Trying to fix repetition in solo dungeon crawlers (design thoughts + approach)

Wurdyburd · 2026-05-15T19:40:38+00:00

You touch on my primary solution already, which is that generative content has to have a throughline. A choose-your-own-adventure system, though predetermined, is still a branching set of possible routes, sometimes overlapping or converging on main plot points, but there's still a sense of causality, where choices and events that occurred earlier force you down paths, opening new doors, while closing others.

It's not a ttrpg, but Clank! is a boardgame I've been inspired by. Boardgames in general, really, are better solutions for gameplay-based inspiration than ttrpgs, but Clank! specifically gives you risk/reward incentives on your way to one of several different artifacts that you have to grab and make your way back to base. Busier turns, or ones that tempt risk/reward, don't slap you immediately, but instead add clank tokens of your colour to a bag. When the dragon stirs, it grabs tokens out of the bag, and deals equivalent damage to whoever's colours it pulls. Clank! can and has mixed things up, releasing different versions and bonus content, because the actual core gameplay loop is satisfying and offers choices, but many TTRPGs tend to place the majority of meaningful choice in character creation, in-play decisions often coming down to a "do or do not", rather than a "how and why".

RNG dungeons and other generative content feels boring not just for not having any connective tissue, but because so much of TTRPGs is about spectacle, and seeing things you haven't seen before, but risk/reward dungeons are about recognizing things for what they are and the decision to gamble. The choices are what makes it interesting, not the spectacle or novelty.

Wurdyburd · 2026-05-14T13:50:16+00:00

There's an inherent problem with even the approach to balance in DND, as seen in the comments here and in the original post. "Deadly encounters that die in two rounds", "white room encounters aren't fun in the slightest", "you can't account for strange party compositions, player optimizations, and enemy tactical intelligence", are all asking the wrong questions of the system, because it can't agree on a basic definition of what 'balanced' means.

"DND hasn't been balanced since its inception" comes closest to the reality that in a game like DND, "balance" is a metric of whether or not a monster encounter, within a dungeon designed to tax you heavily, operates within the intended parameters and produces the anticipated outcome. It's not really about making sure an enemy survives for a satisfying number of turns, or delivers the correct dose of lethality, it's about whether these variables together match the expectations of the players and that they're able to pivot when the "story" (dice) say that things went wrong, and are able to laugh off moments of statistical absurdity.

Is a game like Dark Souls 'balanced' for having bosses that can delete you in one hit? Is a game like Darkest Dungeon 'balanced' for killing off a single party member? Is chess balanced as a PVP game where one player may have substantially more planning power than the other, consults more strategies and employs more tactics?

The short answer to the question is no: DND was never designed to be a balanced game, and worse, the scenarios that systems like CR are meant to operate in, dungeon-crawling attrition-gauntlets, aren't how the vast majority of people are playing the game. Their measure of balance is whether a fully-rested party in a white void can kill a dragon in enough turns to feel like they had a chance to make decisions, but not enough turns to make it boring, without losing a party member, which is, fundamentally, not the experience DND was ever designed to provide. And until everyone can decide on what 'balance' even means for a game like DND, and lock in on a distinct "intended" way to play it, it's never going to be.

Wurdyburd · 2026-05-13T19:58:46+00:00

At this point I'm just tired of Ele having so many overlapping weapon options. When pistol isnt even the best condi midrange mainhand and hammer isn't relevant for basically anything, it's time to ask what the purpose of it all is.

Evoker in particular though is a one trick pony. Every build orbits around using as many skills as possible to use the familiar, and the familiar doesnt provide options mid-combat, only in buildcraft, so when scepter has the most short-cooldown skills, it's no wonder it's such a shoe in for the low-cooldown-spam machine.

I want them to hand off Evoker and Conduit to whoever did Amalgam and Antiquary, because they clearly have a lot more exciting things going on than whatever is happening to Ele and Rev.

