A Point about TPK's

[Catullus64]

A Total Party Kill (TPK) is a failure of the Dungeon Master.

This was the statement over which I had a fairly long and meaningful discussion with a friend. Both the friend and myself are players in each other's campaigns. The argument I made, compacted above, requires a few qualifiers:

This is specifically to do with party wipes, not player death in general.
This is meant to be a general maxim; of course there will be extreme scenarios where the players recklessly and suicidally get in over their heads. However, my feeling is that while individual player death can enhance or change a story, a party wipe simply ends it. The ending of any story is extremely important, and the occurrence of that ending in a disorderly manner, with the principle characters all dying without any proper resolution to the story's conflict, is simply something that the storyteller should want to avoid at all costs, and given the near limitless in-game resources at his disposal, he should be able to prevent it unless he is negligent.

My friend raised many objections to this claim, and I do understand the motives behind these objections: principal among his objections was the centrality of player agency, a concept which he holds the possibility of TPK's to be in service of. I would respond that while allowing player agency is perhaps the most useful tool in creating an enjoyable story, agency is not the end for which I create a game, and the premature cessation of the story, no matter how active the players were in that result, is destructive of the end of a complete, personally experienced story.

Further meditations on the subject would be welcome.

[Aett_Thorn]

I would argue this as follows:

1) It is the DM's job to make encounters that challenge the party. If they are not doing that, then they're not doing the job properly.

2) A difficult encounter should lead to the occasional player death.

3) Bad roles are not the problem of the DM. If you take a DM's difficult encounter that might kill a player or two, and the players get bad rolls, maybe the DM should fudge some numbers here or there, but they aren't required to. This can sometimes lead to a TPK.

4) A DM that PLANS for a TPK without good reason* isn't doing their job right either.


*For instance, the party is sacrificing themselves for the greater good, or the players all know that this will be the last session with those particular characters, etc.

[Woggle]

This is specifically to do with party wipes, not player death in general.
This is meant to be a general maxim; of course there will be extreme scenarios where the players recklessly and suicidally get in over their heads. However, my feeling is that while individual player death can enhance or change a story, a party wipe simply ends it. The ending of any story is extremely important, and the occurrence of that ending in a disorderly manner, with the principle characters all dying without any proper resolution to the story's conflict, is simply something that the storyteller should want to avoid at all costs, and given the near limitless in-game resources at his disposal, he should be able to prevent it unless he is negligent.

I would argue that this is entirely dependant on the type of game the DM is running and the type of story they are trying to tell. In many games the story is a collaboration between the players and the DM, and taking away the potential for a party-wipe goes against the spirit of the game. The DM is not writing a novel; not everything needs to be resolved, and a TPK doesn't need to be the end of a campaign either.

[mephnick]

The ending of any story is extremely important, and the occurrence of that ending in a disorderly manner, with the principle characters all dying without any proper resolution to the story's conflict, is simply something that the storyteller should want to avoid at all costs, and given the near limitless in-game resources at his disposal, he should be able to prevent it unless he is negligent.

Who's the storyteller? Is that supposed to be me?

I thought I was running a game. In a game I put a challenge in front of the players and they win or lose. If I actively prevent loss then I'm not longer running a game. It's negligent for me to try and prevent it.

People complain about railroads and player agency, but then their character dies and they complain that I should have saved them. Hard pass, thanks.

[intermedial]

A core assumption in your argument is the notion that all roleplaying games are plot-driven, or story-focused.

This isn't necessarily the case in roleplaying games which are events-driven, or narrative-focused.

There are certainly cases where a TPK is a wholly and entirely the result of the player's actions. Occasionally these actions are reckless, sometimes they are not: the players take a risk or gamble, and the dice come down against them. That's not a failure, that's life. These are almost always memorable sessions that make for great stories afterwards.

On the flipside, there are times when a DM engineers the conditions for a TPK, deliberately or accidentally. These are usually not satisfying, but the context on these varies so widely I'd hesitate to ascribe a general maxim.

