tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3871409676946408069.post6500563396107293364..comments2023-10-14T03:58:59.333-06:00Comments on The Tao of D&D: 5e: Achilles HeelAlexis Smolenskhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10539170107563075967noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3871409676946408069.post-34372199128393980722019-02-04T11:14:11.301-07:002019-02-04T11:14:11.301-07:00Diminishing consequence is a feature of computer g...Diminishing consequence is a feature of computer games, as well. Games in the 80's tended to be unforgiving - you lose all your lives in Super Mario Bros, you start the game over at the beginning. No save files. Your only option was a total do-over.<br /><br />Over time, (computer) game designers have realized *people don't like to lose*. Probably for the reason you outline in this post. Games now auto-save regularly. Difficulties are set so the average casual player will die seldom, and when they do, they lose very little progress.<br /><br />Even "hard" modern games like Dark Souls or Super Meat Boy, billed as throwbacks to the unforgiving games of yesteryear, have these features. In Dark Souls, death means dropping your "souls" (experience points) on the ground to be picked up later and respawning at the closest bonfire. Super Meat Boy makes you restart the level when you die, but you can do so an unlimited number of times.<br /><br />"Iron-man" modes with one save and perma-death are a niche market, and even games which offer such a mode (very few) offer it merely as an option. The vast majority of people simply don't like perma-death, aren't interested in playing with it, and would never consider playing a game where this was enforced.<br /><br />So yes - WotC could have pushed perma-death hard in 5e, and yes, the game would likely have been the better for it. But make no mistake - it would either be ignored, or reduce the popularity of the game. For a business, not an appealing prospect.Charles Ahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00941603544547428940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3871409676946408069.post-77544713567124047022019-01-24T13:11:08.251-07:002019-01-24T13:11:08.251-07:00I remember having a couple of NPCs that would join...I remember having a couple of NPCs that would join the party if a player was gone or what-not. If every character was near death and I had to decide what character got hit that was the roll I fudged, the blow was gonna hit the NPC and give our team one more round.... Played right the NPC deaths were pretty meaningful.Ruprechthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00139664977453444000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3871409676946408069.post-43547022644867199602019-01-24T12:08:16.179-07:002019-01-24T12:08:16.179-07:00I'd like to answer Lance's point about dea...I'd like to answer Lance's point about death being relatively uncommon. He's right. I played in about two dozen campaigns between 1979 and 1986, run by DMs between the ages of 15 and 45, and in all of those campaigns (including my own) the average chance of death was that one character might die every 8 to 20 runnings. Usually a character would then be raised, and occasionally the raise failed (which was a thing), resulting in permanent death about 1 time in 10. So death was not regular.<br /><br />HOWEVER ... there were "death fetishists" in the game community in those days who got off on a certain kind of self-made and purchased modules (like the Tomb of Horrors), who considered it hilarious to die every few minutes and to have a pile of characters ready to walk into whatever meat grinder the DM planned. These nihilists used to be THE pariahs of legitimate gaming, as they wouldn't hesitate to disrupt campaigns with all the tropes they established: slaughtering random townspeople and old men, hurling themselves stupidly into traps and piles of monsters, burning down everything, cheerfully taking another from their stock of characters and doing it all again.<br /><br />It is these people who created the myth that OSR games used to be about death ... largely because TSR catered to those kind because several of the staff WERE those kind.<br />Alexis Smolenskhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06718381170131324115noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3871409676946408069.post-11687914880394281972019-01-24T11:18:12.408-07:002019-01-24T11:18:12.408-07:00Not just the threat of death, but the actual occur...Not just the threat of death, but the actual occurrence of the thing is an extremely important aspect of the game in my experience. <br /><br />I grew up playing BECMI run by my Dad. Right now I am working through a series of interviews with my Dad about the games we played as a family when I was a kid, which I will eventually transcribe and post on my blog. From these interviews I've come to realize that PC death was relatively uncommon compared to what most old school gamers talk about, but it was still present. <br /><br />As kids we weren't really that afraid of character death because of a common practice we held. The games were of a sporadic open table/open GM nature. We might start a campaign one week, but the next we might do a completely different campaign with different PCs and a different GM and a different setting(though usually the setting was nominally the Known World aka Mystara), and never return to the first weeks campaign. So when a character died in one campaign we would often reuse that character in a different/new campaign, sometimes at the level they died and sometimes we would adjust them to a level appropriate to the campaign. For us a character was never gone forever when they died, we could always play them later. I've found this rule we used and the attitude I developed about PC death are incompatible with actual play since moving on to the more traditional campaign style. So now for me, the impact of a PC death is different, and tied to that I dread making a new PC because I've played so many I feel like I am just recreating a character I already have and could transfer to the new campaign.Lance Duncanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13817319325489613672noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3871409676946408069.post-55638694350756517882019-01-24T05:13:41.934-07:002019-01-24T05:13:41.934-07:00Setbacks are heroic, death is tragedic. Modernity ...Setbacks are heroic, death is tragedic. Modernity doesn't do tragedy (and copes increasingly less well with death on the whole).<br /><br />Above everything, death doesn't sell. Add to this the fact that, as a business, the gaps eminently worth bridging are the ones to comics (or comic-based movies) and videogames, the former having a rather fluid interpretation of death, the later a medium that has gradually become more forgiving as it matured.<br /><br />Today you no longer beat games, you explore them. Death is nought but a trifle in the path of those safely anchored to the last save point.<br />Drainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09724863160300686402noreply@blogger.com