Quote from: BedrockBrendan;809888I never understand people who do this sort of thing.

Some people don't get don't get past the temper tantrums stage of development, unfortunately.

And, being more generous, we all have a bad day from time to time when our 'shit buffer' is running on empty!

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;809856Speaking of "losing," this reminds me an alignment question I had.

In modern D&D, you can change your alignment, no problem. In old D&D, you got hit with a level punishment. Why?

I would imagine it was so players couldn't arbitrarily switch alignments to their advantage, rather than as an organic part of play. Like, for example, when they were NG but found a badass +5 LE Vorpal Sword? That'd be my guess anyway.

It doesn't bother me.  

Unfortunately these days a lot of rpg's will say right in the intro that the game is "like a novel" or "a story of your own creation", which I think puts all sorts of expectations into a players head.  "If it's my story, then I get to choose what happens to me when I want and how I want it!"

The more I think on it, the more I come around to what Estar talks about- rpgs are a game that provides an experience, not so much creating a story.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;809856Speaking of "losing," this reminds me an alignment question I had.

In modern D&D, you can change your alignment, no problem. In old D&D, you got hit with a level punishment. Why? Was there some sort of flavorful justification for it like the character being confused and disoriented with his place in the world now, or was it just about enforcing rigid adherence to the alignment?

Was this kind of "losing" considered fun and necessary for the old alignment system, or is everybody just glad to be rid of it?

In AD&D the reason for it was because each character is linked to some same aligned god by their alignment even if they do not profess belief in one. So changing alignment was altering a fundamental aspect of the character and how the universe viewed the character. Worse for clerics.

If the change was involountary then then the lost level could be recovered by undoing the change. But if it was by free will then the change was permanent and there was likely no going back due to disfavour now with whatever cosmic force you just snubbed.

In the end. Like all else it vareies wildly from group to group. Much like being level drained. Some will shrug and work to regain it. Others will throw a tantrum at the obviously broken game and/or dick DM.

To try to clarify, there are different rates of losing:

1) "The PCs can't lose" - They may have setbacks, but ultimately they're going to get through the mission with at least minimal success.

2) "The PCs will lose, but rarely" - Like many old-school modules, the normal expectation is that if the players start, they will make it through to the end of the module - possibly with a number of new characters. However, it is at least acknowledged that losing is a possibility.

3) "The PCs lose most of the time" - The majority of the time (like my example of 75%), the PCs fail to achieve their primary goal in an adventure. i.e. The main bad guy is still in power, and/or the village is lost, etc.

This is NOT a thread to be bitching about #1. What I want to know is how far towards or into #3 we can go and still be fun.

Quote from: dbm;809869I'm sure there is also a significant block of players who are short on prep time so they make use of modules and the like (I know I fit in that category) and modules are typically designed so you can use as much as possible of it. If you spend money on a module where the party solves the adventure in the first scene, gets mostly wiped out 25% of the way through or some such you might feel short changed. In more home-build play these things are less of an issue in my experience (a friend has more prep time than me and his adventures are consequently much more free wheeling).

I agree with this, but I think that modules influence the prep style of many GMs, so in my experience it is still a big influence on home-built games. For me, most GMs would prepare adventures with a similar assumption to modules - that the PCs will get through the earlier challenges and make it to the later ones.

For me, this has been true even in many fairly sand-boxy setups. The players can choose where to go - but if they go into the ruined tower in hex A7, the expectation is that they'll make it through to the key parts of the ruins. TPK and/or abandoning the mission are possible, but not expected - and even TPKs may still end with successful mission, as the new PCs take up the same adventure.

It highly depends on a number of factors.


Chargen
If it's long and onerous, death factors into a ROI for playing the game -- more work/unfun vs. whatever fun there is.

Taking it personally
Depending on a lot of factors, there are games where my character dying feels _personal_, like _I_ fucked up or was stupid. This is moreso for more wargamey stuff where you have to make really good choices or your characters die.
Given that RPGs are, for me, destressing after a week (or whatever) of stress... I don't want a game that feels like a new job.
Yes, some people enjoy engrossing challenges and whatnot, but I'm trying to recharge, not grind my mental gears more.