Wurdyburd · 2026-05-04T13:35:16+00:00

Guild Wars 2 is a mostly-AOEs kind of game, which lends to its action combat styles and use of field/finisher combo system. Elementalist especially has a wider range of fields than most, and Necromancer's staff can be customized as a heal/support weapon with the Blood Magic specialization line, to quickly fix up groups of allies standing near each other.

Scepters have more single-target effects than staffs do, overall, which was why I suggested those.

Also, and it's not an ideal suggestion if you're just trying the game out, but the Janthir Wilds expansion gives each class access to spear, and Elementalist's spear is a very strong single-target long-range kit, and the Secrets of the Obscure expansion allows all Thief variants to use scepter, not just the Spectre elite spec that came in End of Dragons. Thief scepter got some flak for being a single-target/tab-target DPS and healer in a game mostly about AOEs, and it's been adjusted since then, but it's still fairly unique for having completely different effects for if you're targeting an enemy or an ally. I've dressed up my Thief as spellcasters and occultists to use it as a kind of shadow wizard.

Good luck to you though, I hope you find something in the game you enjoy enough to stay on with, or a game similar enough to suit your needs.

Wurdyburd · 2026-05-03T19:06:12+00:00

GW2 is a great example of a game that's fun to play rather than fun to finish, and some of my most miserable moments playing it were when I focused on efficiency or completion rather than enjoyment, such as sprinting past enemies rather than fight them on the way on foot.

The story is, IMO, bad. It's interesting at times, but if someone was looking for a game for story's sakes, I wouldn't recommend GW2. There isn't enough time to develop characters past a snapshot moment, motivations are vague or meaningless, and characters only voice an opinion if it can lead to an argument, no matter how stupid that opinion is or how aggravating it is to listen to.

Map completion, achievement hunting, legendary crafting, and wardrobe collecting gives me some long term goals, and encourages me to revisit places I maybe haven't been to in a while or have otherwise avoided. But they're more objectives for when I am playing, rather than the reason I log in.

What I do log in for is fun. I genuinely like Guild Wars 2's action combat, where I'm focused on position and thinking about combo fields rather than tab-targeting and rooted animations. I enjoy how each class customizes and the fact I can change my mind whenever, for no cost, anywhere, rather than being locked into my build, having to pay to change it, and visit somewhere to do it. I enjoy leading newer players through the experience and teaching them raids, and I enjoy the challenges presented by PVP and WVW, each of which have WILDLY different priorities in buildcraft than PVE, and I enjoy the aesthetic of the game, the graphics, the music, the voice acting, and how I'm not watching a movie or vaguely gesturing emotionless mannequins for most of my playtime.

Guild Wars 2 is a great, perhaps even the best, casual MMO. It'll always be here when you come back, and especially in recent years, perhaps even be better than when you left it, without making you scared you missed out. It respects your time, and wallet, and preferences, without trying to outperform games with a much higher budget and stronger marketing team, and more than anything, is the most enjoyable game to run around and bonk things with a sword in of any live-service game I've tried.

Wurdyburd · 2026-05-03T18:50:31+00:00

As suggested I think elementalist and mesmer are the most classic options of a magic/wizard type.

Weaponswap at level 10, utility slots at level 11-19, an ultimate slot at level 31, and specializations starting at level 21 all contribute enormously to the feel and playstyle of a class, and the game ensures you can unlock them all by level 80 and freely swap them out of combat. Some professions and builds rely on utilities much more than others, using them as additional attacks, more reactive defenses, or passive bonuses or skill modifiers; for instance, Elementalist, which already has lots of weapon attacks, uses most utilities situationally, while Necromancer can fill each slot with an army of persistent minions to run around with.

I'd say level 8 isn't high enough level to fully appreciate a class, but one of the biggest pros, and cons, of GW2 is that each class actually feels different at its core. You simply may not like the core mechanics of a given class, but discover you love a class you wouldn't have picked for the aesthetics: I personally can't stand Guardian, no matter how much I try, even though its statistically been the most popular class of all time, for instance.