[Tiadoppler]

while allowing player agency is perhaps the most useful tool in creating an enjoyable story, agency is not the end for which I create a game, and the premature cessation of the story, no matter how active the players were in that result, is destructive of the end of a complete, personally experienced story.

Some tables like a sandbox-y game in which player agency is the main theme, and some tables prefer a story-oriented game in which the plot is the main theme. Neither game type is 'wrong'.

In a story-based game, I've found the players find the story more rewarding if failure is an option. They aren't simply playing a linear video game with cutscenes and save points - their characters actually have to do the legwork and problem solving in order to solve the mystery/save the hostages/defeat the zombies/remake the shattered world. If they fail, if their characters simply aren't up to the challenge, then a new group of heroes might have to step up and complete the quest. Success is optional, and that makes it valuable.

In a free-form game, players have even less 'plot armor'. Yes, as a DM, I won't purposefully steer players towards an overly difficult opponent, and I may even give hints that this foe is too powerful. On the other hand, a "sandbox game" should focus even more heavily on player agency than a story-based game.


I agree completely with the sentiment that a party shouldn't have some unavoidable randomly generated ambush that happens to have triple their CR, just cause that's what the dice rolled. That's a failure of the DM: it's the DM's job to curate the world. Saying that your party cannot fail or screw up the originally planned plotline is not the same thing.



On my DM screen, I have a note I wrote to myself a couple years ago after one of my players irritated me:


The first priority is that the players are having fun.

The second priority is that you are having fun.

The third priority is telling a great story.

The fourth priority is telling a story with perfect continuity.

The last priority is telling the story you had in mind to begin with.

[Waterdeep Merch]

It really depends on what the game is.

Is your story so plot-focused that the player characters couldn't be realistically swapped out for an entirely different party and continue as if nothing happened?

Is it possible to play past the death of the entire party?

Is rolling new characters a core conceit to your game or something that should be done only once in a while, and typically due to story concerns/player desires?

How integral is any particular character, and would the game have to end if they were suddenly removed?

Is failure actually a possibility? Or would failure end your campaign in its entirety? And I mean real failure, not plot node X can't happen because Y, so we continue on to part Z without it.

And finally, would getting rescued from your failure hurt the integrity of your game so much that you'd be better off cutting it short and replaying from the beginning?

I've always looked at TPK's as powerful plot twists. Sometimes it means new heroes must pick up where the old ones fell. Sometimes the players have to play a prison escape, or even evade the grim reaper in order to return.

And sometimes, the game just ends. I've never been hurting for ideas for new campaigns, so it's not like we cease playing TTRPG's altogether just because the players' characters all died. Sometimes, you can't get a more memorable ending than absolute failure.

[Mikal]

Who's the storyteller? Is that supposed to be me?

I thought I was running a game. In a game I put a challenge in front of the players and they win or lose. If I actively prevent loss then I'm not longer running a game. It's negligent for me to try and prevent it.

People complain about railroads and player agency, but then their character dies and they complain that I should have saved them. Hard pass, thanks.

This. A thousand times this.
I can only add "Let the dice fall where they may."

[MaxWilson]

A Total Party Kill (TPK) is a failure of the Dungeon Master... My friend raised many objections to this claim, and I do understand the motives behind these objections: principal among his objections was the centrality of player agency, a concept which he holds the possibility of TPK's to be in service of. I would respond that while allowing player agency is perhaps the most useful tool in creating an enjoyable story, agency is not the end for which I create a game...

Ergo, a TPK is a failure for a Dungeon Master like you. It is not necessarily a failure for other Dungeon Masters with different goals, which could include:

* A good time with friends and a memorable story to tell afterwards. A hilarious TPK, especially if it is wildly improbable or due to entertaining (and bad) choices, can be a wild success w/rt this goal. Just imagine how much more hilarious The Head of Vecna would have been if it had also TPK'ed the party instead of only killing two of them.

