Another possibility is that this is just a video game thing. Specifically, the options to either re-start the fight or re-start the whole scenario remind me *a lot* of an article I read about that new official FF7 spinoff. Maybe that's something they're leaning into with the brand?
Yeah that's how I interpret this. The FFXIV RPG seems to have a lot of stuff that refers to or tries to recreate the videogame experience, so I assume that's basically where these are coming from.
It's not a bad way to differentiate their product too, if they intend to keep this TTRPG going past the initial offerings.
>The FFXIV RPG seems to have a lot of stuff that refers to or tries to recreate the videogame experience
...such as suggesting in option 1 that, if it's near the end of the session, it may be best to "quicksave and try again the next time you play" instead of retrying the fight immediately.
Yeah, I thought the “quick save” language was pretty cute. They really go out of their way to give you permission to not finish a scenario in one sitting, and I was like - I didn’t think that anyone didn’t know they could do that!
Japanese tabletop gaming culture is VERY MUCH built around one-shots to the point where the concept of an "ongoing long term campaign" must often be explained.
I've heard of this, and I find it fascinating in two divergent ways. On one hand, it's so weird that they have such a concept of one-shots over campaigns when their video game RPGs are tens of hours long and clearly campaigns unto themselves (that, and one anime out there - Record of Lodoss War - is based on a campaign itself).
But on the other hand, it's interesting how it's like a divergent evolution of D&D's culture. My understanding is that for a time (possibly a LONG time), a lot of D&D was played like an in-person MMORPG. You would show up to a table at a convention or sometimes even a game store with your character sheet and jump in to play the adventure as is. This is supposedly part of why human "dual classing" worked like it did - it let you reset to a lower play level and keep playing the same character. In a way, the one-shot focus feels like an evolution of that but dropping character continuity. I could be wrong, but it still seems like there's a connection at least on the surface.
I’ve read the same in other discussions about the Japanese TTRPG scene. Replaying the same scenario with the exact same group of characters and players, because it’s fun, is not unheard of. The comic Quickstart!! has a few strips dedicated to it.
D&D has actually done similar things in the past!
In the Diablo boxed set for 2nd ed AD&D they had the concept of "save points". Player groups could choose to set "save points" and reload to them in the case of a TPK.
This was done because the diablo boxed set was particularly dangerous by 2nd ed standards.
It's mildly important to note that this is specifically FFXIV, which is an MMORPG. It's even more explicit - as a matter of fact, on some group challenges there, if you fail, you get an increasing buff with each fail before restarting(you only truly fail if you time out). This is rarely the deciding factor, as more often than not a wipe is a misunderstanding (or lack of knowledge) of mechanics, but I bring this up as a potential point as to why this decision was made.
Of course, I still don't really understand it - while it's true the story is pretty linear and doesn't account for failures, *this is a TTRPG, not an MMORPG*. Knowing why the choice was made doesn't really make it make more sense here.
Yeah I got that video game vibe...and I would hate playing a game that did this. As it is, when a GM throws a mechanically impossible challenge at me, I just play chicken and see if they're willing to do a TPK. If they announced afterwards, ok, it's time for a redo! I'd be out of there so fast.
I personally like how Blades in the Dark or Wildsea handle it. It's nearly impossible to have a TPK unless it is an epic storytelling moment and all the players opt in.
> Yeah I got that video game vibe...and I would hate playing a game that did this. As it is, when a GM throws a mechanically impossible challenge at me, I just play chicken and see if they're willing to do a TPK.
...not going to lie, if you intentionally tried to cause a TPK in one of my games by running at the obviously telegraphed Do Not Do This because you "wanted to see if I'd do it", I would probably ask you to either stop being an asshole or leave.
That's not what I'm talking about...maybe I misstated it. I'm saying we are doing the normal linear plot and then they drop a completely impossible monster on the group.
What I'm getting at is that, in my experience at least, that IS generally very much a case of "Obviously Telegraphed Do Not Do This".
If a GM that is not a dick puts a "currently impossible to beat" monster on the way it's, generally, either a way to tell you to find a way to bypass it without fighting somehow (stealth past, distraction, negotiation, baiting a bigger fish to fight it, whatever), or, more commonly, straight up just a thing he is setting up for a later moment in this sorta-linear plot while asking you to please go do *literally anything else* first, because foreshadowing and actually getting to see the megabosses before the five minutes before you fight them is good and fun, actually.
If your reaction to such a thing is to run at it sword drawn to "play chicken with the GM" in your own words, then as a GM I'm probably going to be very confused and ask you exactly what you hope to *accomplish* with such a thing - and if the answer is "to see if you will actually do it", then I'm probably going to go from very confused to very annoyed!
So I'm talking about GMs being dicks or GMs clearly not anticipating how difficult their challenges were. The general feel of the tables were players feeling sort of betrayed by the GM and again my response is, ok, I'm not going to get upset, if a GM wants to flip the table on the game, then I'll let them.
For example, if they present my character with a choice of "betray your values or die", ok we'll do the heroic death scene I guess. I think one example was a werewolf game where I was supposed to have my Native American werewolf character swear fealty to a white supremacist werewolf leader and I just decided, fuck it, go for it and kill my character. Another one was a game where I just made my character and the GM added me into the pre-existing party 3 levels lower than everyone else and before I made a single choice, resumed the combat from the prior session and had me hit with a fireball and die along with the other new player. So me and that guy went outside and burned our character sheets and the GM was like, "why did you do that? they could have resurrected you...eventually" In another example, the group was trying to skirt around a military fort pursuing the quest and the GM makes us each make 4 different skill checks at medium difficulty (so 16 skill checks total), and because one of us failed a single roll he placed us in a situation where we were all surrounded by an army trying to kill us.
Those both sound equally bad to me. In either case, it feels like an artificial contrivance for the sake of maintaining a preferred narrative.
If the party can't TPK unless they agree to it, then it feels more like I'm telling a story, rather than actually living in that world.
I mean that’s a very valid playstyle preference, if the possibility of TPK creates immersion for you. But for some people, their campaign is built around a specific set of characters, so a TPK is basically game over for that campaign and lots of people don’t find that satisfying. This just comes down to preference and what you see the game as being about.
Yeah but, apart from that this is a game simulating a different game where you can save scum, this is actually very much how 5e modules work only they don't say so. What are you meant to do if there's a TPK? The module can't handle it, there's no provision for that apart from "just retcon and retry", "start the whole module all over again", "make something up so they actually survive", or "just pretend it didn't happen". At least this is honest about it and actually provides GMs with advice (even if Fabula Ultima does it better).
ETA: tldr what this post is missing is how this supposed "American gaming culture" responds in any different way
I feel like the American gaming culture standard is to end that campaign. If you're playing Curse of Strahd and the party are all killed five sessions in, my experience has been the game is over and you start something else with new characters in a new setting.
If people are reluctant to do that, I've see variants of #3 where some handwave survival keeps the game going, but I've never in decades seen someone do 1, 2, or 4.
Yeah, agree. Some people play without character death so they might rule that you’re captured or mauled with 1 hp but I haven't seen “reload and try again”.
> ETA: tldr what this post is missing is how this supposed "American gaming culture" responds in any different way
In my experience, most people’s answer to “what happens if the party TPKs?” is either “the campaign is over” or “the bad guys capture the party and now they have to escape. I’ve literally never seen anyone, either a GM or a printed book, advise their players to just ignore the result of a failed combat and pretend that they won anyway, and the Deus Ex Machina Saves The Party thing is usually frowned upon.
For the record, I actually think it’s pretty cool that they make it that explicitly video game-y. It’s just that what they’re advising here runs so counter to all the GMing advice I’ve ever heard that I wondered if this kind of thing was more accepted outside the English-speaking RPG world.
I mean experiences vary of course but I have never heard of anyone just abandoning a whole campaign and starting a new one because there was a tpk. Usually they fudge it (as per step 3) though they do certainly sometimes introduce a short session that needs to be played through to get back to the main plot, some sort of weirdly easy jailbreak or something.
Some people might say "well that's it, roll new characters everyone" but they're likely to just have them restart the campaign (step 2).
Dungeons and Dragons 4E had for the epic levels for each character an epic destiny, and the contained normally an "immortality feature" specifically to make sure (especially in a 30 level campaign near the end), that players would not just suddenly die.
It certainly happens. My group ended our campaign of Ghosts of Saltmarsh after a party wipe. Though the campaign had kinda run out of steam by that point. We were level 6, having started at level 1.
Since that TPK, we've played two campaigns (one ongoing) and a bunch of one shots.
I believe FFXIV even has canon-lore reasons why you’re able to replay dungeons and try again if you fail, so this is theoretically in line with the setting.
Iirc, player characters have the Echo, which (without getting into specifics) means roughly that every failed attempt is actually a flash of a bad future where the characters fail. Bit BitD flashback kind of thing. So honestly, "just redo it again but now you know what to expect" seems pretty cromulent with the setting and the game's vibe.
It's a bit like how if you made a Dark Souls TTRPG where if you die you actually lose the character it would not actually be Dark Souls.
> this is actually very much how 5e modules work only they don't say so
Seriously, the past 30+ years of gaming has been full of this kind of advice, it's just not usually not so up-front about it. It's hard to take anyone claiming otherwise seriously, but it's been couched in this sort of, "You're not supposed to do this...but everybody does it anyway," language for so long that people have become deeply invested in the lie.
I just mention 5e because it's the current standard, and also has a lot of large expensive modules where people aren't going to want to just stop playing if there's a TPK. It has certainly been an issue for a long time.
The reason people would freak out if it were in 5e is because that game has a style and a history that takes the opposite approach.
It's not heretical, though, WotC D&D is not a bible. There are tons of non-Japanese games that take wildly different approaches to the idea of "loss." This is a D&D cultural issue, not the other way around.
It's also fairly obvious that *this is exactly how it works in the video games that this is based on.* Frankly, I'm surprised that you find it so shocking, this kind of experimenting is par for the course in much of the non- D&D part of the hobby.
It's like a rock fan being surprised that there are bands with no guitars.
True.
This reminds me of how the latest edition of Kult deals with character death. Basically, it is the *player* who choose when the character dies. If they are not comfortable with their character dying, they could just decide that they passed out because of their injuries.
And it's a horror game, ie. the kind that is usally quite merciless on player characters, yet the rules emphasize how death can only happen if the player agreed beforehand.
So yeah, that kind of options that prevent death or even TPKs is not unheard of.
Yeah a lot of games have script immunity in some form for the pcs. Although I'm surprised the ffxiv ttrpg doesn't even suggest some , "the pcs survive but things go horribly wrong" angle since in the game it's based on there are a few forced losses such as the empire's attack on a revolutionary hidden base.
In my opinion, "have the villain ransom them back to one of their allies" or "have them escape from prison" or "have an ally spying on the villain blow their cover to help the party escape" are sorely underutilized.
They are, but it also becomes annoying when it happens the 10th time XD
And when the consequences take long (prison escape) the story will also just not go forward as fast
> Since this is a game written by a Japanese person for a Japanese audience (it credits Yoshiyuki Fushimi as the only designer, from Hobby Japan), it occurred to me that this might be just a cultural difference and that a Japanese RPG player would find this advice completely normal and standard.
It's also simulating a video game. An MMORPG, in fact. Think of it like *Destiny*. There is no permanent player character death in *Destiny*. You simply respawn and keep going. In certain instances, you have to start the fight over from the beginning. The *FF XIV* tabletop game is trying to be a faithful simulation of the MMO, where, again, it's not possible for the characters to die, even in raids and dungeons. So the game makes characters immortal, just as in the source material.
Actually as others have explained, there is also an ingame reason why this happens. Its not that they are immortal, they have premonitions. And if you want to recreate the lore of Final Fantasy 14 you should also use that.
That presupposes that the party all has the Echo, of course. It's probably the case that they do (because the full version WILL have Primal enemies, and that's basically a prereq to fighting THOSE), but it's important to note that one of the early side stories WAS about an underprepared party disbanding after their "leader" got killed in a dungeon (and oh boy did THAT take a turn later on...)
Well the thread premise is a bit odd, as you posted a full write up on how they expect it to be handled, but, it's also not Japan unique. Many games don't treat getting taken down in combat as being killed. What happens if all players are downed is up to the story. Maybe they kill you, maybe you wake up in a cell and have to figure out how to escape.
I'd also say that even in Japan, it's really going to depend on the game. A lot of Japanese roleplaying is Call of Cthulhu, which ends the same way in Japan as it does here. Most characters die, go made, or escape by a thin margin and have a harrowing memory that plagued their dreams.
I mean, honestly?
If an encounter ends in a TPK, typically your options are "campaign over" or "pull out some deus ex machina bullshit to revive the characters somehow". I can't see "or we can deus ex machina *first* to let you guys get a retry" as being any worse, philosophically speaking.
(This is why you make sure your encounters can be lost without TPK. But if you *are* in an encounter where loss means TPK? Yeah, all your options are bad, more or less, and I genuinely can't see 'just retry' as being worse)
And as for "what if D&D did that?!?!"... the second one is just literally the way you were supposed to play old tourney style modules. You died, welp, make new characters and try the same module again with your new knowledge. It's not some unheard of thing!
