RPGaDay 2021 #3 Risk

 The main prompt is Tactic, but I'm taking one of the alternative prompts today. Because I think Risk is important and it gets short shrift these days.

One of the downsides of the emphasis on "stories" in RPGs is that they've become very safe. The priority is telling a satisfying story, so anything that derails that narrative or keeps the story from being narratively satisfying is to be avoided. So risks are minimized. "Nobody likes having their character die to the second orc in the dungeon," they say, and GMs are encouraged to move heaven and earth (very easy when your the GM and in control of the universe) to prevent it.

I disagree with this.

I believe that risk, and it's companion, loss, are important, because they make any eventual success that much sweeter. There are GMs who will tell you that they're very good at making a session feel like a knuckle-biter even though it's not. But why go through the effort when you could have the session be a real knuckle-biter?

It's one of the reasons that I love player-driven sandboxes. The story is theirs to create, not mine to dictate. A character absolutely can die to the second orc in the dungeon. It's not likely, but it's not my job to prevent it from happening.

While something like character death is one potential risk factor, it's not the only one. It should be possible for the characters to fail in their missions. There should exist the possibility that they won't be able to defeat the goblins, save the princess, or defeat the necromancer. Sometimes, what's behind a secret door is going to remain a secret.

That also creates a pressure to up your game that continually assuming a narratively satisfying victory doesn't. If the necromancer has a chance of winning, now you have to figure out what that victory could look like. And that opens up possibilities that a paper-thin mustache-twirling villain just can't.