* Agency and challenge. A TPK in this case is a failure of the players. It might also be a DM failure, but only inasmuch as threats were telegraphed incorrectly and/or agency was unsupported--i.e. if the players did everything right, and the dice weren't horrible, and the TPK still happened, then it's the DM's fault. But if the aftermath of the TPK is a player argument with various players blaming other players ("why did you have to push that button?" "why did you make us rest in the tunnel?") then it's definitely the players' fault, not the DM's fault.

A successful DM TPK should definitely involve the players feeling like what happened was their own dumb fault, and that they can avoid it by playing better next time.

The only kind of TPK that is always DM failure is "rocks fall, everybody dies."

[Unoriginal]

A Total Party Kill (TPK) is a failure of the Dungeon Master.

No.

Not all campaigns are the same. Some are soft on the PCs, other are not. What is important is that everyone involved is clear about it from the start.

The first Tomb of Horror was a true meatgrinder. It was the purpose of the module, and it was presented as such.

More recently, Tomb of Annihilation re-used that principle: neither the jungle nor the people nor the dungeons are going to make the PCs any favor, and it's likely they'll die if they're not careful.

If the players are entertained, then a Total Party Kill is a success of the Dungeon Master.

The ending of any story is extremely important, and the occurrence of that ending in a disorderly manner, with the principle characters all dying without any proper resolution to the story's conflict, is simply something that the storyteller should want to avoid at all costs, and given the near limitless in-game resources at his disposal, he should be able to prevent it unless he is negligent.

There is no such thing as an RPG ending happening in an "orderly manner".

The ending of a RPG scenario is much like a squid: mobile, changing, with very few hard parts and multiple things branching off the center, and likely to spit you in the face if you try to force it where you want.

It could even be said that RPG stories never truly end. We just stop talking about what happens next.

My friend raised many objections to this claim, and I do understand the motives behind these objections: principal among his objections was the centrality of player agency, a concept which he holds the possibility of TPK's to be in service of. I would respond that while allowing player agency is perhaps the most useful tool in creating an enjoyable story, agency is not the end for which I create a game, and the premature cessation of the story, no matter how active the players were in that result, is destructive of the end of a complete, personally experienced story.

It's the PCs' story, not the DM's. A DM who write a story wanting the players to play it out as they wish/as they have established isn't writing for the players or the PCs.

The DM provides the stage, the premise, and the non-main roles. Let the PCs come up with the script.

[Catullus64]

It's the PCs' story, not the DM's. A DM who write a story wanting the players to play it out as they wish/as they have established isn't writing for the players or the PCs.

The DM provides the stage, the premise, and the non-main roles. Let the PCs come up with the script.

It is a mutual endeavor: while the PC's provide responses to scenarios, and experience the various catharses of the plot, the DM has to set up context which renders all those responses meaningful. Whether or not the players enjoy the process of gameplay and decision making is, in my view, entirely dependent on that act of establishing context for actions. When the entire party dies, there is no longer a frame for establishing context, unless that death occurs at a structurally appropriate time, i.e., the ending of a narrative arc.

I concede that the claim of my original post, "A TPK is a failure of the Dungeon Master", was needlessly provocative, but it is part of a broader claim about what makes this game most meaningful to everybody, regardless of individual preference. The game is best served when player choices are structured into a meaningful order by a single storyteller, the DM, who has the information and planning to provide such context. I view a TPK as, excepting special circumstances like a proper tragedy, a categorical denial of such order and context.

[No brains]

The ending of a RPG scenario is much like a squid: mobile, changing, with very few hard parts and multiple things branching off the center, and likely to spit you in the face if you try to force it where you want.

What a beautiful sentiment.

[KorvinStarmast]

A Total Party Kill (TPK) is a failure of the Dungeon Master.

Not always.

We played during a mini con at our wargames club (university). There were six groups, and we were the third one through. We did pretty well, but had a few bad rolls at bad times, and then made two very bad tactical decisions near the end with the BBEG was emerging for us to take him out, or to distract him while our one magic user (me) used the one remaining spell (Scroll, dimension door) to get the captive duke's daughter out of the castle.