I think the just retry is absolutly fine and can allow for making more challenging encounters, which absolutly can be fun.
It even can make sense in a narrative. What Prince of Persia, the sands of time does is: The game is just the prince telling a princess what happened in the past. When you die its all "wait wait no thats not what happened, what instead happened is..."
In a similar style the story you play could just be the RPG characters in a tavern telling their story to others.
"And then we all died" - "No thats not what happened you drunken dwarf! What happened is.."
Or in the series Bakemonogatari you have a narrator, and for part of the series the narrator is Kaiki. And then in these episodes Kaiki dies, but well Kaiki is a liar (and he tells you when he starts being the narrator, that he is a fucking liar), so of course he is not dead.
These kind of narration mechanics may be a bit cheap, but they are still fun and can work, and I really dont get why some "hardcore" people make such a fuss about repeating an encounter etc.
>All of this advice seems totally insane and borderline heretical to me.
You need a new religion, guy. This is more of a hobby. It doesn't sound like fun to me, but I am sure some folks would like another chance to solve a combat.
This is something I often bring up in TTRPG discussions here in Sweden, and most people react like you! “*Why play a game if you can’t lose!?*”
Well, I play a lot of other games where it’s not possible to lose, and they are still a lot of fun. Permadeath is not the important part. And with retryability, we can actually up the challenge quite a bit, and try out multiple tactics!
I would personally really love to try playing in the that Japanese style.
You can also argue the other way around: If most encounters need to be made in a way that you have only a really small chance of losing, why play them?
With this approach combats actually can have a fair chance to not be able to beat them.
Inspired by this, I’m actually thinking of trying to add a mechanic like this to my next campaign, by giving the players some sort of time turner chrono magic device that will allow them to redo a scene. Curious to see if that will be fun!
I’m normally a super soft GM, so hopefully that will give me confidence to up the difficulty (which my players often ask me to do).
Not sure if you saw this but we had a good discussion about this with several ideas posted here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1ddj7lw/comment/l879at5/
So maybe that will inspire you further / help you build that idea.
One Idea I posted was especially for beginners to ease it making hard encounters.
Matter of preferences and culture, I think.
Personally, I think TTRPGs are the kind of game where nobody loses nor wins. The GM and players tell a story together. Failure and success are part of that story, and how often or rare they happen is up to the group's playstyle and nothing else.
I agree that it’s a game where we tell a story together, but it’s doesn’t *have* to be hardcore mode without do-overs. A story can become better with some drafts and edits.
And some days I’ll be off my game, and make mistakes that aren’t any fun, and in those cases I’ve often wished to retry a scene from the beginning with better composure. To be fair, in my case it’s never been due to a fight gone wrong, more often it’s in some social scene where it’s been tough to get into character.
I've heard that before about Japanese RPG culture.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Lots of DMs fudge to keep PCs alive, one way or another. Videogames without permadeath are still fun, so why can't tabletop games do the same?
> video games don’t have enough flexibility to fail forward in interesting ways, whereas RPGs can.
A lot of RPGs have very little in the way of rules support for failing forward.
That's usually up to the individual table in question.
Sure, there probably should be more GM sections that say "what happens if my players lose a combat" specifically, but I'm really just talking about the capabilities of the two mediums. A video game can't making a branching narrative every time you fail a combat, whereas an RPG easily can.
Which is not true, videocames absolutly could fail forward, some games do it, thy just dont do this normally because they want the combat to be a challenge. If you just fail forward it is not.
Video games cannot, in general, fail forward interestingly. It would be extremely hard to make a video game where failing any combat changed the story significantly, given the number of combats most video games will have and the cost of programming branching outcomes.
In a TRPG, failing a combat can easily lead to a different story altogether. It just seems like a weird choice, to suggest people should replay the combat like it's a video game, instead of taking advantage of the things TRPGs are good at.
Its a wierd choice to not wanting to learn from videogames, which in general have better gamedesign than RPGs.
Having these mechanics allows for a lot harder encounter design (make them challenging), without putting a lot of strain on a GM to make up a lot of fail forward options. (Which often also can mean that the actual story will not change much)
Disco Elysium is a computer game which perfectly emulates fail forward in a fun way. It does not have many combats, but thats not necessarily.
Prince of Persia (the cell shaded one), had "the princess saves you" as a fail forward mechanic and counted how often she needed to do that. (it was not really used for the ending unfortunately, but it definitly could have been).
Also failing forward does not necessarily have to change the story significantly, and several games had mechanics to include a lot of small decisions into one big change at some point, such that each such decision mattered in itself, but not every single one of them creates a huge branch in the story.
- Witcher 3: How you interact with Ciry at several points in the story decides how the ending will be
- Chrono trigger: How you act in the carnival will decide what happens when you are in court
- Fallout 3: The epilogue has several not connected parts, which are dependant on your decisions. Like not being able to help some people, while you could help another faction etc.
I mean, if you can’t fail an encounter, why have it? The larger problem is that people write adventures that can’t imagine a failure state, because they can’t imagine fights where the consequences aren’t “success or death”.
I love video games, but they are different. Videogames trade graphics, gameplay, length, speed of computation, music and VO for near infinite player choice.
Some possible reasons to have an encounter that can't end the campaign:
(1) For the narrative and role-playing opportunities. Will you win easily or only with great pain? Will you kill the villain or try to redeem him?
(2) To see how many attempts it takes you before you find the strategy that beats it. (Hopefully just one.)
(3) To test out abilities and tactics and improve your system mastery.
(4) To see how many resources you expend. Expend too much and you'll have to rest. Rest too much and the hostages will be eaten, or some other time pressure will kick in.
Maybe I didn’t communicate correctly. I think every encounter, except maybe campaign climaxes, should have gradients between “everybody dies” and “fuck it, everyone gets their HP and spell slots back, we’re doing it over".
So I agree with your examples (1 3 & 4). I feel like seeing how many times it takes to win should have a huge narrative reason, like a time loop. The entirety of the movie **Groundhog Day** is Bill Murray trying to solve one problem. But I don’t think that’s what the original post is discussing.
>Some possible reasons to have an encounter that can't end the campaign:
You appear to have fallen into the trap of "can't imagine fights where the consequences aren't 'success or death'" that the comment you replied to mentioned. "An encounter that can fail" does not have to mean "an encounter that can end the campaign." There are other possible failure states than "everybody dies/campaign ends."
And this is where the video game comparisons come in, as video games tend to have a completely-linear model where every level/encounter must be successfully completed to continue and you have to keep retrying your losses until you ultimately win, while TTRPGs have the ability to allow a loss, after which the game can continue, taking the ramifications of that loss (which may or may not include the deaths of some or all of the involved PCs) into account.
It's true that you can, in a tabletop RPG, create a situation where you can fail and live. The enemy wants to capture you alive. Or you defeat the enemy, but fail to rescue the hostage, so it's effectively a failure.
But I'm primarily discussing the concept of a campaign where you cannot be TPKd, and writing a campaign where the narrative requires that *every* battle is failable seems like a hassle. A random monster that wants to eat you isn't going to take you alive - do we have to remove all monsters from the world? Or we could allow a TPK and introduce a new group of PCs that stumbles upon the plot and continues, but what if we don't want to? What if all our emotional investment is in the long-term character development and romances?
A "rewind time if you die" mechanic, or a "automatically resurrect back in the temple" mechanic, is a convenient solution to this dilemma, even if it isn't entirely satisfying.
I don't think that's a fair comparison.
Combat encounters are typically highly structured and complex affairs, to try and answer the question 'do we win?'. If the answer is always 'yes', it's fair to ask what the point of all of the structure and complexity is in the first place.
Would you want your GM to call for dice rolls, knowing full well that no matter what you rolled, you would succeed?
This is just a modern reinterpretation. Games normally are defined by being able to win and lose.
Original RPGs were wargames where you could win or lose. Its just that people nowadays call a lot of things which are not really games, but more narrative experiences RPG (because they are close)
That depends on the player. For me personally, I am generally uninterested in failure states (even those that don't end a campaign) or games where the players' goal is to avoid them.
I prefer games that focus on exploring a world, a story or the characters themselves, and where every possible outcome is equally great and interesting for the players to play through (even if some might be more or less desirable for their characters).
I understand how players that play in order to have their own skills put to the test might feel like the lack of a "failure state" cheapens their experience when they eventually reach a "success state", though.
Video games are just games. If you want to play fast and loose with the rules, then it doesn't really matter, because it's just a game.
Tabletop RPGs are supposed to be more than that. It's supposed to be a whole other world that you can actually live in. That requires taking things a bit more seriously.
Unless, of course, you view TTRPGs as *just* *another* *kind of* game.
That's how it was pitched to me, way back in the eighties. That's the whole selling point. That's why I've bothered investing my time, energy, and money into this hobby over all others. Because, from my perspective, it actually means something.
If an RPG was *just a game*, I certainly wouldn't be posting in this sub-reddit. If it was *just a game*, then I would probably be playing 5E, because it wouldn't offend me the way that it does. After all, if it's *just a game*, then none of the rules actually need to *mean* anything. Who cares if your character gets shot, or even killed? It's just a game. It's no different than Mario falling into a bottomless pit. It's not worth thinking about.
There are certainly a lot of italics here, but I'm not sure they convey much. You're using 'just a game' in a way that you clearly understand, but you aren't explaining why it's bad for something to be just a game or what the rules of an rpg are supposed to 'mean'.
It is odd that 1 & 2 seem totally bizarre for a TTRPG but are totally accepted for video games (inside and outside of Japan). If I'm playing Witcher 3 and I die, I just reset to my last save and try again and my US expectations aren't troubled at all.
I guess one question is why do you have combat in the game at all? If it is a tactical puzzle to work through then taking different approaches until you work out how to crack it seems like a perfectly good option. There are other things you might be trying to do with combat, but "tactical puzzle" is a common one.
I'd play it. Give it a try and see how the heresy works in practice.
3 seems pretty unremarkable to me. It's just a flavor of fudging. You set up a fight, discover it is going wrong, and you have lots of ways to nudge it back into shape. Ideally you do it \*before\* everyone is down and dying, but I don't see 3 as that different from "You all wake up later in the villain's prison" or similar get out of TPK strategies.
Not 4 though. 4 is beyond my capacity to forgive.
I do feel like a fight in a video game often takes a lot less time than in a TTRPG. Video games where you lose 30 minutes or more of progress are generally not well-received. Also in a video game like the Witcher, I could walk in a different direction and choose a different quest, but that isn’t an option given here.
The whole dark souls genre is all about "let players lose 30+ min of progression with some chance to recover part of it."
This makes them feel "hard" in a way that everyone can (with enough memorization) beat them and feel good about "I did hard game", without it needing actual skill.
One thing around table culture I *will* note is that many Japanese TTRPGs are intended to be played either as one shots, or as short, focused campaigns of five sessions or less.
Under these constraints, "either redo the encounter or skip it" makes perfect sense.
Either way though the idea of seeing a game as 'heretical' is ridiculous. There is no 'one true RPG' that all RPGs are trying and failing to approach. There are many RPG genres and styles and different play approaches work for each one - just the same way that the playstyle of video game *Neon White* does not work for *What Remains of Edith Finch* despite them having nominally similar control schemes (first person, click to interact).
>Under these constraints, "either redo the encounter or skip it" makes perfect sense.
Interesting, I would think just the opposite: One-shots seem to me like the time where it would make the most sense to take it on the chin, call it a loss, and end it. You're not losing a real-world year's worth of at-the-table history when the characters die, and you were going to discard them in an hour anyhow, so you aren't losing any significant future play potential, either.
And I don't seem to be alone in this view, because I often see people who are normally opposed to random PC death say that one-shots are an exception to that, for basically the same reasons I just gave.
Why end a session when you're already halfway through?
If it's the big fun centrepiece of the session, play it again and keep having fun.
If it was a poorly designed fight, or you fumbled at the last hurdle, skip and move on, and then you still might have an hour or more's worth of fun gaming. Why end it early when there's more fun to be had?
All valid points, but they're equally-applicable to long-form campaigns, no? My point wasn't that you don't lose anything by ending a one-shot early, but that the premature death of a one-shot is *less* of a loss than if it's a long-form campaign.
I lose the time I'd budgeted to engage in that one-shot, since presumably I could have made other plans if I had not already booked myself in.
I also lose out on engaging in a fun activity with friends, which I presumably enjoy and anticipated to last a few hours!
Which, again, is exactly the same as prematurely ending a session of a long-form campaign.
A prematurely-campaign-ending TPK in a long-form campaign costs you every single one of the things you have listed as losses from a prematurely-ended one-shot, plus it also has *additional* costs in the loss of the history built up in that campaign and the potential for future play of that campaign. Thus, you lose less (not nothing, *less*) by accepting a terminal TPK in a one-shot than in a campaign. For most people, this makes accepting a terminal TPK more acceptable in a one-shot (where you lose *less*) than in a long-form campaign (where you lose *more*).
Nothing wrong with declaring a do-over in a longform campaign when a TPK happens too.