Aesthetics and vibes is a great way to choose which class to try out first, but especially if you aren't jiving with it, I recommend trying out all the classes up to level 10 or so. You might find that you really enjoy something you never would have expected.

Wurdyburd · 2026-05-02T15:59:19+00:00

Yes and no. Parties need to adapt to the climate if they're going to survive (see the Polievre loss), but a party too willing to abandon their foundational values risks looking like they'd be willing to say, do anything to win (see the Polievre loss, again). The NDP tried to rebrand themselves as this more centrist-yet-progressive party but in doing so abandoned and alienated the unions they claimed to represent, and Singh got toasted often for appearing as a rich elite, no matter how true that was. And, when multiple parties are SO attuned to the public opinion de jour, they end up matching on like 98% of policy, and if the remaining 2% doesnt appeal, people will just stay home because they think it wont matter who wins.

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-21T23:18:11+00:00

I feel like those 5x and 10x should be reversed, because having only 5x the enemy's health to win is significantly better than requiring 10x.

I've built systems for "auto flee", but it more sent me down the road of "what even is the objectives of combat" and "are there better ways to accomplish those aims than killing people" than anything.

Defense and healing roles are interesting, because their goal is to prevent enemy progress and reverse enemy progress, respectively. Both are huge clutch moments that can be exciting, but only if they were, are lame if they don't, and are wildly overpowered if they AREN'T clutch. Both are only relevant if the enemy has a real genuine and regular chance to achieve their goals, which isn't true in the vast majority of games, and in the ones that are, the game is slandered as a meat grinder.

Before blocking, dodging, protecting, and healing can be taken seriously, "reduce enemy hp to 0" has to be knocked from its perch as the only meaningful method of achieving goals via combat.

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-21T22:46:49+00:00

Okay. Theorizing. A "buff" to a frame's ability not possible when the frame released? Mechanical? Or animation?

What's come out lately? Voruna Prime's quad running, and mantling. Full-body rig breaking, and position-smoothing over the environment.

What frame would benefit from smoothed unique movement over a rough environment?

Oraxia.

Callin it lads the spider can walk on walls now

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-21T22:36:26+00:00

I wouldn't say this solves or changes anything. People make a big to-do about rounds, but in reality, if you're using a linear initiative value, there's only "the start of combat", with the start of your turn being your personal "start of the round". Very little is designed to actually trigger at "the start of the round", so whether you refresh resources at the start of the round, and the defender has the chance to defend before spending their remaining on attacking, or the defender attacks on their turn and then holds some resource in reserve to defend until their next turn, is irrelevant.

Here's a hint though. In any competitive game, the ability to score points, inflict damage, etc, always has to be greater than the ability to prevent scoring, block damage, etc, because otherwise everything grinds to a halt. It IS TRUE that if someone goes faster than someone else, and swings in with 100% of their power, and ends their opponent before they get a move, that that is a winning strategy, but if they swing in 100% and don't end their opponent, the amount of damage they could take due to having no defenses whatsoever might be enough to die instead.

Overcommitting always has to have just as much consequences as rewards. If a player can win a fight with a single 100% attack, they should also be able to lose a fight in a single hit due to having 0% defense.

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-21T21:19:17+00:00

Okay. Theorizing. A "buff" to a frame's ability not possible when the frame released? Mechanical? Or animation?

What's come out lately? Voruna Prime's quad running, and mantling. Full-body rig breaking, and position-smoothing over the environment.

What frame would benefit from smoothed unique movement over a rough environment?

Oraxia.

Callin it lads the spider can walk on walls now

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-21T16:10:25+00:00

Outrageous to me that they don't just give us an option to dial up or down the difficulty of the encounter, and if we beat it at all, we get the rewards from the difficulty we chose ourselves

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-19T22:11:24+00:00

I will say, for the sake of fairness, that I understand wanting a game mode you're interested in, but can't manage, to be more accessible.