But we got flanked and my MU died a horrible death, followed by everyone else.

TPK, but that whole raid was fantastic fun. 4/6 groups TPK'd, two didn't, all said an done.
Great fun all around.

A couple of years later, party of seven, all college grads, playing on a weekend. We did a crap job of scouting, walked into a pretty big fight, and then the dice went ice cold. It was surreal. All rolls in the open. And we kept believing that the dice would warm up, rather than GTFO.

We died an inglorious death.
And then we sat there staring at our dice, wondering what had happened to them.

So we rolled up new characters.

[Pex]

2) A difficult encounter should could lead to the occasional player death.

There's a difference. No DM should ever aim for a PC to die. It can happen. Never must happen. No one is doing it wrong if it never happens.

[Tiadoppler]

I view a TPK as, excepting special circumstances like a proper tragedy, a categorical denial of such order and context.

That's understandable. Some tables are up for a tragic ending for a plotline, or even a "meaningless" sacrifice that ends a campaign. If you ever watched the end of Black Adder Goes Forth, that's the best example I can think of off the top of my head. Not all tables want that kind of experience, but some do.

That's something to talk through at session 0: are you playing on hardcore difficulty? Do you want any degree of plot armor? Are you willing to have utter, abject failure as a possible ending to a campaign?


If your players answer with "we want to experience a cool story, where there are lots of heroics and we're the adventurers saving the world" and "yeah, I'd imagine that we'd be captured by the BBEG, not coup-de-grace'd by his mooks in a ditch at level 2", then a TPK could be a real failure of the DM.

If your players say "we're here for the challenge, and a gritty, realistic story" or "throw deadly encounters at us and we'll see what the dice say", then a TPK may well perfectly reasonable.


The Tomb of Horrors exists for a reason: people buy it, play it and enjoy it.

[MxKit]

As much as I (usually) prefer playing in and running games where chance TPKs aren't on the table, I agree that "a Total Party Kill (TPK) is a failure of the Dungeon Master" depends entirely on the style of game and the expectations everyone has for it, and will differ from table to table and from campaign to campaign.

Sometimes you have meat grinders. Sometimes you have a game where the focus is on the challenge rather than the story. Sometimes you have a world where everyone goes in knowing that death is very possible and TPKs are absolutely on the table if they **** up. A lot of the time, a TPK doesn't even have to be the end of a game, as a new group of adventurers can potentially be dropped in, maybe even to find out what happened to the first group.

I'd say that adversarial DMing is a failure of the Dungeon Master, but really TPKs being a failure of the Dungeon Master is only true in certain types of games; a bigger failure would be not establishing what type of game it's going to be before going in, tbh. I may prefer playing one character from the start to the end, but I'm not going to assume that's the type of game it is before going on, and if I find out it's not, I'll either be prepared for that or be able to pass on the game if I'm not in the mood for that.

I think neither you or your friend are wrong, I think you're just applying your own truths a bit too widely. In your games, a TPK would be a failure on your part, based on your priorities, what you're trying to do, and the type of game you're trying to run. In your friend's games, a TPK would not be a failure. When playing in his game, you and the rest of the party should know to be more careful because he will not pull punches on a party wipe if you guys do something boneheaded; when playing in your game, he and the rest of that party should be able to accept that TPKs are not in your cards. Both are entirely reasonable.

ETA:

That's something to talk through at session 0: are you playing on hardcore difficulty? Do you want any degree of plot armor? Are you willing to have utter, abject failure as a possible ending to a campaign?

If your players answer with "we want to experience a cool story, where there are lots of heroics and we're the adventurers saving the world" and "yeah, I'd imagine that we'd be captured by the BBEG, not coup-de-grace'd by his mooks in a ditch at level 2", then a TPK could be a real failure of the DM.

If your players say "we're here for the challenge, and a gritty, realistic story" or "throw deadly encounters at us and we'll see what the dice say", then a TPK may well perfectly reasonable.