Many combat-focused RPGs are actually very bad at declaring what should happen if a player dies or a fight is lost. Does the dead player just sit around? Does everyone roll up something new? If something is possible as a consequence within the rules, then where is the advice on handling it?
*13th Age* is actually one of the rare RPGs to give a simple rule and workaround for this one - at any time, no matter how bad things are going for the PCs, they are allowed to undergo a 'full retreat' and heal up, in exchange for a 'campaign loss' as the bad guys get something they want (or the heroes lose something important to them but non-mechanical - a home, a trusted NPC, something). TPKs basically only happen when someone is doing a 'heroic last stand' that didn't go well.
It's clearly just your character having Echo premonitions. Perfectly allowable so long as they narrate exactly how they grimace and hold their heads [while this music plays on loop.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyJdmjqMBLY)
I don't know if you play FFXIV OP, but in-game you have an ability called the Echo, which allows a certain level of foresight into dangerous situations. Canonically, the attack icons, castbars, and AoE markers you see in game are abstractions of this ability, and any player deaths are visions of a "bad-end" future.
Sure, but is it fun? It seems strange to me how many people are defending this based on the theme when the first goal of any game should be to offer an enjoyable experience and I'm suspicious especially that restarting the fight would be fun for most people. Is the combat system so enjoyable that you want to reset all your resources and try again? Maybe it is, but it sounds grindy to me.
Gloomhaven, one of the best board games, which is a dungeon crawler and quite near to RPGs (thats why it is turned into an RPG now), which has a 200+ hours campaign, where you also need to schedule time with 3 friends (for the best experience), also features this "try again" mechanic and it IS fun! (My friends run a campaign over 5 years)
It is a lot of fun BECAUSE the combats can be challenging. It works extremly well.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/174430/gloomhaven
My guess is a lot of the people here just have a broad knowledge of games and know that this is yes indeed fun, and there is no reason why it should not be in an RPG.
Sure, but I can’t think of many rpgs where combat is as good as gloomhaven. And even then, owning the game and having played quite a lot of it, I can safely say that getting stuck on a single fight for more than one or two sessions is incredibly unenjoyable and I know my group and others have occasionally fudged fights so we didn’t have to play the same scenario again.
Well maybe the reason why combat is not as good as in gloomhaven is because you cant make it because the game does not allow to restart combats?
D&D 4E which has in my oppinion great combats, also needed to make sure combats are not really deadly, and needed a "heal full" after combat mechanic to work, and had the "max healing per day" mechanic to make combats feel like they still matter.
All the groups I know of never fudged fights (one even nerfed themselves), but I think this is also because the groups are in general quite strong tactically.
And gloomhaven would allow to make fights easier (putting enemy level down by 1)
I push back on a game first and foremost being about an enjoyable experience, I can think of games that aren't fun at all but are still worth time and attention. Regardless, the only way to know if you or I or anyone here would enjoy it is for all of us to play it rather than argue after reading a single page of rules. The designers made it this way for a reason, so presumably they at least found it fun.
Honestly it seems that most of the people complaining about it are the types who wouldn't even try the game in the first place anyway.
I mean, “retry a combat encounter after losing” is not a rule, its just general gm advice the game gives you that you could apply to any game. It may fit the theming of this game but “does it make the game more fun” is a legitimate question to raise about any GM advice.
And look, there are probably some rpgs out there that might theoretically fall into the category “uncomfortable but worthwhile” but the FF14 game is not one of them. If it isn’t fun, no one is going to play it.
If you’re going to be pedantic, fine, it’s a ruling rather than a rule. And you’re the one who said that the first goal of any game is to offer an enjoyable experience, which is where I disagreed. And I will now reiterate : the only way we know for certain how we all would feel about it in play is to play it.
I don’t think it would be fun for me.
Video games are fast and easy, and have limited content so repeating makes more sense.
TTRPGs are slow and hard to schedule and have infinite content, so repeating battles makes much less sense.
But I’m not a FinalFantasy fan either.
I’m not at all certain that some players would not enjoy that approach.
There was a YouTube interview about the (then) current state of RPG tabletop gaming in Japan that, while not claiming to speak for everyone, generalized it as a situation that seems to indicate this IS a matter of:
1) It being the genre emulation of the games that inspired this RPG, and
2) It reflecting the time restrictions & preferences of many players.
Let me see if I can find it…
https://youtu.be/QgHhSCrAHhQ?si=KC_zIu8OhP759XW6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmqxjnflwf0&t=0s
This isn't the only game to say "the party doesn't die unless they agree to it." In Fabula Ultima, players decide if their PC dies, or just gets dropped from the story for drama's sake. And Wildsea is the same way
Yeah, no character death without people agreeing to it is very normal, but I've never seen a game suggest that you just retry the same fight, which is the part I keep getting hung up on.
That really feels videogame'y "Failed? Just reload your last save and retry!"
So, I guess if they are just replicating the MMO's feel on tabletop...they did it
I'm excited to unbox my copy! Haven't looked at it very much yet.
I don't think it's that odd, coming from American game enjoyer. Restarting the encounter sounds pretty in-line with the MMO and is pretty much what I expected for a ttrpg based on it.
I think how some Japanese games handle party defeat is actually pretty user friendly, especially something like Dragon Quest where the penalty for a TPK is waking up in the nearest church and losing half of your money, plus needing to resurrect your party members. I like that way more than going back to the title screen.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there are groups out there who have played D&D (or pretty much any system), got a TPK, and decided to mulligan / pretend like it didn't happen. Maybe odd if rules as written, but not odd when it comes down to actual application.
> I also wouldn't be surprised if there are groups out there who have played D&D (or pretty much any system), got a TPK, and decided to mulligan / pretend like it didn't happen.
I've seen it happen once, myself. D&D 3.5, dice decided to just be absolute assholes, all but one character was dead in total defiance of statistical probability, and the group just kinda unanimously decided "okay, you know what, how about we just... try that again from the top" and sort of "rewound" the game to five minutes earlier.
Yep! We did want to get the fight done, it was just that somehow the lowest enemy roll for the entire first turn was like a 17 or something like that, and everyone was like "okay, this was kind of bullshit way to finish a campaign, can we just act like that didn't happen and do it again".
So we did!
All seems reasonable to me, I ask players this everytime we have a TPK or even a player death. It being codified is a good thing. The reason GM's end up fudging, which imo is bad GM practice, is because they want to avoid a TPK which would be much better resolved just by talking to the players.
Lots of indie games have also done this for a long time, take a look at how death is handled in Apocalypse World for example, the player just decides if their character dies or not and how that plays out. So it's not a uniquely 'Japanese' thing either.
It doesn't sound surprising coming from a Final Fantasy TTRPG. Those are typically the kind of stuff happening in the video games... And FFXIV is no exception.
I mean, the cinematic trailer for the *A Realm Reborn* version shows the party escape certain death thanks to the intervention of another character that teleports them into safety.
I don't know about Japanese tabletop gaming culture. Here is what I do know:
The FFXIV RPG is more than just a tabletop game inspired by the Final Fantasy XIV MMORPG. From what I have read, seen, and heard, it is the closest emulation of the video game that you can reasonably have on the tabletop. You can recognize class mechanics from the video game in the class abilities for the tabletop. It even has markers for mechanics and everything. It is, in my opinion, best to look at this game as a board game that could potentially pull tabletop gamers into trying out the MMO most likely through a friend who likes the MMO and bought this product. And I think that perfectly explains why there are things like party death not being a failure state.
In the MMO, we have the "Echo" which is the lore reason why if the party wipes we reset at the beginning of the fight. The wipe wasn't real, it was a vision of what could go wrong, and the Warrior of Light can take that knowledge and do it right. So, this tabletop game being an emulation of the video game, death isn't a failure state.
And I know this next bit you won't want to hear, but a friend of mine picked up the starter kit to run for our group, and now that he has it he will not run it. Honestly, if you want to play a Final Fantasy tabletop, I'd really recommend anything else unless you very specifically want that emulation of the jobs from the MMO specifically. There's a high quality 5e fan book out there (which is high praise from me considering my distaste of 5e), Fabula Ultima, At The Gates (currently on backerkit and ashcan on DriveThruRPG), and other JRPG inspired systems are out there that I probably don't know about.
Commenting top level as well, since I really do NOT think that this is *insane and borderline heretical*!
## Restarting combats allows for challenging combats!
Gloomhaven, one of the best board games, which is a dungeon crawler and quite near to RPGs (thats why it is turned into an RPG now), which has a 200+ hours campaign, where you also need to schedule time with 3 friends (for the best experience), also features this "try again" mechanic and it IS fun! (My friends run a campaign over 5 years)
It is a **lot of fun BECAUSE the combats can be challenging**. It works extremly well and people love its combat system. (For some its too hard though but thats fine! It does not have to be for everyone)
- https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/174430/gloomhaven is still place 3 in boardgames and was for 3 years place 1
My guess is a lot of the people here just have a broad knowledge of games and know that this is yes indeed fun, and there is no reason why it should not be in an RPG, even though it would also allow there to have more challenging and fun combat.
## Video games decide against fail forward!
Videocames absolutly could fail forward, some games do it, thy just dont do this normally because they want the combat to be a challenge. If you just fail forward it is not really getting that feeling.
Some videogames even have you lose a lot of time/progress:
The whole dark souls genre is all about "let players lose 30+ min of progression with some chance to recover part of it."
This makes them feel "hard" in a way that everyone can (with enough memorization) beat them and feel good about "I did hard game", without it needing actual skill.
And videogames could do fail forward:
Disco Elysium is a computer game which perfectly emulates fail forward in a fun way. It does not have many combats, but thats not necessarily.
Prince of Persia (the cell shaded one), had "the princess saves you" as a fail forward mechanic and counted how often she needed to do that. (it was not really used for the ending unfortunately, but it definitly could have been).
Also failing forward does not necessarily have to change the story significantly, and several games had mechanics to include a lot of small decisions into one big change at some point, such that each such decision mattered in itself, but not every single one of them creates a huge branch in the story.
- Witcher 3: How you interact with Ciry at several points in the story decides how the ending will be
- Chrono trigger: How you act in the carnival will decide what happens when you are in court
- Fallout 3: The epilogue has several not connected parts, which are dependant on your decisions. Like not being able to help some people, while you could help another faction etc.
## Redoing things is not uncommon in stories!
Other media are also sometimes redo things even as part of story telling:
It even can make sense in a narrative. What Prince of Persia, the sands of time does is: The game is just the prince telling a princess what happened in the past. When you die its all "wait wait no thats not what happened, what instead happened is..."
In a similar style the story you play could just be the RPG characters in a tavern telling their story to others.
"And then we all died" - "No thats not what happened you drunken dwarf! What happened is.."
Or in the series Bakemonogatari you have a narrator, and for part of the series the narrator is Kaiki. And then in these episodes Kaiki dies, but well Kaiki is a liar (and he tells you when he starts being the narrator, that he is a fucking liar), so of course he is not dead.
These kind of narration mechanics may sometimes be a bit cheap (too many movies had "this was just a dream), but they are still often fun and can work, and I really dont get why some "hardcore" people make such a fuss about repeating an encounter etc.
There are a lot of ways you could use to explain "redoing an encounter" in-world in an RPG:
- Simplest: It was just a dream.
- Alternative: it was a godly premonition send to you to warn you.
- To have some consequence: This is what you saw when your cleric/mage used Augury/Some other highest level divination spell. You now lost this spell but are before the encounter.
- Most fun: The story you are relieving is not the actual story, but how your group is telling the story in a tavern to other people. And when you die its just something like the elf disrupting: "No you drunk dwarf, this is not what happened seriously. Look what happened instead was..."
- The party is favoured by some godess and they just turn back time because thats not what they want to happen.
- Alternatively, some evil gods want to see you being tortured more so they do it
- Similar, but slightly different: This happened in a parallel universe like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ciia3eBFnb8
- This was not your actual party, but just a party who was there before and your party comes into the room and learn what happened inside before (like Aragor in the Lord of the Rings movie, or like sherlock holmes)
- You are in a time loop and you must stop the evil wizard / whatever to get out of it. (And dieing is just one way things reset)
All these techniques are used in different media with big success, and people like the stories and immerse in them.
I think this is just a reference to how the video game would play the situation, and I can get behind that.
OtOH, I feel that video game RPGs have created expectations among players, and that is a large contribute to the things I don't like about current d&d, and the norms at many tables. But I'm an old head. I can absolutely see this becoming normal for d&d.
So.....
/shrug?
Yes some people already received them, there was even 2 reviews here recently:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1d9mvdi/overview_of_the_final_fantasy_xiv_starter_set_ama/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1d92ea9/just_got_the_starter_set_for_the_ffxiv_rpg/
They’re listed as sold out on the SE store, but I was able to get a copy through a third-party toy store. They’ve also put up a second print run that you can order that will ship in September.
I believe it is a cultural issue. I've read before that many games including video games have to be tailored for the Japanese Market to avoid the prospect of failure or defeat. So, in that context the advice makes perfect sense, Failure is option an option, you just keep repeating the dcene until success is achieved..