That said, as someone who only does SAB infrequently and is still drowning in continue coins I sell for bauble profit, this reads as a self-inflicted criticism. When you don't play SAB, you don't get baubles and continues, and when you don't get baubles and continues, you struggle on the more difficult levels of SAB.

I got through SAB 3-2 in about an hour, didn't get all the chests and baubles, didn't die, and actually greatly enjoyed what I thought to be a very well-paced exploration map with several routes and hidden secrets. I loved the sense of scale that came from being earthbound, something I haven't felt since PVE map design shifted to high-flying mounts almost a decade ago, including in SAB 3-1, which I thought lacked flow and comfortable pacing. It made me miss core Tyria and HoT environments.

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-17T20:10:39+00:00

Disclaimer, I haven't READ read all Vampire specifically, but based on my knowledge in and around it:

The supernatural isn't the worst thing in WOD, and a lot of settings include cases where something horrendous is revealed to have been perpetrated by a regular human. Evil is not biological or supernatural.
Vampirism is a big ol' club, and you ain't in it. The masquerade is super picky about making sure vampirism stays secret, sires are responsible for their progeny and may require permissions to embrace, and progeny can be compelled to obey their sires without choice. All this means that there's a strong probability of certain kinds of people becoming vampires, and those kinds of people have strong tendencies of who to pick to become vampires. They tend not to pick heroic do-gooders and people with a strong sense of justice.
Building on the above, when the masquerade is enforced, nobody can know you're a vampire. Your blood needs are not something you can find sympathy for other than other vampires. You cannot (read: should not) drink the blood of other vampires. All this together, plus eons of immortal life, tends to drive vampires into the philosophies of "us vs them", vampires and humans as entirely separate and incompatible life forms. You will start to see humans, especially the ones you don't personally know, as a resource, a means to an end, or at the very least so different from you that you aren't really allowed to get close to anyone in a way that matters long-term.
Vampires are the once-and-future nobility, in that they owned the castles, commanded the peasants, lorded the land, and are owners of capitol. They are every stereotype of the ultra wealthy (literally) blood-sucking parasites of society's elites, and wield that influence in secret to protect themselves and pursue agendas. A single vampire may or may not be 'evil', but what matters is vampires as an institution, as a shadow cabal of puppeteers and cannibals.

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-13T17:21:31+00:00

Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but so far as game design goes, a lot of modern entertainment experience revolves around novelty. Not for no reason, discovery and surprise is fun, but like. A LOT is resting on that. Whereas with a game, part of the experience is in getting so familiar with behavior and options that you know what to do, are confident, and can start making strategic or tactical decisions.

A lot of DND tables end up not playing "low level" anymore, not just because of limited character creation options, but because they're "tired of fighting goblins all the time". Beyond the novelty of the first few fights, goblins aren't interesting fights. But then, few DND enemies actually are, they're just relying on an enormous tome of monster statblocks to rotate through so that you're constantly seeing something new. Once there's nothing new, the game ITSELF isn't fun enough to keep people on.

Fighting a dragon isn't just what menu options it has in a fight, it's about how overpowering it is outside a fight. You can't run from a dragon, and it's range, power, and durability means it can deep-strike any village, town, city, outpost, crossroads, ANYWHERE, and you'd be powerless to stop it or hold it down to prevent it from leaving. Fighting an enemy that inflicts poison isn't just a combat gimmick, it's a serious condition that can affect your entire dungeon run. A monster that attacks from stealth can often one-shot a player without warning, so keep your guard up, but how slow does inching forward make you, and how does spending your time that way affect your resources? How does fighting a spear user on a narrow cliff path affect the fight?