Cool challenge vs. stomp
When I've played PVP online, my favorite element is when things are very very balanced, when both teams are giving it their all and it could go either way.
Losing (or dying) in situations like that? I'm cool with it. I feel like I gained a lot from the entertainment, and losing a character, well, I gave it a good shot!
I hate one-sided battles, whether I'm up or down. Being taken out because oh hey everyone on that team is individually as powerful as ten folks on our team (I'm looking at you, final tier Warhammer MMO) is just... not fun. At all.
Being able to take out dozens of enemies and being in no real danger? Eh, that feels cheap, too, although sometimes it's funny and sometimes it becomes a competition with team-mates on number of kills.

Fun(ny) vs. dull
This goes toward the ROI of fun. If the death is ignominious or dull or random... eh. It's just annoying.
If death is _funny_, though, that's entertaining, even if my character is now a smear on the tarrasque's toe.

Goal denial
Sometimes I have goals for a character. Having my character die generally means anything cool I have in mind gets round-binned. That can be frustrating.

Genre expectations matter a lot. I think a lot of RPG arguments come down to people playing out different genre/subgenre with different play expectations.
There are three common playstyles I can think of:
Media adventure: playing out like an episode of an adventure story on TV. In this sort of game, players shouldn't die unless it's very interesting or important.
Dungeoncrawl: playing out like a simulation of a random bunch of folks doing shit. Chips fall where they may, and if someone dies due to appendicitis, oh well.
Call of Cthulhu: Ok, this isn't SUPER common, but I hazily imagine there are a few games in a similar vein.
Basically, the game is more a matter of seeing how long characters can survive, and then see how horribly they can bite it.

I've sometimes commented that I don't like dungeoncrawl style play, although I think what I'm frustrated by is that those games are also often 'RL skill' style games, where if you fuck up the rules, oh well, your character is toast. I suspect I'd enjoy DungeonWorld more.
I actually really enjoy CoC-style games, so it's not the death in particular that's bugging me.

Anyway, that's my self-examination.

^Dungeon World encourages going hard at the players and that PC death is expected.

Quote from: jhkim;809844Anyone have experience with a high loss rate that was still fun? Were there things that it needed to help keep things upbeat?

It kinda depends on how you define "loss".

In my 3.5 campaign, for example, the PCs wanted to steal a powerful artifact from a group of bad guys. They made significant efforts to do so on five different occasions over the course of 40+ sessions and failed each time. However, just a couple sessions ago they finally succeeded and now have possession of the artifact.

Is that five failures followed by a success? Or is it just a success with a number of setbacks? I'd go with the former.

Here's what I'd say:

The stakes can't be all-or-nothing. Success-or-death is pretty common in RPGs. So is success-or-end of the world. These types of stakes can be combined with high failure rates in a board game or one-shot because the game is over either way, but even a very tiny all-or-nothing failure rate in an ongoing campaign is problematic because it compounds over time. I'm not saying that you should never have all-or-nothing stakes; it's just that it shouldn't be your primary modus operandi.

The stakes still need to be meaningful. Failure is only meaningful if it carries consequences. These consequences should also be entertaining and interesting. For example, the longer the bad guys held the artifact the more terrible things they were able to do with it.

Failures don't have to be absolute. Lots of competitive board games games have a winner who did better than everybody else, but often the other players still accomplished things.

Have lots of different goals actively in play. My players literally failed (over and over and over again) for four years of real time in their goal of stealing this magical artifact. That would have been completely debilitating if there weren't a half dozen other things that they were also trying to achieve at the same time.

Quote from: jhkim;809930To try to clarify, there are different rates of losing:

1) "The PCs can't lose" - They may have setbacks, but ultimately they're going to get through the mission with at least minimal success.

2) "The PCs will lose, but rarely" - Like many old-school modules, the normal expectation is that if the players start, they will make it through to the end of the module - possibly with a number of new characters. However, it is at least acknowledged that losing is a possibility.

3) "The PCs lose most of the time" - The majority of the time (like my example of 75%), the PCs fail to achieve their primary goal in an adventure. i.e. The main bad guy is still in power, and/or the village is lost, etc.

This is NOT a thread to be bitching about #1. What I want to know is how far towards or into #3 we can go and still be fun.

Recently, my group has fallen into presumption that all conflicts should be possible to overcome. This might require significant expenditure, but it would possible to overcome it as an encounter in itself. The negative consequences would be around such things as how much downtime we need before we progress further (and whether that hits us hard through the world reacting), along with how many of our consumables get used-up in the encounter.

With 5e, we have consciously moved away from this assumption and agreed as a group that some encounters may be too much to overcome so we should consider bugging out, look for alternatives to fighting and so on.