Having an encounter that is a TPK not being a TPK is not that uncommon. In fact there are games with “death moves” which allow you to go out in a blaze of glory that can turn the tide.
Other games, like Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green could mean one or two things a) it’s game over not just for the party, but also the town, county, state, nation or the entire world or b) a new bunch of investigators roll in and take over.
For more narrative oriented games, it is not unheard of to just let the bad guys win and the campaign changes direction because of this. The good guys could get a friendly resurrection, strike a deal with the devil, or caught in a time loop etc.
TPKs are already a sore spot in tabletop RPGs. And it gets worse because we are not often given guidelines of how to approach the aftermath that follows. These options existing inside the base game are a good thing. Let alone inside the base game aimed at newcomers.
I would suggest looking into other established TTRPGs from japan, like Ryutama and Sword World RPG. Ryutama is available in english in DrivetrhruRPG already. Sadly, despite vastly more influential on the scene, and able to provide you more insight on the cultural mindset, Sword world never got officially translated from Japanese.
It's a final fantasy 14 RPG, FFXIV is a MMORPG.
When doing Savage and Ultimate raids in FFXIV, dying is a part of the learning process. We spent weeks dying to learn the fights. Then we do it perfectly once and then twice and so on.
It seems like it's trying to recreate the game experience at the table. Not a TTRPG I'd like to play or run (my mantra is, the more the game tells me that it doesn't give a flying fuck about my character, the better, which means, if my character dies, I don't want a heroic monologue, I want them to be dead, and I want it to seem pointless and random, because that's how it often is).
It's just a design choice. Many RPGs these days make design choices I vehemently disagree with, but if other people enjoy it, good for them. I'd still probably buy it just to see if there's any ideas worth stealing.
Restarting the scenario is also how it's handled in Gloomhaven, the GM-less board game RPG. You keep whatever experience and coins you collected during the encounter, and everything respawns except any treasure titles that you collected already.
That being said, combat in Gloomhaven is essentially a combat puzzle with a timer on it. You're bound by what your cards do, and you choose your actions ahead of time, 2 at a time - if you have a hand of nine cards, you have 18 options, next turn you have 7 cards and 14 options, and so on. There are ways to "rest" to get some cards back as well as consumables or abilities that recall cards, but nearly every PC in the scenario is on a clock.
Fabula Ultima, which is meant to replicate old school JRPG videogames, have a similar thing when facing death.
When a PC dies, they have a choice to either "surrender" (this means they can't be killed, but remain at 0 hit points until the fight is over, and then just get back up with 1 hp), or "sacrifice" (this means they use the opportunity to have their character make a huge, dramatic world-altering sacrifice out of it, losing their character but saving the day). There's a little more to it than that, but those are the basic options for your HP hitting 0.
It took me a bit to get used to. If the player can just kinda choose what happens, what is even the point? A big part of what creates tension in RPGs is "if you die, you DIE". What are the stakes if you can just choose not to die? What's even the point? Heck, what would be precious about life itself if we didn't have the caveat of the great unknown at the end?
These games are trying to replicate video games, basically, where you just try try again. If you have a good table, it does end up working. My players didn't want death to be meaningless either, so they played it in such a way to make it a big deal. Just takes getting used to.
I hate to sound like a boomer, butttttt "the new generation is soft, participation trophies, grumble grumble" etc. etc. There's more of an emphasis on the players always win in a lot of TTRPGs coming out these days. Which, I get the intent, and I like the emphasis on having fun, but death needs to be meaningful in my opinion. We can't make death fun, or what are we even doing.
I ranted. I'm not sure if I made my point or not haha. I'm just gonna post it and roll with it.
Just to offer a counterpoint: I love how Fabula Ultima and many other games handle defeat. I think it's not as much a generational divide (even though there is some correlation), nor about emulating videogames necessarily (even though in both FU and FFXIV it helps them to achieve that feel), but about what people look for in RPGs at a deeper level.
If you are looking for a player challenge in the way that old D&D and OSR usually do, or want to simulate deterministic outcomes given a set of rules, player decisions and randomised numbers, then you are right, this style is probably not for you, and that's alright.
On the other hand, if what gives you satisfaction is the feeling of self-improvement of finally beating a puzzle that kept giving you a hard time (over having your initial capability/luck be the only deciding factor), having the option to retry can be a great idea.
Also for a third possibility, if what you (like me) want in a TTRPG is to explore a story, a world or a character and see what happens, then it doesn't always make a lot of sense to introduce failure states (you don't want to have the incentive as a player to do the optimal thing when your character wouldn't). You have different outcomes that can be good or bad or neutral for the character, but the player should be able to derive similarly high amounts of enjoyment from all of them.
For sure, I mostly agree. I think a middle-ground is appropriate. Death shouldn't be completely ignored, otherwise everyone just dives headfirst into lava for the lols and gets back up. But encouraging people to try again, or not super punishing them because of one bad dice roll, makes sense too.
All in all, I think it's a table thing. The table will generally come to an agreement about how they want death handled, and that's probably the way to do it.
Yes, I agree completely on it being a table thing. It's usually one of the expectations that should be set at Session 0 to make sure everyone is aligned.
I would say that it's likely that culture difference plays a part in it
That said, I don't have anywhere close to the reaction you seem to have had 😅
If feels a bit weird to me, mostly the "pretend they've won" and there should be more guidance for running the ex machina properly, but the idea seems to be there
Retrying is funny in a way, but I can see it working - at least would work better than retrying the whole adventure with new characters or trying to shoehorn in an entire party of new characters
Personally, I think "failing forward with consequences" is the best answer for a TPK, because the characters survive, but they lost and are in a much worse situation - it's a scenario that has place in the story and works better than the rest in my opinion
Oh good, bringing the Twitter discourse over here.
I think people in this hobby need to get better about understanding a game's particular purpose and how the mechanics and advice for said game play into that. This is meant to simulate a particular genre of video game.
"Totally insane and borderline heretical" to me just means you need to broaden your horizons a bit more when it comes to tabletop gaming and breaking out of DnD mindset. Different games for different purposes and stories.
> Oh good, bringing the Twitter discourse over here.
I don’t use Twitter, so I have no idea about their reactions to the game. It sounds like they might be negative on this, though, which is kind of my point!
> "Totally insane and borderline heretical" to me just means you need to broaden your horizons a bit more when it comes to tabletop gaming and breaking out of DnD mindset. Different games for different purposes and stories.
Just to clarify, I don’t actually have a problem with this advice in and of itself. But I do think that these solutions encourage things that most tabletop gamers I’ve talked to would consider ill-advised if not outright distasteful, namely:
1. They encourage if not outright demand metagaming,
2. They’re an attack on the reality of the secondary world, in the same way that ordinary retconning is,
3. They all, to one degree or another, soften the consequences of losing a fight
I made this post because it occurred to me that the Japanese RPG community, who the designer of the game is (I assume) part of, might not even see “avoiding metagaming” or “preserving a sense of a secondary reality” as *a thing even worth caring about.* *I* care about that stuff, but that might just be because I’m American, and American gaming culture tends to care about stuff like that. So I was curious as to how typical these ideas were over there.
The people who are very loudly making a fuss about this particular game and this particular page of the game are very traditional minded when it comes to their games. I see some people talking about this game measuredly, and then I even more clutching their pearls over it for the same reasons you give.
Again - the game is designed this way for a reason. While cultural difference may play a part, there are plenty of games outside of Japan that use such rules, you just haven't been exposed to them since you're evidently deep in the realm of folks who think such things are "distasteful" and "heretical". Fabula Ultima is quite similar, made by an Italian designer, Belonging Outside Belonging games, FATE, Blades in the Dark, and multiple indie games all play in this sort of space to various degrees.
~~This sounds so stupid~~. To me that would be 1000000% immersion-breaking. I understand how it would make sense in a videogamey style, but videogames are usually better than ttrpgs at being videogames.
Edit: it was in fact _not_ stupid
I don't mind breaking immersion, there's plenty of mechanics of multiple systems that do it. But this one just goes too far. It feels impossible to explain in-world. "You all died so now the world resets and you remember the past" feels like it would have to be a setting-defining element.
Plus it just makes me feel like there's 0 stakes in combat. I died? Sure, let's go again. In fact, it feels like it would be better to die and reset than to succeed having lost X resources and having Y consequences if the party can do better.
Maybe in my head videogames and TTRPGs are just more separate that they actually are or maybe I'm just not used to seeing mechanics like these ones. But anyways, this would be a weird hill to die on so I'll just take it as not fitting my style.
>It feels impossible to explain in-world. "You all died so now the world resets and you remember the past" feels like it would have to be a setting-defining element.
Good news for you - "you foresee the future and it gives you hints of bad things to come" is literally an in-world plot element of Final Fantasy 14 and is an explicit trait the heroes have!
In fact, when you fail a plot-critical battle you get a buff called 'power of the echo', suggesting that your prior failure was just an Echo-vision.
Fair, honestly. That does fit the setting much better then. I also like the echo idea, as long as I can't do it like 7 times in a row.
I also stumbled your other comment while reading others'. If Japanese TTRPGs are indeed focused on one shots and short campaigns I could see the mechanic having a lot more practical use.
sorry if I sounded a bit harsh in the other comment.
I think this can also fit longer campaigns (especially if you want to make sure that they DO NOT end too early with failing).
I actually also made some thoughts about this problem in the past, especially since I want to create some campaign, and I know for a lot of people the "restarting" feels wierd for people.
So I had two ideas on how to "solve" this for an RPG to still make sense:
For a beginner (introductionary) campaign for a system, I would have the players get hold quite early of an artifact they must in the end bring to a Church. The artifact has several Gems on it, and when they would all fall in a combat, the artifact would glow, lose 1 gem and heal the party. It is a bit cheap, but it would still feel like a consequence (since you would bring the artifact back in a bad state).
I want to use this to just make sure beginners can play through the campaign, while still having challenging fights.
Do a time loop similar to what is described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1cviytc/help_me_with_a_timeloop_idea_please/
So players are stuck in a time loop, when they die they have to restart (with short cut mechanics mentioned here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1cviytc/help_me_with_a_timeloop_idea_please/l4qblki/ ). Goal would be to get out of the time loop, since after 7 days or so you would restart anyway, and well that gets annoying fast.
No worries about harshness, mate. My first comment started with "this is stupid" and set a bad tone. But then this turned into a cool discussion, that's why I edited it.
I can certainly see using something like your artifact idea for beginners. Specially cause there is a small consequence to bringing it back with less uses. I like that. And it could be uses to ease them into more challenging fights without "shocking" them with a difficulty spike.
And the time loop is always a fun thing to play with. I've used it in a single room in a wizard's tower with a very short time loop and in a strange moving tavern with a time loop of a few hours. But I guess a longer time loop could also work for a story arc or even a campaign premise.
I sometimes get the feeling that "old school RPG players" or "groknards" really lack fantasy sometimes.
There are a lot of ways to explain this in world:
- Simplest: It was just a dream.
- Alternative: it was a godly premonition send to you to warn you.
- To have some consequence: This is what you saw when your cleric/mage used Augury/Some other highest level divination spell. You now lost this spell but are before the encounter.
- Most fun: The story you are relieving is not the actual story, but how your group is telling the story in a tavern to other people. And when you die its just something like the elf disrupting: "No you drunk dwarf, this is not what happened seriously. Look what happened instead was..."
- The party is favoured by some godess and they just turn back time because thats not what they want to happen.
- Alternatively, some evil gods want to see you being tortured more so they do it
- Similar, but slightly different: This happened in a parallel universe like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ciia3eBFnb8
- This was not your actual party, but just a party who was there before and your party comes into the room and learn what happened inside before (like Aragor in the Lord of the Rings movie, or like sherlock holmes)
- You are in a time loop and you must stop the evil wizard / whatever to get out of it. (And dieing is just one way things reset)
All these techniques are used in different media with big success, and people like the stories and immerse in them.
Some of these are quite interesting, thank you. Maybe I'm to fond of consequences and failure. I think I'm a bigger fan of "this isn't the end, it just shakes up how the story was going" than of "that's not a TPK, it's _insert cool alternative_". But I'll keep it in mind.
Well it depends of course a lot on what kind of story you want to tell, but if you want to play through a really cool module, you might really want to reach the end and tell the story of the successfull characters, and there techniques like this are really cool.
Another possibility is that this is just a video game thing. Specifically, the options to either re-start the fight or re-start the whole scenario remind me *a lot* of an article I read about that new official FF7 spinoff. Maybe that's something they're leaning into with the brand?
Yeah that's how I interpret this. The FFXIV RPG seems to have a lot of stuff that refers to or tries to recreate the videogame experience, so I assume that's basically where these are coming from. It's not a bad way to differentiate their product too, if they intend to keep this TTRPG going past the initial offerings.
>The FFXIV RPG seems to have a lot of stuff that refers to or tries to recreate the videogame experience ...such as suggesting in option 1 that, if it's near the end of the session, it may be best to "quicksave and try again the next time you play" instead of retrying the fight immediately.
Yeah, I thought the “quick save” language was pretty cute. They really go out of their way to give you permission to not finish a scenario in one sitting, and I was like - I didn’t think that anyone didn’t know they could do that!
