The state of Wizards' D&D in the future will look less like traditional D&D and more like self-esteem therapy for already-narcissistic spoiled children who want to feel "special" for doing nothing.

Can't they just play Nobilis or something?

Commies should, IMHO, be removed for the health of our society... or what remains of it.

I will kill your character. I will kill it, take your character sheet, wipe my ass with it, throw it on the floor and dance my death dance around it.

Quote from: Semaj Khan on December 22, 2020, 10:45:39 PMI will kill your character. I will kill it, take your character sheet, wipe my ass with it, throw it on the floor and dance my death dance around it.

In the words of Morris Minor and the Majors, "Bit harsh, innit?" (Let's see who's as old as I am by who recognizes that.)

Not sure I'd go that far myself as a GM, but I'd certainly say something like, "I'm not out to kill your characters, but I'm not going to stand between your choices and the dice, either."

(As long as it's their actual choices. I don't mind the occasional anticlimactic outcome, and someone who takes a stupid risk should know the consequences, but a long-running favourite character dying out of nowhere on one roll, or even one blind bad choice, does ruin the point of the game, which is to have fun.)

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 23, 2020, 12:24:31 AM
In the words of Morris Minor and the Majors, "Bit harsh, innit?" (Let's see who's as old as I am by who recognizes that.)

Not sure I'd go that far myself as a GM, but I'd certainly say something like, "I'm not out to kill your characters, but I'm not going to stand between your choices and the dice, either."

(As long as it's their actual choices. I don't mind the occasional anticlimactic outcome, and someone who takes a stupid risk should know the consequences, but a long-running favourite character dying out of nowhere on one roll, or even one blind bad choice, does ruin the point of the game, which is to have fun.)

There is no mistreatment too harsh for COS players. None. Hanging's too good for them. Burning's too good for them. They should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive! 

Quote from: Semaj Khan on December 23, 2020, 12:34:05 AMThere is no mistreatment too harsh for COS players. None. Hanging's too good for them. Burning's too good for them. They should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive! 

Little bitsy pieces? Dude. Some of 'em are actually really cute! (Purely aesthetic appreciation for me as I'm married, but still.)

That said, I agree that some take it to, er, extremes. But that's a separate issue from SJ fragility advocacy.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 23, 2020, 12:24:31 AM

Quote from: Semaj Khan on December 22, 2020, 10:45:39 PMI will kill your character. I will kill it, take your character sheet, wipe my ass with it, throw it on the floor and dance my death dance around it.

In the words of Morris Minor and the Majors, "Bit harsh, innit?" (Let's see who's as old as I am by who recognizes that.)

Not sure I'd go that far myself as a GM, but I'd certainly say something like, "I'm not out to kill your characters, but I'm not going to stand between your choices and the dice, either."

(As long as it's their actual choices. I don't mind the occasional anticlimactic outcome, and someone who takes a stupid risk should know the consequences, but a long-running favourite character dying out of nowhere on one roll, or even one blind bad choice, does ruin the point of the game, which is to have fun.)

Once I did hang the sheets of dead Pendragon characters from a tree in my garden.

A friend of mine who is running a 5E game asked me to play one of the main protagonist (a gargantuan red dragon) in the climatic battle of the campaign. It was fun, but it became apparent very early in the battle that, between death saves and healing, it was going to be impossible to kill any of the PCs.

Quote from: dkabq on December 23, 2020, 07:23:11 AM
A friend of mine who is running a 5E game asked me to play one of the main protagonist (a gargantuan red dragon) in the climatic battle of the campaign. It was fun, but it became apparent very early in the battle that, between death saves and healing, it was going to be impossible to kill any of the PCs.

Single big bad guys can have trouble killing PCs, but hordes of little guys can have trouble not killing PCs if they are being run intelligently. Anything with multiple attacks can auto-kill a downed PC in a single round with melee. This is why any evil dragon is happy to have a dozen loyal kobolds that can be ready to eliminate downed foes quickly (and carry away those obviously magical weapons and implements that are dropped as soon as the PC hits 0 hit points).