Tiadoppler said it better than I did, though again I'd like to add that it's not just the players' choice during Session 0; if you have a strong preference about the style of game you want to run, that's also something you should bring up in Session 0, or while looking around for players, to make sure everyone is on board with that and aware of it ahead of time.

[willdaBEAST]

However, my feeling is that while individual player death can enhance or change a story, a party wipe simply ends it. The ending of any story is extremely important, and the occurrence of that ending in a disorderly manner, with the principle characters all dying without any proper resolution to the story's conflict, is simply something that the storyteller should want to avoid at all costs, and given the near limitless in-game resources at his disposal, he should be able to prevent it unless he is negligent.

I can think of a lot of ways that having all of the protagonists die can lead to a satisfying conclusion: the party was acting as a diversion and nobly sacrificed themselves, the death of notable heroes brought a lot of attention to the BBEG and began their eventual downfall, the campaign was an attempt to subvert the concept of heroes always succeeding, the villain may have "won" but they're still trapped in a personal hell, etc.

How a TPK is perceived is going to depend greatly on your players and the story you're telling together. Some stories just end, abruptly and messily, like in real life. I think it's inconsistent to view player death as something that can enhance a story and a TPK as something that can't. A TPK also doesn't mean the campaign is over, you could have the story pick up when the children of the original party are old enough to seek vengeance for their parents.

I'm not encouraging you to TPK your party and I'm not sure if I ever will for my own games, but I think you should challenge any definitive statement about something being detrimental to the story. There's always going to be an exception, maybe not for you, but stating that a DM is negligent for TPKing is a gross simplification.

[Catullus64]

I think neither you or your friend are wrong, I think you're just applying your own truths a bit too widely. In your games, a TPK would be a failure on your part, based on your priorities, what you're trying to do, and the type of game you're trying to run. In your friend's games, a TPK would not be a failure. When playing in his game, you and the rest of the party should know to be more careful because he will not pull punches on a party wipe if you guys do something boneheaded; when playing in your game, he and the rest of that party should be able to accept that TPKs are not in your cards. Both are entirely reasonable.

I think that it's very important to try to derive broader rules and truths from one's individual experiences. While I accept that my friend has the power to set these objectives and goals when he's at the head of the table, at the root of this dissent is a dispute about which attitude towards the game is inherently more worthwhile. I accept that other people have different attitudes towards what they want out of the game, but it would be silly of me to pretend that I don't think my attitude is the best one for everybody. If I didn't think it was best to play the game, I wouldn't play it that way myself. I think one kind of roleplaying is better than the other, and want to see more people play it that way. Selfish? Yes, but an honest and straightforward kind of selfishness.

[Unoriginal]

while the PC's provide responses to scenarios, and experience the various catharses of the plot

Not sure what you mean by this, because that sentence makes no sense as it is or at least require more explanations.

Catharsis is a feeling of cleansing of emotions the audience of a work experience, or a release of emotional tension.

Whether or not the players enjoy the process of gameplay and decision making is, in my view, entirely dependent on that act of establishing context for actions.

This is a tautology. It's the DM's work to provide the world in which the players will make the PCs make decisions and actions, so of course the player's enjoyment is dependent on that.

When the entire party dies, there is no longer a frame for establishing context, unless that death occurs at a structurally appropriate time, i.e., the ending of a narrative arc.

There is no such thing as a "structuraly appropriate time" in a RPG. Characters might die at any moment where the chance to die exist, and so it's possible for all of them to die.

The concept of "narrative arc" or "structure" barely applicable for a TTRPG, because while events happen probably in the sense of a storyline, there is no way to know what will happen. Maybe the PCs will befriend the Hill Giant. Maybe the PCs will decide the king need to die so they can spook his son into signing the peace treaty. Maybe they'll spend half a session on a red herring or trying to solve a personal PC issue rather than talking to the contact who knows what's going on with the bank heist.

And nobody knows how the story will develop.

it is part of a broader claim about what makes this game most meaningful to everybody, regardless of individual preference.

What makes the game meaningful IS that there are individual preferences.