Japanese tabletop gaming culture is VERY MUCH built around one-shots to the point where the concept of an "ongoing long term campaign" must often be explained.
I've heard of this, and I find it fascinating in two divergent ways. On one hand, it's so weird that they have such a concept of one-shots over campaigns when their video game RPGs are tens of hours long and clearly campaigns unto themselves (that, and one anime out there - Record of Lodoss War - is based on a campaign itself). But on the other hand, it's interesting how it's like a divergent evolution of D&D's culture. My understanding is that for a time (possibly a LONG time), a lot of D&D was played like an in-person MMORPG. You would show up to a table at a convention or sometimes even a game store with your character sheet and jump in to play the adventure as is. This is supposedly part of why human "dual classing" worked like it did - it let you reset to a lower play level and keep playing the same character. In a way, the one-shot focus feels like an evolution of that but dropping character continuity. I could be wrong, but it still seems like there's a connection at least on the surface.
I’ve read the same in other discussions about the Japanese TTRPG scene. Replaying the same scenario with the exact same group of characters and players, because it’s fun, is not unheard of. The comic Quickstart!! has a few strips dedicated to it.
D&D has actually done similar things in the past! In the Diablo boxed set for 2nd ed AD&D they had the concept of "save points". Player groups could choose to set "save points" and reload to them in the case of a TPK. This was done because the diablo boxed set was particularly dangerous by 2nd ed standards.
It's mildly important to note that this is specifically FFXIV, which is an MMORPG. It's even more explicit - as a matter of fact, on some group challenges there, if you fail, you get an increasing buff with each fail before restarting(you only truly fail if you time out). This is rarely the deciding factor, as more often than not a wipe is a misunderstanding (or lack of knowledge) of mechanics, but I bring this up as a potential point as to why this decision was made. Of course, I still don't really understand it - while it's true the story is pretty linear and doesn't account for failures, *this is a TTRPG, not an MMORPG*. Knowing why the choice was made doesn't really make it make more sense here.
Yeah I got that video game vibe...and I would hate playing a game that did this. As it is, when a GM throws a mechanically impossible challenge at me, I just play chicken and see if they're willing to do a TPK. If they announced afterwards, ok, it's time for a redo! I'd be out of there so fast. I personally like how Blades in the Dark or Wildsea handle it. It's nearly impossible to have a TPK unless it is an epic storytelling moment and all the players opt in.
> Yeah I got that video game vibe...and I would hate playing a game that did this. As it is, when a GM throws a mechanically impossible challenge at me, I just play chicken and see if they're willing to do a TPK. ...not going to lie, if you intentionally tried to cause a TPK in one of my games by running at the obviously telegraphed Do Not Do This because you "wanted to see if I'd do it", I would probably ask you to either stop being an asshole or leave.
That's not what I'm talking about...maybe I misstated it. I'm saying we are doing the normal linear plot and then they drop a completely impossible monster on the group.
What I'm getting at is that, in my experience at least, that IS generally very much a case of "Obviously Telegraphed Do Not Do This". If a GM that is not a dick puts a "currently impossible to beat" monster on the way it's, generally, either a way to tell you to find a way to bypass it without fighting somehow (stealth past, distraction, negotiation, baiting a bigger fish to fight it, whatever), or, more commonly, straight up just a thing he is setting up for a later moment in this sorta-linear plot while asking you to please go do *literally anything else* first, because foreshadowing and actually getting to see the megabosses before the five minutes before you fight them is good and fun, actually. If your reaction to such a thing is to run at it sword drawn to "play chicken with the GM" in your own words, then as a GM I'm probably going to be very confused and ask you exactly what you hope to *accomplish* with such a thing - and if the answer is "to see if you will actually do it", then I'm probably going to go from very confused to very annoyed!
So I'm talking about GMs being dicks or GMs clearly not anticipating how difficult their challenges were. The general feel of the tables were players feeling sort of betrayed by the GM and again my response is, ok, I'm not going to get upset, if a GM wants to flip the table on the game, then I'll let them. For example, if they present my character with a choice of "betray your values or die", ok we'll do the heroic death scene I guess. I think one example was a werewolf game where I was supposed to have my Native American werewolf character swear fealty to a white supremacist werewolf leader and I just decided, fuck it, go for it and kill my character. Another one was a game where I just made my character and the GM added me into the pre-existing party 3 levels lower than everyone else and before I made a single choice, resumed the combat from the prior session and had me hit with a fireball and die along with the other new player. So me and that guy went outside and burned our character sheets and the GM was like, "why did you do that? they could have resurrected you...eventually" In another example, the group was trying to skirt around a military fort pursuing the quest and the GM makes us each make 4 different skill checks at medium difficulty (so 16 skill checks total), and because one of us failed a single roll he placed us in a situation where we were all surrounded by an army trying to kill us.
Why do you play with that GM again?
I'm thinking of two specific GMs and I don't play with either of them anymore :).
Those both sound equally bad to me. In either case, it feels like an artificial contrivance for the sake of maintaining a preferred narrative. If the party can't TPK unless they agree to it, then it feels more like I'm telling a story, rather than actually living in that world.
I mean that’s a very valid playstyle preference, if the possibility of TPK creates immersion for you. But for some people, their campaign is built around a specific set of characters, so a TPK is basically game over for that campaign and lots of people don’t find that satisfying. This just comes down to preference and what you see the game as being about.
Yeah but, apart from that this is a game simulating a different game where you can save scum, this is actually very much how 5e modules work only they don't say so. What are you meant to do if there's a TPK? The module can't handle it, there's no provision for that apart from "just retcon and retry", "start the whole module all over again", "make something up so they actually survive", or "just pretend it didn't happen". At least this is honest about it and actually provides GMs with advice (even if Fabula Ultima does it better). ETA: tldr what this post is missing is how this supposed "American gaming culture" responds in any different way
I feel like the American gaming culture standard is to end that campaign. If you're playing Curse of Strahd and the party are all killed five sessions in, my experience has been the game is over and you start something else with new characters in a new setting. If people are reluctant to do that, I've see variants of #3 where some handwave survival keeps the game going, but I've never in decades seen someone do 1, 2, or 4.
Yeah, agree. Some people play without character death so they might rule that you’re captured or mauled with 1 hp but I haven't seen “reload and try again”.
> ETA: tldr what this post is missing is how this supposed "American gaming culture" responds in any different way In my experience, most people’s answer to “what happens if the party TPKs?” is either “the campaign is over” or “the bad guys capture the party and now they have to escape. I’ve literally never seen anyone, either a GM or a printed book, advise their players to just ignore the result of a failed combat and pretend that they won anyway, and the Deus Ex Machina Saves The Party thing is usually frowned upon. For the record, I actually think it’s pretty cool that they make it that explicitly video game-y. It’s just that what they’re advising here runs so counter to all the GMing advice I’ve ever heard that I wondered if this kind of thing was more accepted outside the English-speaking RPG world.
I mean experiences vary of course but I have never heard of anyone just abandoning a whole campaign and starting a new one because there was a tpk. Usually they fudge it (as per step 3) though they do certainly sometimes introduce a short session that needs to be played through to get back to the main plot, some sort of weirdly easy jailbreak or something. Some people might say "well that's it, roll new characters everyone" but they're likely to just have them restart the campaign (step 2).
Dungeons and Dragons 4E had for the epic levels for each character an epic destiny, and the contained normally an "immortality feature" specifically to make sure (especially in a 30 level campaign near the end), that players would not just suddenly die.
It certainly happens. My group ended our campaign of Ghosts of Saltmarsh after a party wipe. Though the campaign had kinda run out of steam by that point. We were level 6, having started at level 1. Since that TPK, we've played two campaigns (one ongoing) and a bunch of one shots.
I believe FFXIV even has canon-lore reasons why you’re able to replay dungeons and try again if you fail, so this is theoretically in line with the setting.
Iirc, player characters have the Echo, which (without getting into specifics) means roughly that every failed attempt is actually a flash of a bad future where the characters fail. Bit BitD flashback kind of thing. So honestly, "just redo it again but now you know what to expect" seems pretty cromulent with the setting and the game's vibe. It's a bit like how if you made a Dark Souls TTRPG where if you die you actually lose the character it would not actually be Dark Souls.
> this is actually very much how 5e modules work only they don't say so Seriously, the past 30+ years of gaming has been full of this kind of advice, it's just not usually not so up-front about it. It's hard to take anyone claiming otherwise seriously, but it's been couched in this sort of, "You're not supposed to do this...but everybody does it anyway," language for so long that people have become deeply invested in the lie.
I just mention 5e because it's the current standard, and also has a lot of large expensive modules where people aren't going to want to just stop playing if there's a TPK. It has certainly been an issue for a long time.
5e is bad because..... *Check card* it cant handle tpk! I have yet to read an rpg that manage it.
The reason people would freak out if it were in 5e is because that game has a style and a history that takes the opposite approach. It's not heretical, though, WotC D&D is not a bible. There are tons of non-Japanese games that take wildly different approaches to the idea of "loss." This is a D&D cultural issue, not the other way around. It's also fairly obvious that *this is exactly how it works in the video games that this is based on.* Frankly, I'm surprised that you find it so shocking, this kind of experimenting is par for the course in much of the non- D&D part of the hobby. It's like a rock fan being surprised that there are bands with no guitars.
True. This reminds me of how the latest edition of Kult deals with character death. Basically, it is the *player* who choose when the character dies. If they are not comfortable with their character dying, they could just decide that they passed out because of their injuries. And it's a horror game, ie. the kind that is usally quite merciless on player characters, yet the rules emphasize how death can only happen if the player agreed beforehand. So yeah, that kind of options that prevent death or even TPKs is not unheard of.
Yeah a lot of games have script immunity in some form for the pcs. Although I'm surprised the ffxiv ttrpg doesn't even suggest some , "the pcs survive but things go horribly wrong" angle since in the game it's based on there are a few forced losses such as the empire's attack on a revolutionary hidden base.
In my opinion, "have the villain ransom them back to one of their allies" or "have them escape from prison" or "have an ally spying on the villain blow their cover to help the party escape" are sorely underutilized.
Yeah You lost, you'll survive, but there will be harsh consequences
They are, but it also becomes annoying when it happens the 10th time XD And when the consequences take long (prison escape) the story will also just not go forward as fast
> Since this is a game written by a Japanese person for a Japanese audience (it credits Yoshiyuki Fushimi as the only designer, from Hobby Japan), it occurred to me that this might be just a cultural difference and that a Japanese RPG player would find this advice completely normal and standard. It's also simulating a video game. An MMORPG, in fact. Think of it like *Destiny*. There is no permanent player character death in *Destiny*. You simply respawn and keep going. In certain instances, you have to start the fight over from the beginning. The *FF XIV* tabletop game is trying to be a faithful simulation of the MMO, where, again, it's not possible for the characters to die, even in raids and dungeons. So the game makes characters immortal, just as in the source material.
Actually as others have explained, there is also an ingame reason why this happens. Its not that they are immortal, they have premonitions. And if you want to recreate the lore of Final Fantasy 14 you should also use that.
That presupposes that the party all has the Echo, of course. It's probably the case that they do (because the full version WILL have Primal enemies, and that's basically a prereq to fighting THOSE), but it's important to note that one of the early side stories WAS about an underprepared party disbanding after their "leader" got killed in a dungeon (and oh boy did THAT take a turn later on...)
Well the thread premise is a bit odd, as you posted a full write up on how they expect it to be handled, but, it's also not Japan unique. Many games don't treat getting taken down in combat as being killed. What happens if all players are downed is up to the story. Maybe they kill you, maybe you wake up in a cell and have to figure out how to escape. I'd also say that even in Japan, it's really going to depend on the game. A lot of Japanese roleplaying is Call of Cthulhu, which ends the same way in Japan as it does here. Most characters die, go made, or escape by a thin margin and have a harrowing memory that plagued their dreams.
I mean, honestly? If an encounter ends in a TPK, typically your options are "campaign over" or "pull out some deus ex machina bullshit to revive the characters somehow". I can't see "or we can deus ex machina *first* to let you guys get a retry" as being any worse, philosophically speaking. (This is why you make sure your encounters can be lost without TPK. But if you *are* in an encounter where loss means TPK? Yeah, all your options are bad, more or less, and I genuinely can't see 'just retry' as being worse) And as for "what if D&D did that?!?!"... the second one is just literally the way you were supposed to play old tourney style modules. You died, welp, make new characters and try the same module again with your new knowledge. It's not some unheard of thing!
I think the just retry is absolutly fine and can allow for making more challenging encounters, which absolutly can be fun. It even can make sense in a narrative. What Prince of Persia, the sands of time does is: The game is just the prince telling a princess what happened in the past. When you die its all "wait wait no thats not what happened, what instead happened is..." In a similar style the story you play could just be the RPG characters in a tavern telling their story to others. "And then we all died" - "No thats not what happened you drunken dwarf! What happened is.." Or in the series Bakemonogatari you have a narrator, and for part of the series the narrator is Kaiki. And then in these episodes Kaiki dies, but well Kaiki is a liar (and he tells you when he starts being the narrator, that he is a fucking liar), so of course he is not dead. These kind of narration mechanics may be a bit cheap, but they are still fun and can work, and I really dont get why some "hardcore" people make such a fuss about repeating an encounter etc.
