Exactly! So it is an error on the part of the game designers to place frequent air disasters at random. But the mistake they make is the randomness, not the air disasters. Sure, air disasters are there in the source material, but they are only random at the Watsonian level, i.e. not really random at all.
Do any of the games that we are discussing (i.e. games obsessed with making women pregnant) work that way? I meant to suggest that this was a failure of simulationist game design.
@whswhs and I are aware but not fond of game designs that require the character-players to make Doylist choices during play and manage abstract resources at the Doylist level.
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I doubt it, but I was responding to a tangent that involved slaughtering orcs.
Right. Sorry.
This describes a lot of fights I’ve been in from both sides of the GM’d RPG experience as well as in games without GMs. It also describes a large number of exciting fights in film, comics, literature, and television.
Media with magical/super-powered characters and/or aimed at children in particular often puts characters in action-packed situations where direct harm and defeat aren’t the primary stakes that motivate the action. Sometimes the fighting isn’t the core conflict of the scene, much as you can have characters playing poker without the outcome of the poker game itself mattering to the drama of the scene very much or being in doubt. 
Sometimes as @Benkyo said it’s also more a matter of negotiating costs (through mechanic or through free-play) rather than the stakes not being in the fight itself. I’m reminded of a discussion of Hamlet where someone responded to the question of “Why doesn’t Hamlet just stab his uncle in that one scene” with “because then the play would be over.” Sometimes putting defeat on the table is more or less a play-will-be-over sort of outcome that no one is interested in.
If that’s the only reason that Hamlet doesn’t stab Claudius, then it’s a crap play.
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I think that there are three cases here:
The air crash is essential to the story. In that case you have it happen without rolling dice for it. It’s probably better in this case to have the piloting done by an NPC, as players don’t react well to Kobayashi Maru scenarios; they’re going to want to roll against their piloting skill to avoid disaster, and what do you do if they get a critical success? Abort the campaign?
The air crash is irrelevant to the story; the PCs are flying in order to get to a destination where the story takes place. In that case you omit it, and the next scene takes place at the destination. Or you have a scene of “what are you doing in flight?” as an opportunity for roleplaying.
The need to avoid a crash is part of the drama. Maybe it’s a feature of the world that flying is experimental and risky, or that bad flying weather is frequent; maybe there’s a mission that requires taking desperate measures. In that case you ask for a piloting roll. But there’s no point in asking for a roll if there’s not a chance of failure, and an undesirable consequence for failure.
RPGs aren’t like novels, or films, or graphic novels, where there’s an inherent distinction between the writer, who controls the narrative, and the audience, who don’t. The players are co-authors. But that co-authorship can deprive them of any sense of suspense, if you give them an automatic veto over failure. And conversely, if failure happens only because the GM has decided it should happen for dramatic reasons, then this deprives the players of a sense of agency. Paradoxically, in the special context of an RPG, rolling the dice to succeed or fail at random is the most effective way to provide agency—because the real experience of agency lies not in the throwing of the dice, but in the decision to go ahead and throw the dice even though there is a chance of failure and an undesirable consequence for failure. On one hand, throwing the dice is a gamist element, in that it involves taking a risk in the hope of gaining a reward; on the other, it’s a way of giving dramatic focus to a scene.
Of course dice throwing isn’t the only way to accomplish this; you can achieve it in a diceless game, if on one hand the players don’t know the outcome of their characters’ actions, but on the other the GM can’t simply dictate that outcome at whim. But dice throwing is a way to get that effect.
“This is a sharp sword, which I use ritually as a symbol of a sharp sword. I also have a dull sword, which I use ritually as a symbol of a dull sword.”
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Lyz Kingsley of the film review site And You Call Yourself a Scientist? points out that there are two sorts of disaster film: you crash the plane in the first half hour, or you don’t crash it at all. In other words, the story is either about preventing the disaster, or about what you do afterwards; not both. (There are exceptions, of course, but not many of them.)
