When is it ok for the players to lose Veeky Forums?

when they get arrogant and/or careless

1. It makes sense thematically, such as if your running a CoC game or running some sort of Nihilistic Dark Fantasy
2. When your players make shitty, terrible decisions. If they want to go up against Demogorgon at level 7 with a Moon Druid as the healer and a Hexblade as their main offense, go right ahead you fucking morons
3. To twist the plot into some normie anime shit where it SEEMS like you lost, but in reality there is still hope to win and kill the BBEG even though he conquered the world and enslaved you

Well clearly there, yeah. Bad decisions well do that to any well organized group, much less a couple hacks whose powers combined couldn't topple Bolas' left wing tip

Personally I'd go with, roughly speaking, always. They can always lose. You just have to plan/adjust on the fly for it.
This is of course assuming that the game/players are appropriate for it. A power fantasy with a bunch of kiddos might not work so well. But broadly, it's always okay as long as the DM is doing their job right.
Little losses are easy. A bad roll, a poor judgement call, turning their backs on an ally, ect. Just roll out the consequences and off they go to deal with the complications that creates.
But for the big ones, where parties die and campaigns end? Well barring a truly bonehead and suicidal series of decisions from the players, also fine as long as there is build up. As long as the players know that they are facing terrible consequence if they fail, then sure they can lose.
Cataclysmic asspulls are of course likely to upset people.

But yeah, it's always okay for the players to lose.
With the right game, one might even say that losing is fun. Insert your own favourite dorf joke here.

When they deserve it

It's pretty much never okay for me to let my players lose. Two-thirds of them are medicated for anxiety disorders and two-thirds of them are medicated for depression. It's a fucking mess.

Whenever it would make sense for them to die, or if a character does something blindingly stupid.

Played a Sabbat game of V:TM with a party of Neonates who ended up hunted through the forest by Werewolves.

One of them (An Assamite) insisted that he could fight them with nothing but his Katana and ended up with Final Death inside of fifteen minutes into the session, despite repeated warnings in and out of character from the whole group. Threw a big hissy fit about it too.

The one third who're medicated for both, how do they hold up?

>at which point don't even bother naming them because they don't really matter.

Found the guy who's never played a roleplaying game.

Tell them to man the fuck up.

No seriously, as someone who was on antidepressants and therapy for nearly eight years due to depression, anxiety and OCD, molly-coddling people like that only reinforces it, especially if they're the kind of person who carries their mental problems like a fucking badge of honour, which a worrying number of people do nowadays.

Fellow anxiety/depression guy here to second this.
I hate the idea of people treading on eggshells around me and other humans having to play a game differently because of my personal issues would personally make me feel pretty bad.

I think a bit of brutal loss is good for them, if they can't even handle losing in a game they're never going to get over their issues.

No, they're actually the type to be ashamed of having mental problems, not the standard-bearer type. Which is honestly part of the problem--if things go south and someone has a Moment, there's both the initial mess and then their subsequent guilt over causing a disruption. They're all on pills and seeing therapists, so it's not like they're ignoring their issues.

I'm not a shrink. I don't have training to help them with their issues. What I can do is avoid presenting them with too many negative stimuli so that they can have their weekly socialization and stress relief. After all, by the same token, it IS just a game. If I'm holding back their recoveries by never presenting them with a combat they can't beat, then they need more shit in the rest of their lives. And that would definitely not be my problem except in the case of the one I married, who is at least functional enough to be defending for his PhD this spring.

Have you never played a meatgrinder dungeon?

Always, but more so when they succumb to hubris.

>dungeon where all the items are insanely powerful and when you die you become another enemy based on the magical items you took
>if you defeat the last boss you all roll based on what items you're carrying and turn against your allies
Sounds like a good premise for the rollplayers who want me to run them a game

Fag

Post tits or gtfo

Trips of truth using the number of times I've tried to hang myself. Getting over my learned helplessness did more for me than 10 months of therapy did and some medication did.

On Thursdays.

Jesus I'd think you were MY wife if it wasn't for all those other people with issues you mentioned (don't even have a game going right now, let alone one full of medicated lads).

Defending my PhD in June. Very well might lose my last marble in the months to come

As long as it serves the story, always.

A wise man once said:
>It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.

And it's 100% true. There is no scenario and certainly no life (at least worth telling a story about) where there is no failure and no real chance of failure.

Even a titanic and brutal loss can be the thing that turns your story from a fun one to something that's actually fucking magnificent.

If your players get pissy because they lose or someone dies, they're shit players and shit people.

I killed two of my players in my first session the other day. They made the decision of a) saving their healing spells even though they were at 2 hp, and b) fucking around with high CR monsters at level 1. Not my fault.

