting on this board?

echo

Of course K doesn't enjoy RPG's. Don't you remember this post:

I honestly don't think you can invest in a character you expect to lose at some point.

This makes me wonder why character death means anything at all to people who have stated that they don't care for characters or story. I mean, it is a lose condition of a sort, but it's as completely arbitrary as anything else you can use for a lose condition when you don't care.

Then I wonder if character death is actually what poisons people well before they get a chance to invest in the first place. I mean, the killer DM says "I run a tough campaign" and people then don't invest and settle for little RP, or no RP, or bad RP because good RP involves investing somewhat.

K said right here that he has never been invested in any of the games of D&D he has ever played in and deliberately roleplays poorly because he is so scared the big bad DM might take his character away. Would you have fun playing like that?

[Swordslinger]

As for MCing, you can pretend that you are impartial, but you can't convince anyone of that fact because you literally choose the monsters that you then "logically play" which means you are choosing attack routines you favor for your own purposes, you set the stage that makes certain monsters and PC tactics more or less powerful, and have the power to decide which PC actions are smart or dumb.

And the designer of every game in history (computer or otherwise) decides what the correct answer is too. The programmer who decides to include fire creatures as an encounter in Final Fantasy is doing the exact same thing. The guy who decides that pawns move different from queens is inevitably setting up the game such that sacrificing a queen for a pawn is stupid.

And creating wise and unwise actions is a good thing, because it means that player choices fucking matter.

The moment you try to eliminate all bad choices is the moment people cease to even care about the game. If it doesn't matter what spell you cast or what tactics you use? Who the fuck wants to even play that game?

As far as designing encounters that are fair and give people fair warning... well that's just a skill you have to develop as a DM. The fact that you think it's impossible probably indicates you need to do more work on it dude.

Nobody is disputing that you can create unfair guesswork scenarios, but you don't have to do that.

The fact that human DMs can screw up doesn't mean they will.

Don't you see how "I'm going to kill the PCs if they do something dumb" is a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Only if there's no way to potentially foresee what's dumb and what isn't. You can totally figure that a fire elemental might be immune to fire. In fact, when you decide to fireball it, most people at the table will be facepalming, because what you did makes no sense.

Whenever a PC has ended up dying from stupidity in my games, I have never had the other PCs thinking things like "Wow, that was a bunch of terrible moon logic bullshit."

Instead they're asking the stupid player, "The trolls were doing 20 damage a swing to us, why would you rush in the room and let all three surround you?"

And he gives some dumb response and they just shake their heads.

[K]

In the US, judges are so heavily biased against blacks that, all things being equal otherwise, they give black men death sentences three times as often and sentence them to 50% more jail-time as white men regardless of the race of the judge.

That's the result of pretending that you can be impartial.

No, it isn't. You stated statistic A, then stated statistic A is "the result of intention B", but that's both superficially and factually untrue. Not only is it an irrelevant conclusion, it's correlation does not imply causation.

Don't pretend you can argue or use logic. It's really embarrassing to watch.

I refuted a statement with a fact, then drew a conclusion from the fact and the refuted statement.

Judges are universally thought to be impartial and fair, and the facts refute that, thus casting doubt on the very idea of impartiality. Now, you can argue that other cases of impartiality support the idea of impartiality, but I suspect the evidence isn't there.

As for RPGs, I enjoy those that follow the social contract. The DM provides a story and I'll provide an engaged player. They won't kill or ruin my character and I'll bite on their hooks and take their RP elements seriously and in-character. It's fun because it's improv theatre, not because it's a game. Any DM who doesn't play that way just doesn't get to play with me.

The game parts just put limits on the improv just like any improv game, and people do improv game things like adopt roles, adopt arbitrary restrictions, and try to inspire others to keep the improv going. Like any improv game, the only lose condition is not keeping the fun going.

The fact that anyone thinks that there is an objective reality to RPGing in spite of the evidence seems disturbed to me. It sounds like you guys have problems figuring out what is fantasy and what is reality.

It's a fucking recreational activity designed to be fun for a group of friends. Get a grip and stop being weird about it.

[A Man In Black]

And the designer of every game in history (computer or otherwise) decides what the correct answer is too. The programmer who decides to include fire creatures as an encounter in Final Fantasy is doing the exact same thing. The guy who decides that pawns move different from queens is inevitably setting up the game such that sacrificing a queen for a pawn is stupid.

