Quote Originally Posted by bloodtide View Post
Lots of games have 'characters vs nature', you have to cross a bridge over lava, for example. But if your playing with a storytelling DM, you need not even roll or anything. After all if you did roll bad and fell in the lava, you would know the DM would save you as "the DM is telling a story and does not want the story interrupted by random dice roll deaths.
I agree with you that "story" DMing has some problems and shouldn't be the only possible mode of play. I just don't like one-roll deaths.

For example, the classic poison needle trap, save vs poison or die. It's a solved problem. The solution is to constantly describe how you never touch anything with your hands, and if you're not playing a deathtrap dungeon that slows down the game needlessly. I've had to tell players more than once "there are no traps in this dungeon" just so they'd open the damn door before one of the other players fell asleep.

Meatgrinder games teach players to play super cautiously. In any other kind of game that's tedious, and it's often hard to unteach. The rules should let meatgrinder work but it shouldn't just be assumed.

About your lava bridge, if one failed roll dumps the party in lava, the solution is not to roll. Fly over it, teleport, stone shape a bridge, find another path, come back next level, whatever. Rolling is a reasonable choice if one bad roll has a character hanging from a ledge by his fingers, then everyone gets one turn worth of actions to try to save him, THEN the character has to roll again or fall in. (The probability of falling in doesn't even have to be lower. Suppose the one roll has a 25% chance of failure, and the two rolls each have 50%.)