And I think a lot of early skill-based RPG play tended to abstract things: you made the piloting roll, you get there safely; you blew it, you don’t. But this devalues non-combat activities: just as a single missed attack shouldn’t spell doom in a fight, a single missed roll in any sort of non-instant activity shouldn’t mean automatic failure.
I note that “human vs nature” scenarios are very rare in RPGs, and I think this is part of the reason: fighting rules give you shades of outcome and at least in most RPGs you can change your tactics to favour one thing over another. Other rules don’t: you made your Survival, you’ve got enough food for today. It should be possible to have a dramatic game about plane crash survivors trekking to safety without having to fight anyone; but nobody does it.
Sure, but calling it a disaster film is prejudging the issue. You can have a crash landing as an incident in a film that isn’t a disaster film. See for example Elasti-Girl’s piloting in The Incredibles, or Wash’s in Serenity.
I once read a comment (I have unhappily forgotten where) to the effect that if you were to swap the protagonists of Hamlet and Othello neither play would get off the ground. Hamlet would see straight through Iago; Othello would simply butcher Claudius and declare his right as king.
In other words, the reason that Hamlet doesn’t stab Claudius to death in the confessional is that he is Hamlet.
In yet other words, things that happen in plays and stories ought to have both Doylist and Watsonian reasons for happening. I think a similar thing is true in RPGs. Though it provoked strongly-expressed disagreement and accusations of moral turpitude to say so on r.g.f.a, I think that the events in RPGs likewise are best when they have simulationist, narrative, and gamist reasons to happen.
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Very much agreed. (I find comedy is particularly prone to drop the Watsonian: “this happens because the audience will find it funny” rather than “this happens because it’s a thing that character would do, and the audience will find it funny”.)
Even if your primary motivation is just one of those things, I don’t think it will ever make a game worse to add the other reasons too.
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I basically agree. If the things happening in the narrative don’t make sense in simulationist terms, I find the narrative shallow and unsatisfying. And at the very least, if the gamist aspect gives the players incentives that go against the narrative, then I expect the narrative to be repeatedly sabotaged (for example, by elaborate schemes to recruit the Eagles to fly the One Ring to Mount Doom); ideally the gamist aspect should serve the narrative by providing a tool for heightening tension. Emphasizing one at the expense of the others gives you a fabric that’s all weft and no warp.
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That’s part of why I often don’t enjoy comedy.
Back when I was playing in a friend’s Dragaeran campaign, my character, Bertran, a Dzur nobleman, was modeled on Bertie Wooster, in being not too bright, clueless, and honorable. So in one session, another member of the party went away, and then returned in disguise. Bertran took the new identity at face value. He happened to overhear the other characters placing bets on how long it would take him to figure out that the newly introduced character was someone he already knew; so I said, “The Horse! My friends, I know not what you are wagering on, but I would gladly stake an Imperial!” That broke them all up—but it was also in character for Bertran, both as dim and as a sporting sort of fellow. I think that’s probably my greatest success at comedic roleplaying . . .
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My excuse is that I have no sense of humour. I watch George Formby videos on Youtube for the virtuoso banjolele playing.
Yes I second your plug. They are indeed excellent. I think Reindeer Moon was the first prehistoric fiction in which I felt the characters really did believe in the spirits/religion depicted. Fortunately that was a trend other authors emulated.
And Martini said:
So I think you’re just noticing that baby making is a theme and that the game is fudging the odds to make it come up easily.
Wurm… maaaaaybe.
Paleomythic… I don’t think so. It is more in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pulpy territory (e.g. ‘bikini’ is one of the clothing items on the equipment list), and the sample tribe provided for the PCs to belong to has a total population of 10: married couple with 1 kid, married couple with 2 kids, old man, young man, young woman (joined them from another tribe). Apart from the parent-child relationships I’ve just listed here is no indication of how any of these people are related. Is the old man a grandparent to the kids? Is the young man the brother of one of the spouses? So they only care about stereotypical nuclear families who live far, far away from grandparents, in-laws, cousins and aunties. 