Quote from: HappyDaze on December 23, 2020, 07:31:43 AM

Quote from: dkabq on December 23, 2020, 07:23:11 AM
A friend of mine who is running a 5E game asked me to play one of the main protagonist (a gargantuan red dragon) in the climatic battle of the campaign. It was fun, but it became apparent very early in the battle that, between death saves and healing, it was going to be impossible to kill any of the PCs.

Single big bad guys can have trouble killing PCs, but hordes of little guys can have trouble not killing PCs if they are being run intelligently. Anything with multiple attacks can auto-kill a downed PC in a single round with melee. This is why any evil dragon is happy to have a dozen loyal kobolds that can be ready to eliminate downed foes quickly (and carry away those obviously magical weapons and implements that are dropped as soon as the PC hits 0 hit points).

There were other NPCs fighting the PCs. But apparently not enough. What pushed the point home for me was when the Dracolich (henchman of one of the PCs) returned from the dead/undead for a *third* time.

Use that dragon aerial to your advantage.  Stun them and take them upstairs.
Falling damage may not be as bad as it used to be but it still one of the most effective ways to end a PC's adventuring days.

Quote from: dkabq on December 23, 2020, 09:19:03 AM

There were other NPCs fighting the PCs. But apparently not enough. What pushed the point home for me was when the Dracolich (henchman of one of the PCs) returned from the dead/undead for a *third* time.

>dracolich
>henchman of one of the PCs

What.

No, seriously. What. Why?

Quote from: Ghostmaker on December 23, 2020, 12:10:05 PM
>dracolich
>henchman of one of the PCs

What.

No, seriously. What. Why?

Yeah, that was gonna be my question. If the party's already gotten to the point where one of the PCs has a dracolich for a henchman, I think there are other things than the RAW making them hard to kill.

Quote from: dkabq on December 23, 2020, 09:19:03 AM
There were other NPCs fighting the PCs. But apparently not enough. What pushed the point home for me was when the Dracolich (henchman of one of the PCs) returned from the dead/undead for a *third* time.

Dracolich as a MINION of one of the PCs? That's way too monty haul for my tastes.

On a broader note, what RPGPundit's video calls attention to is a polarization, in gaming, between what are often mutually exclusive types of psychological payoff, or what could be called therapeutic feedback vs. tempering feedback.

Tempering feedback is what might be called the whole point of engaging in any type of contest at all: the point is to put an agent under stress through conflict, and the process of surviving the conflict leaves the agent stronger even if it doesn't obtain actual victory. For the stress of the conflict to be legitimate, there have to be stakes the agent cares about and a genuine chance of losing those stakes; a conflict which lacks these things generates no stress and thus gains no useful tempering or strengthening effect.

Therapeutic feedback, on the other hand, is oriented towards relieving stress upon an already-stressed agent so as to slow or arrest long-term weakening of that agent, so conflicts can only be therapeutic where the agent is secure in being able to withstand the loss of whatever's staked -- in other words, there has to be no chance of losing anything the agent really cares about; a conflict which is perceived as a genuine threat only increases stress beyond an already intolerable level.

Now it's possible for a game to provide both kinds of feedback so long as the perceived stakes of a game are orthogonal to the player's own personal areas of needed feedback, whether that's tempering or therapeutic. The mistake of the SJ advocacy movement is to demand that personal player identity has to be represented in the game, which immediately forces that identity into becoming part of the conflict stakes in a way therapeutic feedback can't handle. (To use a personal example, part of the reason I don't play Call of Cthulhu is because succeeding at the game, so far as one can succeed, would require my PC to abandon philosophical beliefs I don't want to abandon, even in pretense; to make the game more philosophically comfortable for me would require all my co-players to agree with turning it into something it simply isn't.)

Like everything else about the SJ movement, this seems like ultimately an attempt to eat one's cake and still have it: demanding that games be both therapeutically supporting, and validating through tempering, on the same stakes is simply not going to work, and will make it impossible for groups with differing priorities to play the same game together.