I think it’s useful if it’s a feature you can choose to activate or deactivate yourself on specific groups of communities, but it sounds awful if the decision is made for you.

Good explanation, thank you

Iirc there was a whole thing when Joker came out where people were trying to diagnose the Joker with some combination of real conditions, and the actor/writers came out and said nah we just gave him a bunch of behaviors generally accepted as dangerous red flags

You’re excited about this? Like it’s a competition you want women to win?

This seems like a neat idea, although I worry that if it’s not executed right it seems like I’m just making up weird stuff to make the game harder. As it stands, I stick to the RAW pretty closely so that I feel like I’m being reasonably fair. I tend to doubt myself a lot when I homebrew mechanics that work against the player.

I think I mentioned the word in the post but didn’t elaborate: dilemmas. It seems like this is a big part of what you’re suggesting: letting the players take part in deciding what negative consequences they suffer where there is no answer that is strictly positive for the players. I do feel like I have failed to present my dilemmas in a way that gets perceived as fair, it just seems like the players assumed that there must be time to loot the vault and escape from the demon without consequence, when I was trying to make it clear that they can either get away quickly, or loot the vault and have a powerful enemy catch up to them.

And to be honest that’s kind of been the most fun I’ve had is when I offer a choice between safety without maximum reward, or taking a risk that requires a clever solution to escape from. I feel like I telegraph the danger but I can’t overcome this underlying assumption that I’m not actually going to follow through on the threat.

Are there any rules for injuries like that anywhere?

I think the rest of the table enjoyed themselves, but I do think part of it is that they weren’t as invested as the player in question. They would show up to the session, put themselves in danger, and don’t really seem to get the same anxiety about their character dying because I don’t think they would really care that much.

Frankly I think that amplifies the issue because we only have one player that might want to spend time on a plan to try to guarantee success and the rest of the party is more “fuck it we ball” types. Furthermore the anxious player was the most frontliner of them all so the party’s lack of planning is most likely to bite him in the ass out of any of them.

Thanks for this, I’m interested in your take on what you do to make your games interesting for you as a DM. My issue isn’t so much that I can’t run a game my friend enjoys, it’s that I don’t really enjoy it because I feel like I know exactly what’s going to happen. I enjoy DMing with more complex and difficult encounters because I get unexpected situations out of it.

It’s interesting that you mention Fate because I’ve actually run it before at a retreat, and that same friend recommended Fate as a more beginner friendly, easier to set-up TTRPG. And when I ran it I thought of him because the whole system seems to almost guarantee the players’ success, and the drama is in the “complications” or whatever the jargon for Fate is. D&D by comparison doesn’t seem to lend itself to that success-but-at-a-cost.

Yeah, absolutely. I don’t want to be the DM where everything is a deadly encounter.

Maybe I could satisfy myself by upping the difficulty, but changing the consequences? Like the typical consequences to losing an encounter would be death, hostages taken, etc. But maybe it would be a good compromise to have encounters where the failure condition isn’t death. I’m thinking about Shaolin Showdown all of the sudden…

Kind of Alex Jones-y I thought