The game is best served when player choices are structured into a meaningful order by a single storyteller, the DM, who has the information and planning to provide such context.

No.

Maybe you, personally, like campaigns where the DM has a strong storyline the characters follow, but it is by no mean an universal truth nor anything more than a preference.

into a meaningful order

What does "meaningful order" mean? If, in an adventure about mysterious demon cultists performing human sacrifices in a duchy, the PCs manage to bypass some portions of the adventure because they figured the Duke was the culprit, and then decide to ally with the Thieves' Guild to expose him rather than presenting their evidence to the Lord-General as the DM planned, are they not following the "meaningful order" ?

I view a TPK as, excepting special circumstances like a proper tragedy, a categorical denial of such order and context.

Either such order and context is something that is categorically denied every times the players decide to do something not following the rails the DM has placed for them, or such order and context don't exist in a TTRPG.

[Catullus64]

Not sure what you mean by this, because that sentence makes no sense as it is or at least require more explanations.

Catharsis is a feeling of cleansing of emotions the audience of a work experience, or a release of emotional tension.

...

There is no such thing as a "structuraly appropriate time" in a RPG. Characters might die at any moment where the chance to die exist, and so it's possible for all of them to die.

The concept of "narrative arc" or "structure" barely applicable for a TTRPG, because while events happen probably in the sense of a storyline, there is no way to know what will happen. Maybe the PCs will befriend the Hill Giant. Maybe the PCs will decide the king need to die so they can spook his son into signing the peace treaty. Maybe they'll spend half a session on a red herring or trying to solve a personal PC issue rather than talking to the contact who knows what's going on with the bank heist.

...

Maybe you, personally, like campaigns where the DM has a strong storyline the characters follow, but it is by no mean an universal truth nor anything more than a preference.

To the first objection: That, too, is what I understand catharsis to be. The players experience something of the emotions of their characters and undergo a cleansing of their own similar tensions. Sorry if my wording muddied that definition.

To the second objection: Simply because the PC's make variable decisions does not mean the story has no rhyme or reason. Since you as the DM present the events to which the players will react, you still have great discretion in determining the pace at which things develop, and what consequences their actions have. In that sense, the players provide the premise of the story by acting, and you provide the resolution by describing consequences.

To the third: It is indeed my personal preference, but it wouldn't be my preference if I didn't think it was also more universally grounded, and that it had some objective superiority to less narratively controlled games.

[Drascin]

It really depends on what the game is.

Is your story so plot-focused that the player characters couldn't be realistically swapped out for an entirely different party and continue as if nothing happened?

This called my attention. My experience is that "swapping for an entirely different party" is almost invariably a diminishing of the campaign. Everything that had happened before, every NPC the players befriended, every relationship, every rivalry, poof, all that is either entirely gone or so damaged you might as well scrap it. A campaign where you could "continue as if nothing happened" sounds like a spherical cow to my ears.

In fact, as I mentioned on another recent thread on a similar topic, experiences with this complete break in characterization that TPKs represent were the thing that made me decide that TPKs were basically never worth it for me as a GM, and to install various rules to make the chance of death vanishingly small.

[Tiadoppler]

if you have a strong preference about the style of game you want to run, that's also something you should bring up in Session 0, or while looking around for players, to make sure everyone is on board with that and aware of it ahead of time.

Great point! DM/Player communication in general solves so many problems before they happen.

If I didn't think it was best to play the game, I wouldn't play it that way myself. I think one kind of roleplaying is better than the other, and want to see more people play it that way. Selfish? Yes, but an honest and straightforward kind of selfishness.

Disclaimer: The following is all just random, rambling opinions.

People get offended when someone says "this is the right way/that is the wrong way". That's why you're getting so much pushback about your opinion. D&D is a medium for telling stories, it isn't a genre in and of itself. Genre might be "comedy" or "tragedy" or even "hero's journey".

