Quote from: Justin Alexander;668026As for those in this thread claiming that 20% or 50% or even 70% of their combat encounters end in a TPK? Garbage. Even if we're just talking about encounters that result in a temporary setback before the PCs return for the inevitable, victorious comeback those numbers still look ludicrously high.

A lot of our scenarios end in failure for the PCs. They don't inevitably mount a victorious comeback. In the session I described above, the party killed the leaders of a the rebellious faction, but they came very, very close to a TPK because of bad tactics. And now they have avenues closed to them (I had originally thought the party would side with the rebels against the lord protector, but now they are firmly in the lord protector's camp). The party made an enemy out of a librarian who was key to uncovering important character goals. They've hitched their wagon to a cunning and ambitious NPC who cannot be trusted. Now their character goals will be far harder to achieve. They may have to come up with new ones.

Even in a simple dungeon adventure, my players often miss the big treasure haul. They didn't look in the right places, or they avoided a particularly tough monster, or took their sweet time getting to the bad guy and he was alerted and fled with the loot.

In my campaigns, there is a wide variability in success rate (in terms of achieving goals, getting loot, and surviving), because there's a wide variability in the amount of skill and intelligence brought to bear by the players in any given session. That's where the 'game' part of RPG lies - the sense of accomplishment in meeting goals when those goals can only be met with shrewd and resourceful play.

"The GM's job is to be defeated by the players" describes some games.

They're pretty far from the hobby game scene I grew up with in the 1970s-80s, but they're common enough today for a blogger to be able to advocate that view as a conventional wisdom.

In the older style of game, the GM's role is to provide a challenging game.

In early RPG campaigns, the GM fairly often was acting mainly like a wargame-campaign GM: as a referee adjudicating interactions among players. At other times, the players were united against an opposition the GM managed; but the emphasis then was on a sense of fairness, not on ensuring players attained whatever victory conditions they chose.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that GM forces lose 99% of the time when my PCs are engaged in mundane negotiations. How do my NPCs 'lose' when determining trade contracts or collaboration on civic projects? Win-wins somehow generate a win-lose somewhere? This is 90+% of my Birthright game right now.

And since opportunity costs exist for every governing action, there's always a PC loss, too. To build a silo in one spot, but not another, and delay expected power broker meetings all in the same month means that every PC governance action comes with requisite success, loss, and complications. How strictly are we defining the nature of PC wins and losses?

This sounds like a ridiculous contention that RPGs are some sort of zero-sum.

I run a no-holds-barred Call of Cthulhu game. I'd say they end in tpk roughly 50% of the time. My players love it, and have on several occasions specifically requested that I keep it that lethal when Ive expressed remorse over interesting characters getting turned into bugs, have their organs dissolved by ray guns, get eaten from the inside out by parasitical swarms, lose their limbs to carnivorous frogs, or simply get into The Box ( "Into the box! Into the box you go! ). As a GM I want my players to succeed. Im rooting for them. But if running Cthulhu has taught me anything, its that my players appreciate 'letting the dice fall as they may' and the sense that they are always in real danger, so when they do survive it feels like a genuine acccomplishment

As one of my players put it "when I lose in your game it feels like winning".

In other words, there is no 'right' answer to this: like most everything to do with rpgs, its about the specific game one's playing and the specific group of people one plays with. More and more Im convinced that these two factors take presedence over everything else, so much so that anyone claiming the way another person online plays is 'wrong' is very much suffering from a self-absorbed ostrich-syndrome.

Quote from: Bill;667290The gm sets the difficulty of any challenge. Therefore, the gm decides if the pc's will win, barring swings of chance.

No challenge is equal to the pc's capabilities, and even then, they would lose half the time.

In my experience, pc win more than half the time.

The gm lets them win.

This suggests the kind of game in which the GM is deciding either

(a) beforehand that the scenario is to attempt to accomplish goal X by means Y

or

(b) ad hoc that the players will succeed at whatever they choose.

This is a very different proposition than the old style of game in which the GM establishes environmental parameters and lets players choose how to interact with them!

In that kind of game, players are successful most of the time because they choose their goals and deploy their resources carefully enough.

Quote from: Opaopajr;668049Win-wins somehow generate a win-lose somewhere?

Zero-sum games -- especially ones that boil down to tactical combat -- seem to have become the sine qua non of role-play gaming in some quarters.

The GM is Crom, caring not if the PCs live or die.

One lead-in to the tendency to think this way is no doubt the tendency toward "monolithic party" games: those in which every single player-character is on the same team.

By contrast, in a Gangbusters game we might have half a dozen interested parties with different outcomes in mind for a shipment of Scotch whisky. One or none might get what they want, or some might compromise to get some of what they want.

In a 5-player board game or card game with one winner, one expects (barring exceptional skill) to lose on average about 4 times as often as one wins. Being able to accept this is part of good sportsmanship.

The job of a GM of a monolithic-party RPG can be like that of a video-game designer: presenting a set of challenges that can escalate perhaps indefinitely ("the game that never ends"), dealing the players many defeats along the way.

It may be more common, though, to see the matter as an unfolding of a saga of assured survival and glory for a given set of PCs, the challenging game element appearing only in the details of how they become world-saving heroes (or whatever).

Quote from: ThatOneGM;667776Obviously the phrase cannot apply to every GM, every session, or every encounter ever played, but I stand by the spirit of my statement and I hope that this comment and my upcoming article have given/will give everyone something to discuss and take home to their own games.

