TheFlatline wrote:Speaking of Dragon Age after playing through Inquisition I thought the general idea of being in charge of "the Inquisition" and the Logistics & Dragons & stuff might be a lot of fun to run as a campaign. DA works in a D&D mindset because you have a gargantuan organization at your fingertips but you still have to go out personally and gather fucking iron ore to supply swords to your troops.
Well, to be fair to the DA:I, you only gather iron ore for your personal weapons. For your troops you just claim lumber and quarries. Although many other infuriatingly minutae things are required in Inquisition. I mean, really? I, the Inquisitor, have to go and kill ten rams to get supplies for the hungry?
You're forgetting the inquisition fetch quests. I had to take "geological samples" and shit constantly for extra inquisition influence. Or skin animals for skins so that they could make tents that would withstand the desert sun. Or whatever. Which you generally never actually needed. I think they were intending on letting you spend influence on more than just opening up story areas frankly.
No what you're thinking of is the quests that let you get quarries and lumbar to actually improve your stronghold.
Slim Shady wrote:Isn't this why a lot of games have a limited resource to spend that makes success likely or even guaranteed?
I suggest you read This. You don't have to go through all 24 pages, but it shows you the cognitive dissonance you're up against.
Once you pull back the curtain and show the players their narrative imperative points or whatever, the fact that the fix is in is known to the audience. You've spoiled the ending, and the players know that John McClane is going to survive. The fictional risk that the action movie shows is no longer there, because you've shown the audience the net under the "death defying jump."
FrankTrollman wrote:
Once you pull back the curtain and show the players their narrative imperative points or whatever, the fact that the fix is in is known to the audience. You've spoiled the ending, and the players know that John McClane is going to survive. The fictional risk that the action movie shows is no longer there, because you've shown the audience the net under the "death defying jump."
-Username17
And there's nothing wrong with this. It just requires that one's goal for the game be to produce an interesting story, rather than to simulate dying horribly. That is to say, don't play with people who care about the curtain. Sure, you end up with pretentious storygamers and role-not-roll-players, but at least your game is interesting.
Though I'll agree with Sigma999 that failing forward is also an option, though I wouldn't say that it's an optimal one. If John McClain gets shot by Hans Gruber, becomes a ghost, and uses his Ghost Powers to save the day with the help of Haley Joel Osment, that's still perfectly viable, though drastically genre-changing and not something you want to pull out in the final act unless you establish that ghosts exist early on.
In this day and age, "Death is part of the game" is mostly a matter of preference and depends on each table's culture. It's no longer The One True Way(tm) nor something to be reviled.
For tables where death is not part of the game, the focus and point of excitement just shifts from "will my guy survive?" to "how will events unfold?" and "what price will be paid for victory?" GMs who insists that a lack of death makes a game uninteresting are probably not creative enough.
If you ask me, death is far from the worst consequence of defeat, just the most uninteresting. While I'm not a storygamer, my games share with literature the similarity that my adventures are the story of their protagonists, that's how literature often works (fuckyouverymuch GRR Martin).
An ongoing story is a big investment, and if the protagonist dies all that investment is lost. Relationship flowchars, plot points, planning, and more important, time... really, fuck that noise. That investment is where I derive my fun from (so do my players), and fun is our bottom line.