A contributing factor has been playing other games since giving up on 4e and whilst waiting for 5e to come out. Playing games with a wider range of objectives and different emphasis has helped us wake up from the rut we had fallen into. 5e is less combat obsessed than 4e was, so it feels easier to keep this wider perspective.

In that context, I would still want to succeed in the majority of encounters but I would be happy to look for a wider range of avenues to success. So if I was presented with a combat challenge that was too powerful to overcome directly (even if the fight had started) I would back out and look for alternative ways of achieving my goal. That is to say, if approach one fails I'm ok with reassessing and trying a second or third approach as needed.

Ultimately I would still want to overcome the majority of challenges unless they were clearly unattainable (no storming castles or slaying Dragons at 1st level...). But if I was losing more than a third of encounters I would be looking to re-jig my character to make them fit the campaign better. Losing more than half of the encounters would probably result in a down-time conversation with the GM to better understand what their aims for the campaign were.

Ultimately, we are often stymied in real life and since I'm not a masochist I don't want to regularly face this in my fun-time.

Quote from: Will;809933It highly depends on a number of factors.

Yeah, to the point that it's approaching one of those 'how long is a piece of string?' questions... too many variables to have anything near a one-size-fits-all answer.
I won't play in a game where I can't fail, Bob won't play in a game where he can... and all shades in between.

I like myself to be challenged, whether I play a board game or an RPG. I often loose, but I'd say I personally most enjoy it, in RPGs at least, when the loss might actually be more interesting than the victory. I also think that indeed, for there to be a genuine feeling of satisfaction in victory, there needs to be a great challenge, even some losses along the way. Getting that dastardly villain tastes much better if he defeated us previous 3 - 4 times.

Quote from: Simlasa;809948Yeah, to the point that it's approaching one of those 'how long is a piece of string?' questions... too many variables to have anything near a one-size-fits-all answer.
I won't play in a game where I can't fail, Bob won't play in a game where he can... and all shades in between.

Indeed, and that's the hardest job of a GM I think - managing all those personalities, juggling expectations so that everyone leaves the table content. Of course, to a degree, birds of feather flock together, but there'll be occasionally just a good friend who has very different expectations from the rest of the group game - wise, but, well, he's still a great guy/gal to have around.

Quote from: Simlasa;809948Yeah, to the point that it's approaching one of those 'how long is a piece of string?' questions... too many variables to have anything near a one-size-fits-all answer.
I won't play in a game where I can't fail, Bob won't play in a game where he can... and all shades in between.

I'm more positive about the discussion -- I think it's worth exploring why people like/dislike things, because there may be common ground.

For example, someone might write me off as a big pussy who can't take losing my precious characters before they've bothered to find out I have no problem losing characters in COC.

So, think about your tastes and where they came from and talk things out.

Quote from: Will;809957I'm more positive about the discussion -- I think it's worth exploring why people like/dislike things, because there may be common ground.

For example, someone might write me off as a big pussy who can't take losing my precious characters before they've bothered to find out I have no problem losing characters in COC.

So, think about your tastes and where they came from and talk things out.

There's certainly an expectation - based approach to games and mortality. Which is why there's so much ruckus regarding D&D actually, I think - because there are at least 4 different mortality expectations now (TSR D&D, 3e, 4e, 5e - all have different HP, challenge and damage curves and fight models).

Of course, it has also a good side - a game might be in fact geared to be less deadly, in order to allow players to declare more outrageous actions.

I think it would be critical that if losing = death, character creation be fast. Nothing worse than sitting at the table holding your dick while everyone else gets to play.

Other than that, I don't mind losing-- especially if I an see the consequences play out in the world. Though, it may be a bit annoying if I lose all the time due to bad luck on dice rolling or just general incompetence of the PC itself.

It may depend a lot on whether you're more of a "let the dice fall where they may and play it out" type of person or a "I want to be heroic most of the time" type of player.

Quote from: Will;809957I'm more positive about the discussion -- I think it's worth exploring why people like/dislike things, because there may be common ground.

I guess that's what I mean, like so many things it all comes down to a matter of taste... 'why red is my favorite color'. That's fine...

A difficult cooperative boardgame like Ghost Stories seems to me not that different than some 'tournament' RPG like Tomb of Horrors. You're not likely to win, but it's fun to try.
I agree that for something like that it's best to have simple/fast chargen... or have some NPC 'spares' on hand so a Player can jump back into the game.