Quote from: Ratman_tf;1133040I think you mentioned it in the video, but I reserve do-overs for things like decisions based on misunderstandings. If the GM fails to adequatley explain a situation or if the players fail to communicate their intent clearly.
If the players and GM understand the situation, even if the players understand they don't have all the info, then let it ride.

Only a rare few are arguing that. And not reccently.

When I first got on this fora I mentioned making a catastrophic rules mistake, the players noticing it before a TPK happened and I told the players we'd just rewind and I'd tone things down as it was my mistake.

And a few members here told me that was wrong and should have let it stand and TPK them. One of the most ass backwards statements ever.

If we're being honest though, aren't we already more or less doing this?  When I'm DMing, I'm intentionally making encounters that I intend to push the players without wiping them out.  While it's not so blatant as just handing the players a do-over button, the game is tilted in favor of them making it through because the person running it is purposefully aiming for a sweet spot of challenge.  Yeah, PCs have died in my games, but only as a result of breathtaking bad luck or them managing to do something spectacularly stupid; the status quo is that they'll show up, have whatever adventure, and be back for the next one.  I'm not trying to run them through the Tomb of Horrors here.

Quote from: Valatar;1133077If we're being honest though, aren't we already more or less doing this?  When I'm DMing, I'm intentionally making encounters that I intend to push the players without wiping them out.  While it's not so blatant as just handing the players a do-over button, the game is tilted in favor of them making it through because the person running it is purposefully aiming for a sweet spot of challenge.  Yeah, PCs have died in my games, but only as a result of breathtaking bad luck or them managing to do something spectacularly stupid; the status quo is that they'll show up, have whatever adventure, and be back for the next one.  I'm not trying to run them through the Tomb of Horrors here.

At least leave the players their illusion of challenge, the fig leaf so to speak.

Quote from: Valatar;1133077If we're being honest though, aren't we already more or less doing this?  When I'm DMing, I'm intentionally making encounters that I intend to push the players without wiping them out.  While it's not so blatant as just handing the players a do-over button, the game is tilted in favor of them making it through because the person running it is purposefully aiming for a sweet spot of challenge.  Yeah, PCs have died in my games, but only as a result of breathtaking bad luck or them managing to do something spectacularly stupid; the status quo is that they'll show up, have whatever adventure, and be back for the next one.  I'm not trying to run them through the Tomb of Horrors here.

For me it varies - I may be doing a sandbox where they pick their own adventure which may be low threat or high threat. And I may just throw them in under levelled and see if they can survive, which has created some of the best stories with pcs using smarts, tactics, allies, diplomacy and flight to survive.

I don't know if Crawford's games LITERALLY cause brain damage, but I sure did lose a few IQ points reading some of the responses in this thread.

I started playing D&D in 8th grade, and since that time I've seen a "do over" exactly twice: one D&D game I was running, the other a GURPS Twilight 2000 game I was a player in. First instance, I was inexperienced and let some stuff during a session get out of control, the players all agreed to just pretend that session didn't happen and we moved on. Wasn't a big deal, and it had nothing to do with the players failing miserably and it being un-fun, more like "wow, I totally fucked up, let's salvage this." The GURPS game was pretty much the same thing; I was gone for the session in question, actually, and an inexperienced player apparently did some REALLY stupid shit because he didn't know better, when I showed up the next game, the GM told me what happened and that everyone decided to just ignore that to get the game back on track. The player's brother set him straight and zero issues after we resumed.

I have been a part of many, many games that went into weird territory, or where the characters had a TPK, or whatever, and in every other instance the game either just stopped (almost uniformly with people I wasn't really friends with), or we decided to just start a new campaign (my friends). I have severe gamer ADD, and I always want to try something new, so this doesn't really bother me. The longest continuous game I've actually run is three years, and even then there was a break in the middle after a TPK and we restarted with new characters in the same game world. It was actually good because everyone got to try out new classes/abilities.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1133048How?

Maybe that could be argued for the earliest days when wargamers were the core OD&D audience, but why would B/X or AD&D players have less investment than 5e players? Speed of chargen doesn't explain it because 5e chargen is the same speed or faster than 3e or 4e.

  Individual characters have gotten more detailed and more important to the 'narrative,' and thus less disposable.