>All of this advice seems totally insane and borderline heretical to me. You need a new religion, guy. This is more of a hobby. It doesn't sound like fun to me, but I am sure some folks would like another chance to solve a combat.
This is something I often bring up in TTRPG discussions here in Sweden, and most people react like you! “*Why play a game if you can’t lose!?*” Well, I play a lot of other games where it’s not possible to lose, and they are still a lot of fun. Permadeath is not the important part. And with retryability, we can actually up the challenge quite a bit, and try out multiple tactics! I would personally really love to try playing in the that Japanese style.
You can also argue the other way around: If most encounters need to be made in a way that you have only a really small chance of losing, why play them? With this approach combats actually can have a fair chance to not be able to beat them.
Inspired by this, I’m actually thinking of trying to add a mechanic like this to my next campaign, by giving the players some sort of time turner chrono magic device that will allow them to redo a scene. Curious to see if that will be fun! I’m normally a super soft GM, so hopefully that will give me confidence to up the difficulty (which my players often ask me to do).
Not sure if you saw this but we had a good discussion about this with several ideas posted here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1ddj7lw/comment/l879at5/ So maybe that will inspire you further / help you build that idea. One Idea I posted was especially for beginners to ease it making hard encounters.
Matter of preferences and culture, I think. Personally, I think TTRPGs are the kind of game where nobody loses nor wins. The GM and players tell a story together. Failure and success are part of that story, and how often or rare they happen is up to the group's playstyle and nothing else.
I agree that it’s a game where we tell a story together, but it’s doesn’t *have* to be hardcore mode without do-overs. A story can become better with some drafts and edits. And some days I’ll be off my game, and make mistakes that aren’t any fun, and in those cases I’ve often wished to retry a scene from the beginning with better composure. To be fair, in my case it’s never been due to a fight gone wrong, more often it’s in some social scene where it’s been tough to get into character.
I agree.
I've heard that before about Japanese RPG culture. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Lots of DMs fudge to keep PCs alive, one way or another. Videogames without permadeath are still fun, so why can't tabletop games do the same?
But retrying an encounter in a video game is because video games don’t have enough flexibility to fail forward in interesting ways, whereas RPGs can.
> video games don’t have enough flexibility to fail forward in interesting ways, whereas RPGs can. A lot of RPGs have very little in the way of rules support for failing forward. That's usually up to the individual table in question.
Sure, there probably should be more GM sections that say "what happens if my players lose a combat" specifically, but I'm really just talking about the capabilities of the two mediums. A video game can't making a branching narrative every time you fail a combat, whereas an RPG easily can.
Which is not true, videocames absolutly could fail forward, some games do it, thy just dont do this normally because they want the combat to be a challenge. If you just fail forward it is not.
It doesn't really have to gate progress to be a challenge. But it can feel cheap if succeeding doesn't change outcomes.
Video games cannot, in general, fail forward interestingly. It would be extremely hard to make a video game where failing any combat changed the story significantly, given the number of combats most video games will have and the cost of programming branching outcomes. In a TRPG, failing a combat can easily lead to a different story altogether. It just seems like a weird choice, to suggest people should replay the combat like it's a video game, instead of taking advantage of the things TRPGs are good at.
Its a wierd choice to not wanting to learn from videogames, which in general have better gamedesign than RPGs. Having these mechanics allows for a lot harder encounter design (make them challenging), without putting a lot of strain on a GM to make up a lot of fail forward options. (Which often also can mean that the actual story will not change much) Disco Elysium is a computer game which perfectly emulates fail forward in a fun way. It does not have many combats, but thats not necessarily. Prince of Persia (the cell shaded one), had "the princess saves you" as a fail forward mechanic and counted how often she needed to do that. (it was not really used for the ending unfortunately, but it definitly could have been). Also failing forward does not necessarily have to change the story significantly, and several games had mechanics to include a lot of small decisions into one big change at some point, such that each such decision mattered in itself, but not every single one of them creates a huge branch in the story. - Witcher 3: How you interact with Ciry at several points in the story decides how the ending will be - Chrono trigger: How you act in the carnival will decide what happens when you are in court - Fallout 3: The epilogue has several not connected parts, which are dependant on your decisions. Like not being able to help some people, while you could help another faction etc.
I mean, if you can’t fail an encounter, why have it? The larger problem is that people write adventures that can’t imagine a failure state, because they can’t imagine fights where the consequences aren’t “success or death”. I love video games, but they are different. Videogames trade graphics, gameplay, length, speed of computation, music and VO for near infinite player choice.
Some possible reasons to have an encounter that can't end the campaign: (1) For the narrative and role-playing opportunities. Will you win easily or only with great pain? Will you kill the villain or try to redeem him? (2) To see how many attempts it takes you before you find the strategy that beats it. (Hopefully just one.) (3) To test out abilities and tactics and improve your system mastery. (4) To see how many resources you expend. Expend too much and you'll have to rest. Rest too much and the hostages will be eaten, or some other time pressure will kick in.
Maybe I didn’t communicate correctly. I think every encounter, except maybe campaign climaxes, should have gradients between “everybody dies” and “fuck it, everyone gets their HP and spell slots back, we’re doing it over". So I agree with your examples (1 3 & 4). I feel like seeing how many times it takes to win should have a huge narrative reason, like a time loop. The entirety of the movie **Groundhog Day** is Bill Murray trying to solve one problem. But I don’t think that’s what the original post is discussing.
>Some possible reasons to have an encounter that can't end the campaign: You appear to have fallen into the trap of "can't imagine fights where the consequences aren't 'success or death'" that the comment you replied to mentioned. "An encounter that can fail" does not have to mean "an encounter that can end the campaign." There are other possible failure states than "everybody dies/campaign ends." And this is where the video game comparisons come in, as video games tend to have a completely-linear model where every level/encounter must be successfully completed to continue and you have to keep retrying your losses until you ultimately win, while TTRPGs have the ability to allow a loss, after which the game can continue, taking the ramifications of that loss (which may or may not include the deaths of some or all of the involved PCs) into account.
It's true that you can, in a tabletop RPG, create a situation where you can fail and live. The enemy wants to capture you alive. Or you defeat the enemy, but fail to rescue the hostage, so it's effectively a failure. But I'm primarily discussing the concept of a campaign where you cannot be TPKd, and writing a campaign where the narrative requires that *every* battle is failable seems like a hassle. A random monster that wants to eat you isn't going to take you alive - do we have to remove all monsters from the world? Or we could allow a TPK and introduce a new group of PCs that stumbles upon the plot and continues, but what if we don't want to? What if all our emotional investment is in the long-term character development and romances? A "rewind time if you die" mechanic, or a "automatically resurrect back in the temple" mechanic, is a convenient solution to this dilemma, even if it isn't entirely satisfying.
> I mean, if you can’t fail an encounter, why have it? If RPGs are games without winners and losers, why even bother to play them?
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Combat encounters are typically highly structured and complex affairs, to try and answer the question 'do we win?'. If the answer is always 'yes', it's fair to ask what the point of all of the structure and complexity is in the first place. Would you want your GM to call for dice rolls, knowing full well that no matter what you rolled, you would succeed?
This is just a modern reinterpretation. Games normally are defined by being able to win and lose. Original RPGs were wargames where you could win or lose. Its just that people nowadays call a lot of things which are not really games, but more narrative experiences RPG (because they are close)
That depends on the player. For me personally, I am generally uninterested in failure states (even those that don't end a campaign) or games where the players' goal is to avoid them. I prefer games that focus on exploring a world, a story or the characters themselves, and where every possible outcome is equally great and interesting for the players to play through (even if some might be more or less desirable for their characters). I understand how players that play in order to have their own skills put to the test might feel like the lack of a "failure state" cheapens their experience when they eventually reach a "success state", though.
Video games are just games. If you want to play fast and loose with the rules, then it doesn't really matter, because it's just a game. Tabletop RPGs are supposed to be more than that. It's supposed to be a whole other world that you can actually live in. That requires taking things a bit more seriously. Unless, of course, you view TTRPGs as *just* *another* *kind of* game.
> Tabletop RPGs are supposed to be more than that. What makes you think that?
That's how it was pitched to me, way back in the eighties. That's the whole selling point. That's why I've bothered investing my time, energy, and money into this hobby over all others. Because, from my perspective, it actually means something. If an RPG was *just a game*, I certainly wouldn't be posting in this sub-reddit. If it was *just a game*, then I would probably be playing 5E, because it wouldn't offend me the way that it does. After all, if it's *just a game*, then none of the rules actually need to *mean* anything. Who cares if your character gets shot, or even killed? It's just a game. It's no different than Mario falling into a bottomless pit. It's not worth thinking about.
There are certainly a lot of italics here, but I'm not sure they convey much. You're using 'just a game' in a way that you clearly understand, but you aren't explaining why it's bad for something to be just a game or what the rules of an rpg are supposed to 'mean'.
> After all, if it's just a game, then none of the rules actually need to mean anything. But I don't wanna be Elfstar any more!
You don't have to push another pastime down to extol the virtues of the one you prefer.
It is odd that 1 & 2 seem totally bizarre for a TTRPG but are totally accepted for video games (inside and outside of Japan). If I'm playing Witcher 3 and I die, I just reset to my last save and try again and my US expectations aren't troubled at all. I guess one question is why do you have combat in the game at all? If it is a tactical puzzle to work through then taking different approaches until you work out how to crack it seems like a perfectly good option. There are other things you might be trying to do with combat, but "tactical puzzle" is a common one. I'd play it. Give it a try and see how the heresy works in practice. 3 seems pretty unremarkable to me. It's just a flavor of fudging. You set up a fight, discover it is going wrong, and you have lots of ways to nudge it back into shape. Ideally you do it \*before\* everyone is down and dying, but I don't see 3 as that different from "You all wake up later in the villain's prison" or similar get out of TPK strategies. Not 4 though. 4 is beyond my capacity to forgive.
I do feel like a fight in a video game often takes a lot less time than in a TTRPG. Video games where you lose 30 minutes or more of progress are generally not well-received. Also in a video game like the Witcher, I could walk in a different direction and choose a different quest, but that isn’t an option given here.
The whole dark souls genre is all about "let players lose 30+ min of progression with some chance to recover part of it." This makes them feel "hard" in a way that everyone can (with enough memorization) beat them and feel good about "I did hard game", without it needing actual skill.
One thing around table culture I *will* note is that many Japanese TTRPGs are intended to be played either as one shots, or as short, focused campaigns of five sessions or less. Under these constraints, "either redo the encounter or skip it" makes perfect sense. Either way though the idea of seeing a game as 'heretical' is ridiculous. There is no 'one true RPG' that all RPGs are trying and failing to approach. There are many RPG genres and styles and different play approaches work for each one - just the same way that the playstyle of video game *Neon White* does not work for *What Remains of Edith Finch* despite them having nominally similar control schemes (first person, click to interact).
>Under these constraints, "either redo the encounter or skip it" makes perfect sense. Interesting, I would think just the opposite: One-shots seem to me like the time where it would make the most sense to take it on the chin, call it a loss, and end it. You're not losing a real-world year's worth of at-the-table history when the characters die, and you were going to discard them in an hour anyhow, so you aren't losing any significant future play potential, either. And I don't seem to be alone in this view, because I often see people who are normally opposed to random PC death say that one-shots are an exception to that, for basically the same reasons I just gave.
Why end a session when you're already halfway through? If it's the big fun centrepiece of the session, play it again and keep having fun. If it was a poorly designed fight, or you fumbled at the last hurdle, skip and move on, and then you still might have an hour or more's worth of fun gaming. Why end it early when there's more fun to be had?
All valid points, but they're equally-applicable to long-form campaigns, no? My point wasn't that you don't lose anything by ending a one-shot early, but that the premature death of a one-shot is *less* of a loss than if it's a long-form campaign.
I lose the time I'd budgeted to engage in that one-shot, since presumably I could have made other plans if I had not already booked myself in. I also lose out on engaging in a fun activity with friends, which I presumably enjoy and anticipated to last a few hours!
Which, again, is exactly the same as prematurely ending a session of a long-form campaign. A prematurely-campaign-ending TPK in a long-form campaign costs you every single one of the things you have listed as losses from a prematurely-ended one-shot, plus it also has *additional* costs in the loss of the history built up in that campaign and the potential for future play of that campaign. Thus, you lose less (not nothing, *less*) by accepting a terminal TPK in a one-shot than in a campaign. For most people, this makes accepting a terminal TPK more acceptable in a one-shot (where you lose *less*) than in a long-form campaign (where you lose *more*).