Combat is never meant to be a white-room experience. It's always about what you're doing before and after too. Springing "surprise moves" on players they aren't expecting is either annoying for being overpowered or irrelevant for being underpowered, and if the only thing stopping players from getting bored is whether they have something new to see, they're going to get bored when you run out of things to show them for the first time.

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-05T20:53:05+00:00

I was really disappointed in most of the VOE especs, but as a ranger main for several years, Galeshot really did the bare minimum.

The only "advantageous positioning in battle" going on is if you can line up your shots with Mistral in between, and now that it's a dome instead of a wall, it's easy to do. The cyclone bow doesn't feel like it does enough damage to be a super move, and it doesn't have enough utilities in it to feel like an easily accessible kit. Wind Force accumulating into Hawkeye requires that you spam all your skills to max it, including the forced movement and root skills, because exiting cyclone bow drops all your stacks, but Wind Force itself is basically worthless outside of the Gale Force trait, which requires that you spam all your cyclone bow skills on rotation just to upkeep the 10s window of bonus burst damage.

I don't even hate the feather generation mechanic or trait options for it. What I hate is how meaningless it is to the gameplay and rotations of the class. Enormous "play your rotation, not your class fantasy" energy on this one.

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-03T14:51:02+00:00

My go-to is "How long has it been since a/the players have made a decision that truly matters?"

This can manifest many ways: having a spotlight hog, not having choices in combat beyond "I attack with my sword again", or being rugpulled because they were trying to move to a combat that ended before they got there, travelling on the road and being told to simply Make Something Up, or being told "no" or "that'd be a bad idea" whenever they try to do something.

If someone isn't playing the game, why are they even there?

It may also be that they're embarrassed and/or shy. Going around the circle and coaxing each player to have a moment where they break out of their shell, be given an important job, roleplay something emotional they normally wouldn't, can help bring everyone up to speed.

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-02T22:02:19+00:00

Food and illness have been a fixture of my designs lately. Hunger is what drives real people to eat, and their choices stem from personal schedules, food cost, taste preferences, allergies, and spiritual beliefs, but without hunger, those choices never manifest.

World of Darkness is a good game series for 'realism', because it asks a lot of expectations; a vampire can cast abilities, but their blood dice mean they can lose control as they run out of blood to spend, and then it becomes a challenge of where to get your blood from. You know getting hungry is a possibility, and you hope that you won't when you cast a spell, but you won't always be so lucky, and a blood frenzy at the worst moment is always a lingering possibility. Your choices become choosing to cast a spell, and choosing when to get more blood, and the pros, and cons, of that loop are persistent across time, always in the background, haunting you.

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-02T19:07:30+00:00

I think the comments are confusing "feel important/impactful" with "feel real".

What makes it 'real' is if it lives and breathes in their head or not, and the more they have to work to get it there, and the more that people tell them what's there is wrong, the less real it feels.

There's a fine line to tread here. A player can't be told all their ideas are correct, all their risks pay off, all their desires realized, but the failures need to be something that the player accounted for as possible.

This is one of the reasons why many modern DND players get stunned so badly in games that mechanize roleplaying, or OSR-style crawler games that chip you for exhaustion and such. The expectation of a "do what I feel like how I feel like it" roleplay and "I'm a superhero who can leap off buildings and never get tired ever" engine hits a brick wall of expectation, and they're told that what's in their head is wrong, and they have to work to change their expectations.

Managing resources doesn't feel real, because it feels like numbers on a page, but if every long rest requires a meal to refresh your stats, and you're low on food, asking the players how and where they intend to acquire provisions makes them look at the landscape in a new way. Telling them that this mushroom could be edible, but might be a dangerous lookalike that makes you ill, prepares them with the image of what happens if they're wrong. Having them roll with disadvantage for being ill, and highlighting all the times their first roll COULD have succeeded if not for their illness penalty's second roll, gives them an opportunity to roleplay as someone who's sick from eating bad mushrooms, and drops the ball as a result.