Quote from: Jason Coplen;1132765I did a "dream sequence" once when a teenager. The redo was even worse. I took time off DMing to watch and see how others did things, but I can't say it helped. It takes years to be decent, at least in my case.

Like anything in life - you go out in the forest and kick the tree ten-thousand times.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1133095Individual characters have gotten more detailed and more important to the 'narrative,' and thus less disposable.

Odd. I started in 1978. Every character was individual. Every player I played with cherished their PC's and even got into real-life fist-fights over stuff that happened between their PC's (and kept playing with each other and remained friends). PC's were never disposable, and the narrative was always what we chose to do.

Most other games I knew of in my area were no different. The worst games were the ones where GM's were trying to narrate their version of some novel and their players balked or the GM became adversarial for not following the GM's narrative.

Today, how many threads do we see where games have been designed around making up for the lack of experience of "good GMing" by taking away the ability to adjudicate as a GM and giving players more "options" to have "narrative control"? It immediately sets up a dichotomy between having immersion and having a boardgamey disengaged experience where the mechanics of the game IS the game.

Quote from: tenbones;1133097Odd. I started in 1978. Every character was individual. Every player I played with cherished their PC's and even got into real-life fist-fights over stuff that happened between their PC's (and kept playing with each other and remained friends). PC's were never disposable, and the narrative was always what we chose to do.

  Oh, it's been around from the beginning, it's by no means a bad thing--but it does produce tension with certain assumptions in original D&D, where players would generally have 'stables' of PCs and, by reports, not get too attached to them until they've survived a couple of levels. And as I said, the other part of the problem is that the rest of the game's design has not only not changed to reflect this, but can too easily reach the point where the only possible consequence for character failure (PC or NPC alike) is death.

 Of course, you've been gaming longer than I've been alive , so I will defer to your expertise in this matter.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1133098Oh, it's been around from the beginning, it's by no means a bad thing--but it does produce tension with certain assumptions in original D&D, where players would generally have 'stables' of PCs and, by reports, not get too attached to them until they've survived a couple of levels. And as I said, the other part of the problem is that the rest of the game's design has not only not changed to reflect this, but can too easily reach the point where the only possible consequence for character failure (PC or NPC alike) is death.

 Of course, you've been gaming longer than I've been alive , so I will defer to your expertise in this matter.

In general I agree with tenbones on this, people were super invested in their characters even back then, they were never disposable (and I have no recollection of running "stables" of pcs, always just one per campaign).

Where you are right is that investment wasn't instant from the get-go. I guess because chargen was pretty bare-bones back then. Characters were blank slates, their stories were yet to be told, not something worked out in loving detail at chargen. So yes I would say investment was less in the first couple of levels. You might not get too cut up about dying at Level 1 (unless you had rolled unspeakably good stats that you were unlikely to see repeated!). On the other hand, by level 3 and sometimes even by level 2 your character had stories of his own, treasured possessions, and a personality.  By that point, investment was high.

Wrt do-overs back in the day, the most extreme example I can think of is one I was not involved in at all, but heard something about. In Professor Barker's own Tekumel campaign, sometime quite early on (mid-70s?), the players solved one of the deepest mysteries of Tekumel, worked out how to return Tekumel to humanspace, and actually did it. At which point I guess the Professor basically said great job guys, game is over now, what do you want to play next? I guess the players hadn't foreseen that and were dismayed because they wanted to keep playing Tekumel. Eventually they somehow persuaded the Professor to agree it never happened (or happened in an alternate plane, or got reversed, or some such thing) so the game could go on. Anyway, pretty major do-over from back in the day.

Quote from: Zirunel;1133112In general I agree with tenbones on this, people were super invested in their characters even back then, they were never disposable (and I have no recollection of running "stables" of pcs, always just one per campaign).

Where you are right is that investment wasn't instant from the get-go. I guess because chargen was pretty bare-bones back then. Characters were blank slates, their stories were yet to be told, not something worked out in loving detail at chargen. So yes I would say investment was less in the first couple of levels. You might not get too cut up about dying at Level 1 (unless you had rolled unspeakably good stats that you were unlikely to see repeated!). On the other hand, by level 3 and sometimes even by level 2 your character had stories of his own, treasured possessions, and a personality.  By that point, investment was high.