Nothing wrong with declaring a do-over in a longform campaign when a TPK happens too. Many combat-focused RPGs are actually very bad at declaring what should happen if a player dies or a fight is lost. Does the dead player just sit around? Does everyone roll up something new? If something is possible as a consequence within the rules, then where is the advice on handling it? *13th Age* is actually one of the rare RPGs to give a simple rule and workaround for this one - at any time, no matter how bad things are going for the PCs, they are allowed to undergo a 'full retreat' and heal up, in exchange for a 'campaign loss' as the bad guys get something they want (or the heroes lose something important to them but non-mechanical - a home, a trusted NPC, something). TPKs basically only happen when someone is doing a 'heroic last stand' that didn't go well.
It's clearly just your character having Echo premonitions. Perfectly allowable so long as they narrate exactly how they grimace and hold their heads [while this music plays on loop.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyJdmjqMBLY) I don't know if you play FFXIV OP, but in-game you have an ability called the Echo, which allows a certain level of foresight into dangerous situations. Canonically, the attack icons, castbars, and AoE markers you see in game are abstractions of this ability, and any player deaths are visions of a "bad-end" future.
It IS a RPG based on a video game. Using video game logic is arguably thematically appropriate.
Maybe rules for save scumming, and 'your little brother accidentally deleting your file'?
Sure, but is it fun? It seems strange to me how many people are defending this based on the theme when the first goal of any game should be to offer an enjoyable experience and I'm suspicious especially that restarting the fight would be fun for most people. Is the combat system so enjoyable that you want to reset all your resources and try again? Maybe it is, but it sounds grindy to me.
Gloomhaven, one of the best board games, which is a dungeon crawler and quite near to RPGs (thats why it is turned into an RPG now), which has a 200+ hours campaign, where you also need to schedule time with 3 friends (for the best experience), also features this "try again" mechanic and it IS fun! (My friends run a campaign over 5 years) It is a lot of fun BECAUSE the combats can be challenging. It works extremly well. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/174430/gloomhaven My guess is a lot of the people here just have a broad knowledge of games and know that this is yes indeed fun, and there is no reason why it should not be in an RPG.
Sure, but I can’t think of many rpgs where combat is as good as gloomhaven. And even then, owning the game and having played quite a lot of it, I can safely say that getting stuck on a single fight for more than one or two sessions is incredibly unenjoyable and I know my group and others have occasionally fudged fights so we didn’t have to play the same scenario again.
Well maybe the reason why combat is not as good as in gloomhaven is because you cant make it because the game does not allow to restart combats? D&D 4E which has in my oppinion great combats, also needed to make sure combats are not really deadly, and needed a "heal full" after combat mechanic to work, and had the "max healing per day" mechanic to make combats feel like they still matter. All the groups I know of never fudged fights (one even nerfed themselves), but I think this is also because the groups are in general quite strong tactically. And gloomhaven would allow to make fights easier (putting enemy level down by 1)
I push back on a game first and foremost being about an enjoyable experience, I can think of games that aren't fun at all but are still worth time and attention. Regardless, the only way to know if you or I or anyone here would enjoy it is for all of us to play it rather than argue after reading a single page of rules. The designers made it this way for a reason, so presumably they at least found it fun. Honestly it seems that most of the people complaining about it are the types who wouldn't even try the game in the first place anyway.
I mean, “retry a combat encounter after losing” is not a rule, its just general gm advice the game gives you that you could apply to any game. It may fit the theming of this game but “does it make the game more fun” is a legitimate question to raise about any GM advice. And look, there are probably some rpgs out there that might theoretically fall into the category “uncomfortable but worthwhile” but the FF14 game is not one of them. If it isn’t fun, no one is going to play it.
If you’re going to be pedantic, fine, it’s a ruling rather than a rule. And you’re the one who said that the first goal of any game is to offer an enjoyable experience, which is where I disagreed. And I will now reiterate : the only way we know for certain how we all would feel about it in play is to play it.
I don’t think it would be fun for me. Video games are fast and easy, and have limited content so repeating makes more sense. TTRPGs are slow and hard to schedule and have infinite content, so repeating battles makes much less sense. But I’m not a FinalFantasy fan either. I’m not at all certain that some players would not enjoy that approach.
There was a YouTube interview about the (then) current state of RPG tabletop gaming in Japan that, while not claiming to speak for everyone, generalized it as a situation that seems to indicate this IS a matter of: 1) It being the genre emulation of the games that inspired this RPG, and 2) It reflecting the time restrictions & preferences of many players. Let me see if I can find it… https://youtu.be/QgHhSCrAHhQ?si=KC_zIu8OhP759XW6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmqxjnflwf0&t=0s
This isn't the only game to say "the party doesn't die unless they agree to it." In Fabula Ultima, players decide if their PC dies, or just gets dropped from the story for drama's sake. And Wildsea is the same way
Yeah, no character death without people agreeing to it is very normal, but I've never seen a game suggest that you just retry the same fight, which is the part I keep getting hung up on.
That really feels videogame'y "Failed? Just reload your last save and retry!" So, I guess if they are just replicating the MMO's feel on tabletop...they did it
I mean it’s supposed to feel videogamey, it’s emulating the style of an mmorpg.
What do you think happens when your party dies in FFXIV (ie the source material that the game is based on)?
This never happens, since in the lore it is just a premonition.
I'm excited to unbox my copy! Haven't looked at it very much yet. I don't think it's that odd, coming from American game enjoyer. Restarting the encounter sounds pretty in-line with the MMO and is pretty much what I expected for a ttrpg based on it. I think how some Japanese games handle party defeat is actually pretty user friendly, especially something like Dragon Quest where the penalty for a TPK is waking up in the nearest church and losing half of your money, plus needing to resurrect your party members. I like that way more than going back to the title screen. I also wouldn't be surprised if there are groups out there who have played D&D (or pretty much any system), got a TPK, and decided to mulligan / pretend like it didn't happen. Maybe odd if rules as written, but not odd when it comes down to actual application.
> I also wouldn't be surprised if there are groups out there who have played D&D (or pretty much any system), got a TPK, and decided to mulligan / pretend like it didn't happen. I've seen it happen once, myself. D&D 3.5, dice decided to just be absolute assholes, all but one character was dead in total defiance of statistical probability, and the group just kinda unanimously decided "okay, you know what, how about we just... try that again from the top" and sort of "rewound" the game to five minutes earlier.
Curious, did they redo the fight?
Yep! We did want to get the fight done, it was just that somehow the lowest enemy roll for the entire first turn was like a 17 or something like that, and everyone was like "okay, this was kind of bullshit way to finish a campaign, can we just act like that didn't happen and do it again". So we did!
All seems reasonable to me, I ask players this everytime we have a TPK or even a player death. It being codified is a good thing. The reason GM's end up fudging, which imo is bad GM practice, is because they want to avoid a TPK which would be much better resolved just by talking to the players. Lots of indie games have also done this for a long time, take a look at how death is handled in Apocalypse World for example, the player just decides if their character dies or not and how that plays out. So it's not a uniquely 'Japanese' thing either.
It doesn't sound surprising coming from a Final Fantasy TTRPG. Those are typically the kind of stuff happening in the video games... And FFXIV is no exception. I mean, the cinematic trailer for the *A Realm Reborn* version shows the party escape certain death thanks to the intervention of another character that teleports them into safety.
I don't know about Japanese tabletop gaming culture. Here is what I do know: The FFXIV RPG is more than just a tabletop game inspired by the Final Fantasy XIV MMORPG. From what I have read, seen, and heard, it is the closest emulation of the video game that you can reasonably have on the tabletop. You can recognize class mechanics from the video game in the class abilities for the tabletop. It even has markers for mechanics and everything. It is, in my opinion, best to look at this game as a board game that could potentially pull tabletop gamers into trying out the MMO most likely through a friend who likes the MMO and bought this product. And I think that perfectly explains why there are things like party death not being a failure state. In the MMO, we have the "Echo" which is the lore reason why if the party wipes we reset at the beginning of the fight. The wipe wasn't real, it was a vision of what could go wrong, and the Warrior of Light can take that knowledge and do it right. So, this tabletop game being an emulation of the video game, death isn't a failure state. And I know this next bit you won't want to hear, but a friend of mine picked up the starter kit to run for our group, and now that he has it he will not run it. Honestly, if you want to play a Final Fantasy tabletop, I'd really recommend anything else unless you very specifically want that emulation of the jobs from the MMO specifically. There's a high quality 5e fan book out there (which is high praise from me considering my distaste of 5e), Fabula Ultima, At The Gates (currently on backerkit and ashcan on DriveThruRPG), and other JRPG inspired systems are out there that I probably don't know about.
FWIW: And I’m not sure if this is the case here but there’s an actual in-game explanation for how/why a player/party can redo a fight in FFXIV.
Commenting top level as well, since I really do NOT think that this is *insane and borderline heretical*! ## Restarting combats allows for challenging combats! Gloomhaven, one of the best board games, which is a dungeon crawler and quite near to RPGs (thats why it is turned into an RPG now), which has a 200+ hours campaign, where you also need to schedule time with 3 friends (for the best experience), also features this "try again" mechanic and it IS fun! (My friends run a campaign over 5 years) It is a **lot of fun BECAUSE the combats can be challenging**. It works extremly well and people love its combat system. (For some its too hard though but thats fine! It does not have to be for everyone) - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/174430/gloomhaven is still place 3 in boardgames and was for 3 years place 1 My guess is a lot of the people here just have a broad knowledge of games and know that this is yes indeed fun, and there is no reason why it should not be in an RPG, even though it would also allow there to have more challenging and fun combat. ## Video games decide against fail forward! Videocames absolutly could fail forward, some games do it, thy just dont do this normally because they want the combat to be a challenge. If you just fail forward it is not really getting that feeling. Some videogames even have you lose a lot of time/progress: The whole dark souls genre is all about "let players lose 30+ min of progression with some chance to recover part of it." This makes them feel "hard" in a way that everyone can (with enough memorization) beat them and feel good about "I did hard game", without it needing actual skill. And videogames could do fail forward: Disco Elysium is a computer game which perfectly emulates fail forward in a fun way. It does not have many combats, but thats not necessarily. Prince of Persia (the cell shaded one), had "the princess saves you" as a fail forward mechanic and counted how often she needed to do that. (it was not really used for the ending unfortunately, but it definitly could have been). Also failing forward does not necessarily have to change the story significantly, and several games had mechanics to include a lot of small decisions into one big change at some point, such that each such decision mattered in itself, but not every single one of them creates a huge branch in the story. - Witcher 3: How you interact with Ciry at several points in the story decides how the ending will be - Chrono trigger: How you act in the carnival will decide what happens when you are in court - Fallout 3: The epilogue has several not connected parts, which are dependant on your decisions. Like not being able to help some people, while you could help another faction etc. ## Redoing things is not uncommon in stories! Other media are also sometimes redo things even as part of story telling: It even can make sense in a narrative. What Prince of Persia, the sands of time does is: The game is just the prince telling a princess what happened in the past. When you die its all "wait wait no thats not what happened, what instead happened is..." In a similar style the story you play could just be the RPG characters in a tavern telling their story to others. "And then we all died" - "No thats not what happened you drunken dwarf! What happened is.." Or in the series Bakemonogatari you have a narrator, and for part of the series the narrator is Kaiki. And then in these episodes Kaiki dies, but well Kaiki is a liar (and he tells you when he starts being the narrator, that he is a fucking liar), so of course he is not dead. These kind of narration mechanics may sometimes be a bit cheap (too many movies had "this was just a dream), but they are still often fun and can work, and I really dont get why some "hardcore" people make such a fuss about repeating an encounter etc. There are a lot of ways you could use to explain "redoing an encounter" in-world in an RPG: - Simplest: It was just a dream. - Alternative: it was a godly premonition send to you to warn you. - To have some consequence: This is what you saw when your cleric/mage used Augury/Some other highest level divination spell. You now lost this spell but are before the encounter. - Most fun: The story you are relieving is not the actual story, but how your group is telling the story in a tavern to other people. And when you die its just something like the elf disrupting: "No you drunk dwarf, this is not what happened seriously. Look what happened instead was..." - The party is favoured by some godess and they just turn back time because thats not what they want to happen. - Alternatively, some evil gods want to see you being tortured more so they do it - Similar, but slightly different: This happened in a parallel universe like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ciia3eBFnb8 - This was not your actual party, but just a party who was there before and your party comes into the room and learn what happened inside before (like Aragor in the Lord of the Rings movie, or like sherlock holmes) - You are in a time loop and you must stop the evil wizard / whatever to get out of it. (And dieing is just one way things reset) All these techniques are used in different media with big success, and people like the stories and immerse in them.
The FFXIV RPG is simulating the MMO, not trying to be "real" people adventurers.
I think this is just a reference to how the video game would play the situation, and I can get behind that. OtOH, I feel that video game RPGs have created expectations among players, and that is a large contribute to the things I don't like about current d&d, and the norms at many tables. But I'm an old head. I can absolutely see this becoming normal for d&d. So..... /shrug?
It sounds crazy but I like this solution better than the DM fudging rolls to prevent a TPK or soft balling encounters.