But you can fail those games. Indeed, in the case of some you are expected to, to use trial and error and fail until you figure out how the game works. Failure comes at the cost of setting up the board again or restarting from a save point.

These games have failure states that are not sitting out any possible play for a period of weeks.

[Swordslinger]

The fact that anyone thinks that there is an objective reality to RPGing in spite of the evidence seems disturbed to me. It sounds like you guys have problems figuring out what is fantasy and what is reality.

It's a fucking recreational activity designed to be fun for a group of friends. Get a grip and stop being weird about it.

So is every other game you might play, it doesn't mean that you go and disregard the rules for the hell of it.

Character death is a part of the rules. It always has been, in every single edition of D&D that has ever been produced. If you want a game without character death, then D&D is not the game for you.

People have told you here that they enjoy the threat of real death and they enjoy overcoming challenges in D&D. I don't really care about your whole "trees falling a forest" style analogy about how no challenge in any game anywhere is real or unbiased because the designer set up what's success/fail states or because DMs are human. The point is that people have said they want character death to be a possibility.

This is a game about being heroes, and you lose all heroic feel if it's literally set in stone that your characters can never die no matter how stupid they are. By doing that kind of DM railroading BS, you're taking away my ability to actually feel like my decisions matter or that my character is doing anything heroic. Do you seriously think I can take any "Deadly" monster seriously if I know the thing can never hurt my character? It's just a total verisimilitude killer.

[RadiantPhoenix]

These games have failure states that are not sitting out any possible play for a period of weeks.

I think that this is a very legitimate issue, and that it needs to be addressed.

How can we reduce the amount of time a player has to sit out when their character dies or is otherwise removed from play?

Can we, perhaps, come up with some acceptable method for a player to influence the game without a character?

How about if we give PCs abilities that only work while they're dead?

EDIT: Or otherwise incapacitated.

[Stubbazubba]

What would be the difference between "dead but still affecting play," and "alive but affecting play much less until you can be rescued/escape/etc." ?

[RadiantPhoenix]

The "dead or incapacitated" abilities would:

• Directly affect what's going on in the game right now, rather than later, when you come back
• Play somewhat differently from how the character normally plays

These could also become active if the party is split normally, maybe. Not sure.

[Chamomile]

I could actually see some cool flavor from a game where, whenever you died, you became a disembodied spirit capable of exerting limited influence on the battlefield, and that this spirit could be brought back into your body with a ~2 minute ritual.

[RadiantPhoenix]

The more I think about it, the more I begin to realize that it's not just a problem with death, although death is the worst offender, it's a problem with things that keep a PC out of the game for more than about fifteen minutes of real time.

• Death
• Death-like effects, e.g. flesh to stone
• Capture
• Splitting the party

[DSMatticus]

I can't believe Swordslinger is still blathering bullshit like "PC's have to be able to fail" when that isn't even the argument: the argument is "failure shouldn't mean someone has to stop playing." And then as examples of why penalties for failure are awesome, he uses games where failure means nothing.

"Oops, I failed the videogame boss and died. Quickload."
"Oops, I failed the encounter and died. What level are we? 10? Well, see you guys next week."

[ckafrica]

There are no rails. There's a hook (treasure, bounty, player request), with abundant clues to chase (and random scenery the players turn into clues of their own making), often a BBEG the players will wish to cut up; but I make plans for the monsters, not for the players. It's not a set of rooms for the players to raid, it's a home for a tribe of marauding, Evil humanoids, who are expecting some vengeance to come calling eventually.

See hooks, clues, prepared encounters and whatnot are rails. The DM plans out how he expects the players to respond and prepares encounters and environments for them to access and engage with. Perhaps they don't do it as you expect and you have to improvise to keep the story going. That improve might be coming up with something entirely different because they have come up with an entirely different way to engage your prepared material. Perhaps its that they've made a decision that would likely result in their untimely demise and so you need to figure out how to keep the story going in a believable way. You have created the situation that the story will play out in and it is your job to make sure the story can continue.

The players can't change anything. There are no "take it backs" in RPGs.* If they do something that looks like it will lead to their demise, than you have to figure out how the story can continue If you as a DM can't figure out how to convincingly keep the story going, be it do to them making a choice you hadn't anticipated or them making a choice which has led them to their doom, than you shouldn't be a DM.