IIRC Reindeer Moon has the most horrific mother-dies-in-childbirth scene I’ve ever read. Not ‘natural’ childbirth death deliberate interference
I’m going to say that what is or isn’t fun depends on what kind of fun you’re looking for. An action/adventure campaign offers one sort of fun; a dramatic campaign offers a different sort.
When I’m running a campaign with a low-tech setting, I assume that there’s no perfectly reliable approach to contraception, and often that contraception simply isn’t available. So women have the choices that @DrBob outlines of abstinence, abortion, or infanticide—plus two others, nonprocreative sex (including, for example, sex with other women), or acquiring dependents and heirs.
But in a lot of actual societies without contraception, abstinence was definitely a live option, whether for real cases such as Albanian sworn virgins, or for fictional characters such as Atalanta, Britomart, or Eowyn. It certainly wasn’t unthinkable for a women to have sworn chastity so that she could remain adventurous, at least for an epic heroine. So why not play a character that way? If your goal is to play someone who goes out to slay monsters, undertake quests, and so on, being sexually active isn’t part of the central theme of the campaign. Or if you want drama, have her be attracted to someone, but not ready to marry and settle down.
It seems to me that (hetero)sexually active women adventurers are something of an anachronism in premodern settings. And my own preferred aesthetic is mostly realistic; I’d rather avoid anachronisms. But I don’t think that avoidance has to make all women characters unplayable.
On the other hand, as a realist, I would rather not have game mechanics that imply a game world radically different from the real world through sheer failure to do the math. That strikes me as a failed simulation, by definition.
The author’s motive has very little to do with how satisfying the result is. If we want to have a couple sessions or a whole campaign but we’re not interested in the aftermath of certain outcomes, we would do well to avoid those outcomes prior to the end of the campaign or else find a way to skip over them. We can think more than one thing at a time, so we can find plenty of room for more interesting in-fiction and out-of-fiction reasons to support this sort of structural logic.
I assure you plenty of media you have enjoyed has had a strict structural logic imposed upon it for reasons completely unrelated to narrative or philosophy, and this hasn’t prevented all the good stuff from happening at all.
That hasn’t really been my experience. I don’t find those three classifications map especially well onto my games, friends or systems so the idea of seeing them as thematic imperative doesn’t work very well for me. I haven’t ever found that framework particularly useful at the system-analysis level, let alone for event-motivation.
I think the notation of specific sexual acts is fairly rare in role playing games, so I don’t see any anachronism whatsoever. There isn’t any evidence that pre-historic peoples were unaware of non-procreative sex and there’s certainly evidence that pre-modern peoples have been aware of birth dynamic basics for as long as we’ve been writing things down–not least because we’ve been selling bullshit miracle herbs for about as long as we’ve been writing things down. 
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I think perhaps I didn’t succeed in making the logic clear to you. My objections is not at all to the presence of motives for the author to do things a certain way (that is, to there being Doylist reasons for the story to go that way). My objection is to the absence of any motive other that “because then the play would be over,” that is, to the absence of motives for the characters to do things a certain way (that is, to there not being Watsonian reasons for the story to go that way). To put it algebraically, I was not objecting to A, but to A & ~B, and particularly to ~B. I don’t think your response applies in that case.
I don’t inherently object to structural patterns such as the Myth of the Birth of the Hero, but to be blunt, I have seen too many things with the “heroic arc” from naive, ignorant, timid, or unethical starting point to noble titan. It was brilliant in The Count of Monte Cristo, and enjoyable in Star Wars; but when I saw Ged as a whiny farmboy in the video of A Wizard of Earthsea, or Hal Jordan totally not having the right stuff in Green Lantern, I turned them both off in disgust, both because they were following a hackneyed formula and because they were tearing down characters I liked in their original versions. A formula that blocks the telling of stories that are worth telling strikes me as being past its sell-by.
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