D&D is a somewhat reasonable game system for running stories with lots of different genres. Perhaps one game has a team of underfunded and underprepared civilians, soldiers and scholars facing off against an unknowable terror from the depths of time, and another game has a group of half-a-dozen friends who take time off their day jobs to meet and befriend anyone who might scare or threaten their village. No, D&D isn't designed as a perfect simulation of Call of Cthulhu or My Little Pony, but it can still serve as the mechanical backbone for either of those stories and infinitely many more.

[MxKit]

I think that it's very important to try to derive broader rules and truths from one's individual experiences.

Sometimes, when it comes down to subjective ideas about what's fun in a game, and there can be multiple different things that people find varying degrees of fun, there's no such thing as a broader truth. It's like ice cream flavors: I really love vanilla and chocolate and strawberry, and somebody else might love chocolate and like vanilla a lot and enjoy strawberry well enough, and somebody might only like vanilla. At that point, the latter person saying "it's a mistake to serve anything but vanilla ice cream!" is drawing from individual experience and not even the slightest bit helpful or true.

at the root of this dissent is a dispute about which attitude towards the game is inherently more worthwhile.

What's "inherently more worthwhile" is if everyone at a table is having fun with the game style that they've decided upon. There are multiple people here saying they find it fun to play in games where, for whatever reason, TPKs are on the table; I think trying to argue that they're mistaken about their preferences and/or that their preferences and their fun isn't as "worthwhile" is folly.

I accept that other people have different attitudes towards what they want out of the game, but it would be silly of me to pretend that I don't think my attitude is the best one for everybody. If I didn't think it was best to play the game, I wouldn't play it that way myself. I think one kind of roleplaying is better than the other, and want to see more people play it that way. Selfish? Yes, but an honest and straightforward kind of selfishness.

I mean, this isn't just selfish, that's not really the problem here. It's flawed logically and bordering on nonsensical. If it was just "I prefer X kind of roleplaying and selfishly wish most tables did it X way because that would guarantee I'd have the most fun I could possibly have at any table I sat down at," that would be one thing and I could even sympathize, because selfish wishes that the things we like would cater to us are common as anything. But what you're actually saying is "I know other people want different things out of their games than I do, but I still think they should want what I do out of games and that it would somehow be more fun for them if they didn't play the games the way they actually want to, because if any other style of play was subjectively for anyone else then I wouldn't have my own personal preferences." Bwuh?

[Catullus64]

I mean, this isn't just selfish, that's not really the problem here. It's flawed logically and bordering on nonsensical. If it was just "I prefer X kind of roleplaying and selfishly wish most tables did it X way because that would guarantee I'd have the most fun I could possibly have at any table I sat down at," that would be one thing and I could even sympathize, because selfish wishes that the things we like would cater to us are common as anything. But what you're actually saying is "I know other people want different things out of their games than I do, but I still think they should want what I do out of games and that it would somehow be more fun for them if they didn't play the games the way they actually want to, because if any other style of play was subjectively for anyone else then I wouldn't have my own personal preferences." Bwuh?

No, that bolded bit is pretty much what I meant.

[Unoriginal]

To the first objection: That, too, is what I understand catharsis to be. The players experience something of the emotions of their characters and undergo a cleansing of their own similar tensions. Sorry if my wording muddied that definition.

So to you playing Dungeons & Dragons is about cleaning oneself of one's violent/taboo urges?

To the second objection: Simply because the PC's make variable decisions does not mean the story has no rhyme or reason. Since you as the DM present the events to which the players will react, you still have great discretion in determining the pace at which things develop, and what consequences their actions have. In that sense, the players provide the premise of the story by acting, and you provide the resolution by describing consequences.

As players and DMs interact, a RPG session should be expected to be coherent. It's not the same thing as being structured. Not in the narrative sense, at least.

To the third: It is indeed my personal preference, but it wouldn't be my preference if I didn't think it was also more universally grounded, and that it had some objective superiority to less narratively controlled games.

Really, you're unable or unwilling to conceive how other people's preferences on a subjective topic can be as equally valid as yours ?

[Catullus64]

So to you playing Dungeons & Dragons is about cleaning oneself of one's violent/taboo urges?