*well I do believe the DM needs to warn when they are about to try something guaranteed to fail. If a player says he's going to try to jump a lava river that is wider than he can possibly jump because he didn't bother to ask how far it was, I will let him reconsider with full information.

It'll be super-hard if you wander in at level 2, and super-easy if you wait 'till level 10, because updating it much is boring, anti-sim, and thwarts the player's accomplishments anyway.

First of all letting players take on an adventure you know they have small to no chance to handle is a pretty dick move on the part of the DM. If you can't give them enough hints that they aren't ready for it without killing them, than you are playing with a group of idiots (in which case you should be preparing encounters which fit their abilities, or simply not run adventures with a group of moron how can't handle the kinds of challenges you like to prepare).

Secondly, updating is not anti-sim, you just have to imagine why they're now tougher. The goblins you left alone have been secretly digging to find a powerful ancient artifact that they have managed to find while the players were off doing other stuff. Now they have been mutated into half-shadow goblins. bump up the treasure as a result of the cash around said artifact and huzzah you're good to go.

There is no fudging. Players hate it, and I will not do that to them. As DM it is my job to present reasonable collections and alliances of monsters (and treasures) in reasonably foreshadowed places, prepared as if living their lives, have them coordinate a response and fight back and as well as they might manage, within the limits of their information and community morale.

See DMs are actually fudging all the time. We do it by making tactical choices which will give the players a fighting chance. We don't make them fight the who village in a single go. We don't have all the archers turn the mage into a pin-cushion and leave the poor fighter for last. In the rocket-launcher-tag world of 3e, every time your not TPKing the party during any challenging encounter, you are probably holding back the full potential you could unleash on the players. And why do you do that? Because you want them to be able to win and continue the story.

[ckafrica]

These games have failure states that are not sitting out any possible play for a period of weeks.

I think that this is a very legitimate issue, and that it needs to be addressed.

How can we reduce the amount of time a player has to sit out when their character dies or is otherwise removed from play?

Can we, perhaps, come up with some acceptable method for a player to influence the game without a character?

How about if we give PCs abilities that only work while they're dead?

EDIT: Or otherwise incapacitated.

The most immediate solution I and some of my DMs have used for this is to let the player without a character on hand handle some of the monsters for us. Unfortunately that only works for combat situations and if you've got long RP segments in between without a character, you're a tad screwed. The other solution was to have each character's henchman be played by another character so you'd always have someone to play (assuming of course the henchman hadn't gotten whacked as well). But that only works if you've got a small enough group that having 2 characters per player wasn't bogging things down.

[Psychic Robot]

sometimes characters die
big fucking whoop
life goes on

[A Man In Black]

I think that this is a very legitimate issue, and that it needs to be addressed.

How can we reduce the amount of time a player has to sit out when their character dies or is otherwise removed from play?

Can we, perhaps, come up with some acceptable method for a player to influence the game without a character?

How about if we give PCs abilities that only work while they're dead?

EDIT: Or otherwise incapacitated.

The simplest way is to make the standard defeat state not death, and let kidnapping and other suchlike be covered by the "Don't split the fucking party, you moron" GM advice rather than rules. That way, people still get to participate in the party the same way they normally do, rather than needing some alternate while-you're-dead minigame.

[Swordslinger]

I can't believe Swordslinger is still blathering bullshit like "PC's have to be able to fail" when that isn't even the argument: the argument is "failure shouldn't mean someone has to stop playing." And then as examples of why penalties for failure are awesome, he uses games where failure means nothing.

I don't even see what the big fucking deal is over people not being able to play. Dude, in D&D your party can sometimes split up and that means you won't be in every scene. That's just how the game works and I don't feel like it's a bad thing so long as it's not done for extended periods of time.

The fact that dying is a pretty serious and rare penalty is not a huge deal for me. Yes, dying sucks, but it happens. But lets keep in mind this isn't like death in a video game where you die every 5 minutes, probably more. A PC death should be a rare major event, and yeah, I don't have a huge issue with people having to sit out when they die.

I have to assume nobody here has ever played monopoly, Risk or any number of other multiplayer board games, where people who lose get knocked out. It's just something you accept about how the game works. And honestly I'd rather just be knocked out entirely rather than just be hanging around with no chance of doing anything useful. As far as crap to do while knocked out, start working on your next character? Or even just go play video games.

So big deal... Darth Vader kills Obi-Wan and then Obi-Wan's player rolls up a new rebel pilot for the assault on the death star. Shit happens dude.