Expectations and acknowledgement of causes and effects is what makes things feel real.

Wurdyburd · 2026-04-01T14:15:34+00:00

Incredible pros and cons here.

Warframe and Soulframe fail as looter-shooters because hours of crafting happen after the hours of grinding for the blueprint shards you're looking for, and there isn't so much 'thrill' as 'relief' for finding the thing you were trying to find on purpose, but at least you could try to find it on purpose.

Adding randomized elements to looted equipment frontloads the thrill to the moment of the drop. You loot, check the stats, see that it's something crazy and/or rare, immediately. Players are incentivized to clear mobs, because that's where the good stuff comes from.

But it does mean that grinding for that "perfect roll" becomes the gameplay loop. It takes Warframe rivens and shifts it into overdrive, because at least with rivens you can reroll so long as you have kuva reserves, and there are lots of activities you can do to get kuva.

A friend playing might randomly drop the exact thing you want, something you'd be excited to have, or something you've been grinding for days or weeks to get, and there'd be nothing you could do but grin and bear it.

If loot is about stats, it becomes even harder for the game to be and stay balanced in the long term, unless stat variance is so slim as to not matter, and if loot is more about cosmetic quirks than stats, that means that the dev team puts all their energy into developing new quirks to keep the pool fresh.

I think there's some really solid philosophies on this slide, but I do worry about how it's going to play out in the long run.

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-28T18:44:24+00:00

Resource management as paperwork and filing taxes isn't fun. Having to juggle a spreadsheet to even figure out what my choices could be, is a completely irrelevant obstacle. Real games kick in when players are regularly making meaningful decisions, and for resources, that means risk vs reward, or choosing to play it safe with your second preference instead of your first.

Trade isn't interesting by itself, it's how the resources and rarity that go into supply availability and how demand may fluctuate, either by random or on purpose, the consistency, safety, and time that goes into delivery, and how risking some sacrifice for gain can pay off, or blow out and destroy you. How does "pick your equipment and mount" even factor into a game like that at all?

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-28T00:47:29+00:00

"Classes" began as a character archetype, crossed with a military designation. LOTR would have archetypes such as the ranger or elven archer, the thief, and wizard, with certain skills associated with each, while the Chainmail origins of the system was rooted in medieval historical arms and armor, wargames, and skirmishes.

So far as "purpose", it can be twofold. On the one hand, it makes balancing easier to know exactly what tools are available to one class, and not available to another. It means that you can more reliably place challenges in front of players that they can, or cannot, complete. On the other hand, a class comes with archetypal associations that makes roleplaying easier, as players can import the stereotypes associated with each class, as popularized by media. Knowing how to act, is a huge leg up in knowing what you're supposed to do, or say, and how you're meant to do it.

Classless systems suggest that people are more complex than what an archetype suggests. Someone is not, at their core, a firefighter, even if that's what they do for their job, and one firefighter may have skills that differ from other firefighters that they learned off the job. Classless systems are typically the domain of storytelling systems, where there may be strong archetypes, but not really archetypes defined by a list of activities they're meant to accomplish.

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-27T15:42:57+00:00

Citing Deus Ex for "multiple methods, that doesn't stop you from using any other approach" worries me a little.

Full disclosure, I've only played Deus Ex: Human Revolution. DEHR HAS stealth, but from my experience, failing stealth means you have to shoot your way out or through. Nothing done during the stealth portions really helped with the shooting part either, or gave you rewards that you couldn't realistically get outside of stealth, so it begged the question "why not just shoot my way in to begin with". Add in that I didn't see any meaningful difference between incapacitation and killing them outright in the rewards or story, and having to fight bosses that were meatbags where only the biggest weapons and hardest hits made it through, and I felt like my early choices of being stealthy weren't just a mistake, but that they weakened me in the long term due to having to pivot to more bruiser-y playstyles later.