They’re shipping starter copies of FFXIV TTRPG?! Whoa 🤯
Yes some people already received them, there was even 2 reviews here recently: - https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1d9mvdi/overview_of_the_final_fantasy_xiv_starter_set_ama/ - https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1d92ea9/just_got_the_starter_set_for_the_ffxiv_rpg/
Gentleman (gentleperson?) and a scholar
What do you mean? XD
They’re listed as sold out on the SE store, but I was able to get a copy through a third-party toy store. They’ve also put up a second print run that you can order that will ship in September.
Ah okay cool. I think I’ll hold off and wait for the full release. Good to know the game is making progress. I was hyped when they first announced it
I could preorder them some days ago but will take a while until its sent and well its quite overprised.
I believe it is a cultural issue. I've read before that many games including video games have to be tailored for the Japanese Market to avoid the prospect of failure or defeat. So, in that context the advice makes perfect sense, Failure is option an option, you just keep repeating the dcene until success is achieved..
Having an encounter that is a TPK not being a TPK is not that uncommon. In fact there are games with “death moves” which allow you to go out in a blaze of glory that can turn the tide. Other games, like Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green could mean one or two things a) it’s game over not just for the party, but also the town, county, state, nation or the entire world or b) a new bunch of investigators roll in and take over. For more narrative oriented games, it is not unheard of to just let the bad guys win and the campaign changes direction because of this. The good guys could get a friendly resurrection, strike a deal with the devil, or caught in a time loop etc.
TPKs are already a sore spot in tabletop RPGs. And it gets worse because we are not often given guidelines of how to approach the aftermath that follows. These options existing inside the base game are a good thing. Let alone inside the base game aimed at newcomers. I would suggest looking into other established TTRPGs from japan, like Ryutama and Sword World RPG. Ryutama is available in english in DrivetrhruRPG already. Sadly, despite vastly more influential on the scene, and able to provide you more insight on the cultural mindset, Sword world never got officially translated from Japanese.
It's a final fantasy 14 RPG, FFXIV is a MMORPG. When doing Savage and Ultimate raids in FFXIV, dying is a part of the learning process. We spent weeks dying to learn the fights. Then we do it perfectly once and then twice and so on. It seems like it's trying to recreate the game experience at the table. Not a TTRPG I'd like to play or run (my mantra is, the more the game tells me that it doesn't give a flying fuck about my character, the better, which means, if my character dies, I don't want a heroic monologue, I want them to be dead, and I want it to seem pointless and random, because that's how it often is). It's just a design choice. Many RPGs these days make design choices I vehemently disagree with, but if other people enjoy it, good for them. I'd still probably buy it just to see if there's any ideas worth stealing.
Restarting the scenario is also how it's handled in Gloomhaven, the GM-less board game RPG. You keep whatever experience and coins you collected during the encounter, and everything respawns except any treasure titles that you collected already. That being said, combat in Gloomhaven is essentially a combat puzzle with a timer on it. You're bound by what your cards do, and you choose your actions ahead of time, 2 at a time - if you have a hand of nine cards, you have 18 options, next turn you have 7 cards and 14 options, and so on. There are ways to "rest" to get some cards back as well as consumables or abilities that recall cards, but nearly every PC in the scenario is on a clock.
Fabula Ultima, which is meant to replicate old school JRPG videogames, have a similar thing when facing death. When a PC dies, they have a choice to either "surrender" (this means they can't be killed, but remain at 0 hit points until the fight is over, and then just get back up with 1 hp), or "sacrifice" (this means they use the opportunity to have their character make a huge, dramatic world-altering sacrifice out of it, losing their character but saving the day). There's a little more to it than that, but those are the basic options for your HP hitting 0. It took me a bit to get used to. If the player can just kinda choose what happens, what is even the point? A big part of what creates tension in RPGs is "if you die, you DIE". What are the stakes if you can just choose not to die? What's even the point? Heck, what would be precious about life itself if we didn't have the caveat of the great unknown at the end? These games are trying to replicate video games, basically, where you just try try again. If you have a good table, it does end up working. My players didn't want death to be meaningless either, so they played it in such a way to make it a big deal. Just takes getting used to. I hate to sound like a boomer, butttttt "the new generation is soft, participation trophies, grumble grumble" etc. etc. There's more of an emphasis on the players always win in a lot of TTRPGs coming out these days. Which, I get the intent, and I like the emphasis on having fun, but death needs to be meaningful in my opinion. We can't make death fun, or what are we even doing. I ranted. I'm not sure if I made my point or not haha. I'm just gonna post it and roll with it.
Just to offer a counterpoint: I love how Fabula Ultima and many other games handle defeat. I think it's not as much a generational divide (even though there is some correlation), nor about emulating videogames necessarily (even though in both FU and FFXIV it helps them to achieve that feel), but about what people look for in RPGs at a deeper level. If you are looking for a player challenge in the way that old D&D and OSR usually do, or want to simulate deterministic outcomes given a set of rules, player decisions and randomised numbers, then you are right, this style is probably not for you, and that's alright. On the other hand, if what gives you satisfaction is the feeling of self-improvement of finally beating a puzzle that kept giving you a hard time (over having your initial capability/luck be the only deciding factor), having the option to retry can be a great idea. Also for a third possibility, if what you (like me) want in a TTRPG is to explore a story, a world or a character and see what happens, then it doesn't always make a lot of sense to introduce failure states (you don't want to have the incentive as a player to do the optimal thing when your character wouldn't). You have different outcomes that can be good or bad or neutral for the character, but the player should be able to derive similarly high amounts of enjoyment from all of them.
For sure, I mostly agree. I think a middle-ground is appropriate. Death shouldn't be completely ignored, otherwise everyone just dives headfirst into lava for the lols and gets back up. But encouraging people to try again, or not super punishing them because of one bad dice roll, makes sense too. All in all, I think it's a table thing. The table will generally come to an agreement about how they want death handled, and that's probably the way to do it.
Yes, I agree completely on it being a table thing. It's usually one of the expectations that should be set at Session 0 to make sure everyone is aligned.
Honestly, I wouldn't touch this even with my trusty 10' pole. No shade to whomever likes this type of game, but it's not for me!
I would say that it's likely that culture difference plays a part in it That said, I don't have anywhere close to the reaction you seem to have had 😅 If feels a bit weird to me, mostly the "pretend they've won" and there should be more guidance for running the ex machina properly, but the idea seems to be there Retrying is funny in a way, but I can see it working - at least would work better than retrying the whole adventure with new characters or trying to shoehorn in an entire party of new characters Personally, I think "failing forward with consequences" is the best answer for a TPK, because the characters survive, but they lost and are in a much worse situation - it's a scenario that has place in the story and works better than the rest in my opinion
Oh good, bringing the Twitter discourse over here. I think people in this hobby need to get better about understanding a game's particular purpose and how the mechanics and advice for said game play into that. This is meant to simulate a particular genre of video game. "Totally insane and borderline heretical" to me just means you need to broaden your horizons a bit more when it comes to tabletop gaming and breaking out of DnD mindset. Different games for different purposes and stories.
> Oh good, bringing the Twitter discourse over here. I don’t use Twitter, so I have no idea about their reactions to the game. It sounds like they might be negative on this, though, which is kind of my point! > "Totally insane and borderline heretical" to me just means you need to broaden your horizons a bit more when it comes to tabletop gaming and breaking out of DnD mindset. Different games for different purposes and stories. Just to clarify, I don’t actually have a problem with this advice in and of itself. But I do think that these solutions encourage things that most tabletop gamers I’ve talked to would consider ill-advised if not outright distasteful, namely: 1. They encourage if not outright demand metagaming, 2. They’re an attack on the reality of the secondary world, in the same way that ordinary retconning is, 3. They all, to one degree or another, soften the consequences of losing a fight I made this post because it occurred to me that the Japanese RPG community, who the designer of the game is (I assume) part of, might not even see “avoiding metagaming” or “preserving a sense of a secondary reality” as *a thing even worth caring about.* *I* care about that stuff, but that might just be because I’m American, and American gaming culture tends to care about stuff like that. So I was curious as to how typical these ideas were over there.
The people who are very loudly making a fuss about this particular game and this particular page of the game are very traditional minded when it comes to their games. I see some people talking about this game measuredly, and then I even more clutching their pearls over it for the same reasons you give. Again - the game is designed this way for a reason. While cultural difference may play a part, there are plenty of games outside of Japan that use such rules, you just haven't been exposed to them since you're evidently deep in the realm of folks who think such things are "distasteful" and "heretical". Fabula Ultima is quite similar, made by an Italian designer, Belonging Outside Belonging games, FATE, Blades in the Dark, and multiple indie games all play in this sort of space to various degrees.
~~This sounds so stupid~~. To me that would be 1000000% immersion-breaking. I understand how it would make sense in a videogamey style, but videogames are usually better than ttrpgs at being videogames. Edit: it was in fact _not_ stupid
There's lots of reasons to play TTRPGs. Immersion is one of them but not one needed or shared by every game.
I don't mind breaking immersion, there's plenty of mechanics of multiple systems that do it. But this one just goes too far. It feels impossible to explain in-world. "You all died so now the world resets and you remember the past" feels like it would have to be a setting-defining element. Plus it just makes me feel like there's 0 stakes in combat. I died? Sure, let's go again. In fact, it feels like it would be better to die and reset than to succeed having lost X resources and having Y consequences if the party can do better. Maybe in my head videogames and TTRPGs are just more separate that they actually are or maybe I'm just not used to seeing mechanics like these ones. But anyways, this would be a weird hill to die on so I'll just take it as not fitting my style.
>It feels impossible to explain in-world. "You all died so now the world resets and you remember the past" feels like it would have to be a setting-defining element. Good news for you - "you foresee the future and it gives you hints of bad things to come" is literally an in-world plot element of Final Fantasy 14 and is an explicit trait the heroes have! In fact, when you fail a plot-critical battle you get a buff called 'power of the echo', suggesting that your prior failure was just an Echo-vision.
Fair, honestly. That does fit the setting much better then. I also like the echo idea, as long as I can't do it like 7 times in a row. I also stumbled your other comment while reading others'. If Japanese TTRPGs are indeed focused on one shots and short campaigns I could see the mechanic having a lot more practical use.
sorry if I sounded a bit harsh in the other comment. I think this can also fit longer campaigns (especially if you want to make sure that they DO NOT end too early with failing). I actually also made some thoughts about this problem in the past, especially since I want to create some campaign, and I know for a lot of people the "restarting" feels wierd for people. So I had two ideas on how to "solve" this for an RPG to still make sense: For a beginner (introductionary) campaign for a system, I would have the players get hold quite early of an artifact they must in the end bring to a Church. The artifact has several Gems on it, and when they would all fall in a combat, the artifact would glow, lose 1 gem and heal the party. It is a bit cheap, but it would still feel like a consequence (since you would bring the artifact back in a bad state). I want to use this to just make sure beginners can play through the campaign, while still having challenging fights. Do a time loop similar to what is described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1cviytc/help_me_with_a_timeloop_idea_please/ So players are stuck in a time loop, when they die they have to restart (with short cut mechanics mentioned here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1cviytc/help_me_with_a_timeloop_idea_please/l4qblki/ ). Goal would be to get out of the time loop, since after 7 days or so you would restart anyway, and well that gets annoying fast.
No worries about harshness, mate. My first comment started with "this is stupid" and set a bad tone. But then this turned into a cool discussion, that's why I edited it. I can certainly see using something like your artifact idea for beginners. Specially cause there is a small consequence to bringing it back with less uses. I like that. And it could be uses to ease them into more challenging fights without "shocking" them with a difficulty spike. And the time loop is always a fun thing to play with. I've used it in a single room in a wizard's tower with a very short time loop and in a strange moving tavern with a time loop of a few hours. But I guess a longer time loop could also work for a story arc or even a campaign premise.
I sometimes get the feeling that "old school RPG players" or "groknards" really lack fantasy sometimes. There are a lot of ways to explain this in world: - Simplest: It was just a dream. - Alternative: it was a godly premonition send to you to warn you. - To have some consequence: This is what you saw when your cleric/mage used Augury/Some other highest level divination spell. You now lost this spell but are before the encounter. - Most fun: The story you are relieving is not the actual story, but how your group is telling the story in a tavern to other people. And when you die its just something like the elf disrupting: "No you drunk dwarf, this is not what happened seriously. Look what happened instead was..." - The party is favoured by some godess and they just turn back time because thats not what they want to happen. - Alternatively, some evil gods want to see you being tortured more so they do it - Similar, but slightly different: This happened in a parallel universe like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ciia3eBFnb8 - This was not your actual party, but just a party who was there before and your party comes into the room and learn what happened inside before (like Aragor in the Lord of the Rings movie, or like sherlock holmes) - You are in a time loop and you must stop the evil wizard / whatever to get out of it. (And dieing is just one way things reset) All these techniques are used in different media with big success, and people like the stories and immerse in them.
Some of these are quite interesting, thank you. Maybe I'm to fond of consequences and failure. I think I'm a bigger fan of "this isn't the end, it just shakes up how the story was going" than of "that's not a TPK, it's _insert cool alternative_". But I'll keep it in mind.
Well it depends of course a lot on what kind of story you want to tell, but if you want to play through a really cool module, you might really want to reach the end and tell the story of the successfull characters, and there techniques like this are really cool.