This was roughly our experience.  If you made level 3, you started to care.  If you even sniffed level 5, you were totally invested.  The one exception was that if we had an epic TPK, everyone was so amused by how that happened, that it trumped their attachment to the characters.  That is, it was a strange kind of "care" or attachment to the character--that wasn't so much about surviving as it was about having a good run.

Quote from: jhkimSo... You're saying that Crawford's RPGs *literally* cause brain damage?!? I've heard similar claims about certain RPGs before, but I found them hard to credit.

Quote from: insubordinate polyhedral;1133060Wow, I think that's my first-ever jhkim bizarro-world reply! Does this make me an official member now? Not only did I claim no such thing, I even made sure to allow for it possibly being the right thing sometimes. Wow. Also, I was referencing the advantage of RPGs being a place to be risky for fun with very low actual danger/damage potential, i.e. the opposite of causing brain damage.

Heh. OK, so I go overboard sometimes. One of the things I enjoy about debate here is that people step over the line sometimes, and then they step back. In this case, I was focused on the part of your reply that's bolded below.

Quote from: insubordinate polyhedralThis seems like it fits into the larger pattern of trying to defang risk from everything, which among other things, destroys the human brain's perception of reward and affects perception of meaning. Jordan Peterson talks about this idea quite a bit in terms of self-improvement. Learning to deal with failure and dare to look foolish or be injured or generally fall on one's face is an important part of humanity, and stripping it out of games runs counter to some of the purpose of games to begin with.

But maybe that was my over-reading of what you wrote. If you don't think that low-risk games cause harm, then we're in agreement.

(Re: comparison of tabletop RPGs to video games with save points)

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1133039Except it's not, you do have a price, a consequence, you were at point f, you died and re-spawn to point c.

Where's the price for the characters in a "It was all a dream" snowflakery?

I don't know what this supposed snowflakery looks like in actual play - I watched Pundit's video, but he didn't link to Crawford's material. But suppose someone ran a tabletop RPG which worked exactly this way -- i.e. any time someone died, or anything else bad happened, the players could go back to a previous save point. It seems to me that fits exactly what Pundit characterized as consequence-less "it was all a dream" snowflakery. Heck, the last save point could literally be when the character's last slept. Then it would totally fit that the last day's events were just a dream.

Quote from: jhkim;1133133(Re: comparison of tabletop RPGs to video games with save points)

I don't know what this supposed snowflakery looks like in actual play - I watched Pundit's video, but he didn't link to Crawford's material. But suppose someone ran a tabletop RPG which worked exactly this way -- i.e. any time someone died, or anything else bad happened, the players could go back to a previous save point. It seems to me that fits exactly what Pundit characterized as consequence-less "it was all a dream" snowflakery. Heck, the last save point could literally be when the character's last slept. Then it would totally fit that the last day's events were just a dream.

So, no price to pay, like I said, you do you but that removes the incentive it turns an adventure game into candy crush, and hey if that's what floats your boat by all means go crazy, just don't tell me it's the same type of game I'm playing because it's not and do not say it's the way people should run theirs, especially when you're seen as an authority and newbies will take your advice and thing TTRPGs suck.

Snowflakery: What and how Snowflakes like to (play in this case), and pretend it's "The One True Way tm". Changing fundamentally the game while pretending they did not.

Quote from: jhkim;1133133Heh. OK, so I go overboard sometimes. One of the things I enjoy about debate here is that people step over the line sometimes, and then they step back. In this case, I was focused on the part of your reply that's bolded below.

But maybe that was my over-reading of what you wrote. If you don't think that low-risk games cause harm, then we're in agreement.

Cheers man. No, "destroys" was for "the perception", not "the brain". I was talking primarily about the psychology of the removal of risk also removing the feeling of reward ("fun"). Since I'm a layman and try not to talk out of my ass, I linked some of the psychology material I'd read that I was thinking of when I made that claim, which also gets into the function of play - possibly useful absent an objective definition of "fun". And to your point about debate here, "destroys" was a poor word choice on my part. "Reduces" is more accurate, less hyperbolic, and hopefully clearer.

Sometimes people like to bowl with bumpers, no problem. Bowling with bumpers a lot, though, is probably missing out, though the devil's always in the details.