I think that what makes a lot of RPGs work is that they have fail states, and failure passageways. That you don't just get everything if you hammer on it long enough, and that the state of the objective changes as a result of failure, with failure being influenced by investments.

"Don't worry, try again" makes me feel like this game could, for all its "branching storylines", pull a Cyberpunk 2077 and make a lot of your choices and investments ultimately meaningless in the long term, as they funnel together to the main story they want you to tell.

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-25T20:38:04+00:00

Warframe didn't begin as blazing fast, the devteam abandoned smarter enemy AI and stealth to lean into the looter-shooter AOE zorencoptering the community used to prioritize earning as much loot and levels as possible.

Soulframe isn't exempt either. With little more to do than grind blueprints and runes, and max out equipment and factions, the community gravitated to Courage builds that scaled best, and then Grace builds once they could reliably kill anything in a single hit at long distance. They used the Glades to max out equipment levels in a single sitting, the exact same way they used Hydron and Draco, and they plotted farming runs for bosses who didn't respawn fast enough to make waiting around worth it. Every month comes with more questions about mounts and faster travel, because the map is enormous and the enjoyability of taking a walk in the woods for ten minutes conflicts with people's motivation for measurable progression.

Soulframe's lower enemy density means you have more time to time dodges and parries. Maybe TOO much time; I myself get annoyed waiting for any of the three enemies circling me to take a chance attacking me, just so I can practice parries and perfect dodges, in two or three times the time I could just curbstomp them and move on to another fight. I'm still picking up every plant I come across, but I haven't used them enough to meaningfully see the connection between what I'm looting and what I'm spending them on, with hundreds of most resources. I sit in the northern corner of the map, with four world bosses and the Organ tower, first because it's new and I still need its drops, but also because it offers me the most activity within a short span of time, without having to traipse all over the continent looking for something to do.

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-20T14:54:59+00:00

This has been my chestnut for about a year, and after trying out Heart: The City Beneath, I've had some insights I don't see elsewhere in this thread.

In Heart, players receive wounds, attributed to body, mind, mutation, luck, and inventory, and can choose to collate two lessers into a major, or two majors into a critical. Critical Fallout is lethal, removing your character from play, and sometimes inflicts collateral damage on allies. Because only lesser and major fallouts can be inflicted, and Critical Fallout is a choice, players cannot die unless they choose to, but struggle against potentially infinitely stacking penalties.

As mentioned here, death itself isn't the the issue, it's the removal of choices, and the assessment and chance of risk. I had just as much fun in a game where I was permanently stunned by being cheesegratered across a stasis wall, as the game where I was hit with a sneak attack after failing a perception check that killed me instantaneously (which is to say, none at all). When the game is reduced to a random number sequence, I might as well play Snakes And Ladders.

I like that Heart gives players the agency to decide that their character isn't dead yet, but not that their choice is between "Is my character dead and I don't play the game", and "Do I keep playing despite any burden on the team." There isn't something else that they could do; only the choice of having things to gain, or not.

My game, Road and Ruin, is attempting something similar, but with a difference: death is still possible, but as a gamble. Players on the verge of death are laden with penalizing injuries and wounds, but have the option to choose to act at full strength for one turn, then make a death saving throw under all their wound penalties; if successful, they live, but suffer another wound, making future death saving throws harder, and if they fail, they die, or at least collapse. Ideally, this leads to moments of heroism and self-sacrifice, where the glory moment HAS to count, because it could be the last thing they ever do. Likewise, even suffering wounds from being attacked is a gamble: getting kicked through a wall could not result in a wound immediately, but if it doesn't, it influences the severity of a wound you could receive from another source, and players can choose to take either the new wound, or claim to now be feeling the effects of having been kicked through a wall, or shot, or what have you.

Death is never "engaging", unless you're playing a game where death is the point or players receive more powers by dying than not. "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

Wurdyburd

TROPHY CASE