Really, you're unable or unwilling to conceive how other people's preferences on a subjective topic can be as equally valid as yours ?

Question 1: Yep!

Question 2: Nope!

[Waterdeep Merch]

This called my attention. My experience is that "swapping for an entirely different party" is almost invariably a diminishing of the campaign. Everything that had happened before, every NPC the players befriended, every relationship, every rivalry, poof, all that is either entirely gone or so damaged you might as well scrap it. A campaign where you could "continue as if nothing happened" sounds like a spherical cow to my ears.

In fact, as I mentioned on another recent thread on a similar topic, experiences with this complete break in characterization that TPKs represent were the thing that made me decide that TPKs were basically never worth it for me as a GM, and to install various rules to make the chance of death vanishingly small.

It's not meant as a condemnation to games that aren't like this- rather, it addresses a niche. Some people really do just run a giant dungeon crawl, where the player experiencing it is all that matters. Whole party dies, no big deal. Play new characters. Old players leave and new ones come in? You can continue running it, no problem, because the existence of specific players is ultimately inconsequential. Even interactions with NPC's aren't all that important if said NPC's aren't dramatically important.

While I'm too young to have experienced it myself (aside from the occasional retro experience), this is what old school dungeon crawling meant to a lot of people. You often see it these days in roguelike video games. It's not for everyone, nor is it for every game, but it's a niche where a TPK is a perfectly acceptable thing.

[Unoriginal]

No, that bolded bit is pretty much what I meant.

Then say so and don't pretend it's an universal.


We all believe we're right, to some level, probably. I immensely dislike Pathfinder, for exemple, and I think my reasons for that are valid. Yet "Pathfinder is ****" is nothing but a subjective statement. "Pathfinder has a lot of player options for the purpose of making people search through them and it is possible to create characters that overshadow others easily" is an objective statement, and some people enjoy that about Pathfinder.

Question 1: Yep!

Well ok, then. I must say I never used D&D to purge myself of any desire to hurt people or engage in antisocial actions, but ok.

Question 2: Nope!

Alright.

So, there is no reason for anyone to respond to this thread.

You're clear you don't want to consider others' points-of-view, so the best we can do is to not bother.

[ngilop]

A Total Party Kill (TPK) is a failure of the Dungeon Master.

This was the statement over which I had a fairly long and meaningful discussion with a friend. Both the friend and myself are players in each other's campaigns. The argument I made, compacted above, requires a few qualifiers:

This is specifically to do with party wipes, not player death in general.
This is meant to be a general maxim; of course there will be extreme scenarios where the players recklessly and suicidally get in over their heads. However, my feeling is that while individual player death can enhance or change a story, a party wipe simply ends it. The ending of any story is extremely important, and the occurrence of that ending in a disorderly manner, with the principle characters all dying without any proper resolution to the story's conflict, is simply something that the storyteller should want to avoid at all costs, and given the near limitless in-game resources at his disposal, he should be able to prevent it unless he is negligent.

My friend raised many objections to this claim, and I do understand the motives behind these objections: principal among his objections was the centrality of player agency, a concept which he holds the possibility of TPK's to be in service of. I would respond that while allowing player agency is perhaps the most useful tool in creating an enjoyable story, agency is not the end for which I create a game, and the premature cessation of the story, no matter how active the players were in that result, is destructive of the end of a complete, personally experienced story.

Further meditations on the subject would be welcome.

I do not understand how a player's death can enhance or change a story, can you explain it to me.

[BurgerBeast]

I'll never agree with this.

Some people prefer quality.

It's no different than any endeavour. If you want to simply have fun, then go ahead. If you want to play the best D&D you can, then go for it.

But don't try to pass off having fun as the best way to play or the way it's meant to be played. That's not true for anything.

At some point, you must concede that the "fun" (satisfaction is a better term) is the net result of continuously playing D&D well. If it wasn't, then D&D would not be the pretext.

Play D&D well. Satisfaction will follow. Fun, when the word itself is not intentionally vague, is fickle and overrated.