Welcome to theRPGSite! The more the merrier.

I see your interpretation of "defeat" is very loose, but makes sense within your context. Not exactly the way I would phrase things as "defeat" conjures very specific meaning to most people in general. But now that you explain it, I see where you are coming from.

I would probably phrase your ideas as PCs are left with "open opportunities to decide." It explcitly states that its not a predetermined set of events, that player choice matters. That way "success" becomes personal, and thus measurable only in a subjective way.

So, PCs who decide to farm cattle in order to worship and placate the red dragon also "succeed," even while "defeat" was completely absent in their approach to the equation. They want to join the dragon's side, so antagonism is the last thing in their approach. Further, just moving away and or ignoring the problem can become a personal measure of "success." In this "success" and "defeat" are unrelated entirely. Again, the relationship to the encounter or knowledge can be set up in a non-diametrically opposed matter, therefore negating the whole idea of equal number of losers to winners.

It's an interesting idea to posit such a vast interpretation of "defeat," but it's just easier to come the other way and note that PCs create their own terms of success.

GMs can offer hooks within a premise, but it's up to players to accept the premise and the hooks. One can accept the premise and reject the hooks, or flip the script and accept the hook with a new take on the premise. Or reject both and take the game somewhere completely new, depending on GM permission. Organically, any of the above can arise. This openness is namely the purview of a sandbox and other open styles.

Yet many modules set up an assumed antagonistic stance, so its easy to get lost in that assumed framework. But RPGs are far more flexible in their play ability. So such opened definitions derived from such a narrow play framework tend to lose a lot in translation. In the end there's far more cooperation than competition between GM and players, which leads to such definition confusion.

Quote from: Haffrung;668030A lot of our scenarios end in failure for the PCs. They don't inevitably mount a victorious comeback. In the session I described above, the party killed the leaders of a the rebellious faction, but they came very, very close to a TPK because of bad tactics. And now they have avenues closed to them (I had originally thought the party would side with the rebels against the lord protector, but now they are firmly in the lord protector's camp). The party made an enemy out of a librarian who was key to uncovering important character goals. They've hitched their wagon to a cunning and ambitious NPC who cannot be trusted. Now their character goals will be far harder to achieve. They may have to come up with new ones.

What you've listed there, however, is the characters succeeding at everything the characters set out to accomplish. The stuff they've "failed" at is, ironically, only the stuff that you wanted them to do that they never actually considered a goal for themselves.

Quote from: Opaopajr;668049I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that GM forces lose 99% of the time when my PCs are engaged in mundane negotiations.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the mind-numbing pedantry in this thread.

"Ah, well, ya see the PCs because had to use a couple of healing potions after they killed the goblins. So really it's more of a win-loss type of situation."

That's a dumb question.

Disagree.

Justin, I know you've had a bug up your ass the past few days, but your comment addresses absolutely nothing of what I already game.

Fighting goblins and using potions is similar to governance of civic projects and trade deals, how? The sheer resolution framework is not shared; the win-loss structure is meaningless in comparison.

Quote from: Opaopajr;668079Justin, I know you've had a bug up your ass the past few days, but your comment addresses absolutely nothing of what I already game.

Fighting goblins and using potions is similar to governance of civic projects and trade deals, how? The sheer resolution framework is not shared; the win-loss structure is meaningless in comparison.

Some games are necessarily deadly, some are not.   And if anyone is including pc death as the only 'loss' delineator, well, my campaigns average a ' loss every 6 months about.   But my groups have been excommunicated, stolen from, lied to and convinced to advance the plots of their enemies, lost a hand, etc

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;668009I think a key trait of impartial and fair GMs is a willingness to understand things from the played side, and (perhaps most importantly) the ability to recognize when they have not been fair or when they were wrong.

In the situation you describe I think there are two things going on: one is what the group might consider a fair situation or scenario to be (can a no-win or nearly non-winnable emerge in the game, and if so under what circumstances is it regarded as fair). The other is how many clues the players expect from the GM. Is there an assumption that when truly dire situations arise, the players will have sufficient warning within the setting. Or is there an assumption that the players are limited by their character's point of view and could wander into such situations unknowingly. A lot of this is preference and I think any assessment of your GMs fairness and impartiality starts with what the groups preferences are.

So you're agreeing that fair and impartial is personal preference?

Quote from: Sommerjon;668273So you're agreeing that fair and impartial is personal preference?

I am agreeing that fair is going to mean slightly different things depending on the groups preferences and expectations. I am also saying that to call a person fair and impartial is a judgment. There will usually be room for debate. A the end of the day, in these situations what matter is whether your players regard your overall behavior as Gm to be fair and impartial. Just like with referees and judges.

So a 3E group accustomed to the challenge rating system and going by the book might regard the GM adhering to the CR system when designing encounters fair and impartial. While an old school group more interested in stuff like setting might regard some of the stuff laid out earlier in the thread as more important (being consistent the setting and events within the setting, etc). I do think there are some common things though across these. I think what is most important is whether a given group find their GM to be impartial and fair, not whether someone posting here on this thread does. If we play in a campaign where the stakes are high, where PC death occurs from time to time, there is a let the dice fall where they may, and tpk is a possibility everyone accepts, what is important is that we find the GMs rulings and choices to be fair.