Depends on what the players want out of the game.

Players only loose when they didn't have any fun.

When they get off my railroads

they know what they're getting into

Always

If the players are ever involved in anything that is remotely like a fair fight, they fucked up.

When the players are on the same page as the DM and make bad decisions.

>When is it ok for the players to lose Veeky Forums?
When their hit points are reduced to zero

When is it okay to pit players against Nicol Motherfucking Bolas?

When the dice say they lose and it wasn't clearly due to bullshit luck or poor scaling on your part. If the players are fighting an enemy, refuse to retreat, make bad decisions, and simply lose they are dead. If I scale an encounter horribly to where they never stood a chance I will generally throw something in to save them, or if they are simply having horrible luck I might balance the encounter by purposely rigging rolls against their opponent(s).

>players encounter troll
>they have no fire
>explicitly tell them that it hasn't noticed them
>they attack
>die (obviously) and give me shit for it

perma-players are fucking braindead

i wish i could hate them to death

Hundreds of thousands have done this before you. You'll be fine, user

woah

Actual therapist here. You are correct. Seems rough but avoiding suffering is what causes anxiety and depression. Learn more about it, name is experiential avoidance. It may not seem like it but its been highly researched, some pharma labs don't want the truth out because while pharmaceutical treatment works, it creates lifelong dependency while both therapy and drugs gives better results short and long term without repercussions for its users.

either always or never depending on campaign and players

In my experience, their own hubris leads them to think they are either way more competent than they actually are (ex: the time the Barbarian thought that, since he had 50 HP and was "super strong" he could tank a Beholder. He did not. NOTE: They weren't even supposed to fight the beholder.), or where their own plans ignore any semblance of reality (ie., the time the guy with craft chemistry (+2) thought he could start up an entire meth-lab despite having no experience in the matter, and rolled a 2 so it exploded.

Often, I find they die due to lack of preparation, general arrogance on their part, or just ignoring the very concept of causality and consequence. I rarely have to challenge them to the point where they die, instead they put themselves in dangerous situations.

Is that why you see such high rates of depression in developed countries?

>When is it ok for the players to lose Veeky Forums?

Whenever they lose, it was by definition OK. It's a game. The chance of losing is built into its very concept, and if you're not ready to accept defeat, you should not play.

That said, generally speaking games should be """""""fair"""""" in the sense that players always have a decent chance of avoiding loss and in order to actually lose, they need to do a series of very bad decisions.

You don't have to be a dick about it, but you shouldn't stop them from losing if that's how the cards played out.

Overcoming adversity and loss in games is one way of learning about overcoming adversity and loss in real life.

And if they're really such fragile little girls that they can't ever come to grips with it, then find better players user. Games without even the possibility of a failstate aren't games at all, they're just a storytime that would have been better done in a novel.

So has anyone just tried dropping a mountain on bolas?

People lose all the time in Card games like your pic. Warhammer, board games.... Anything competitive really there is normally a loser and a winner.

Have you never lost a game before?

my dm recently told me that their job isn't to kill the players outright but to tell a fun story and bring players to the edge of death to get a sense of pride and accomplishment once we overcome the challenge. However if we happen to roll poorly or be assholes and go in balls to the walls without thinking stuff out then we will absolutely be killed.

Not him (but in grad school for psych)

There are many different developed countries, with different causes. In Japan, it is definitely linked to their culture. Their work-life balance is bullshit, they have intense honor standards, etc., the whole thing is just a miasma meant to squeeze productivity out of people in a way akin to squeezing blood out of a stone. Not good.

There is, however, at least in some developed countries a decisive lack of attachment to the community. That is, many people feel very detached from the society they live, that their lives are ultimately aimless, and the redundancy makes it seem... pointless. Consider that even our definitions for core social conventions like Law or Marriage have radically changed, and that there is no underlying culturally-universal morality or social code; instead every time you run into strangers you have this mine field of not knowing what is "triggering" to them, or that watching the news with other people means you may say something they don't agree with, or even topics like marriage (the fundamental unit of the family) has different meanings.

This isn't to say that some White Ethnostate is the superior form of society, but it is a cautionary tale about throwing out any semblance of baseline common culture and hoping that consumerism will fill in the gap. Imagine, if you will, the difference between Chinese take-out at a PF Changs and an authentic chinese restaurant run by a 2nd generation Chinese family. One is more "authentic" than the other. That's where we are at as a society now--eating PF Changs, forever, culturally.

Now, individually, we also have fucked work-life balance. Working from home, nonstop calls/emails/texts, 2 jobs, etc., it's not really what you're built for. We've made a world where individual time is a hot commodity, and people don't have enough time to tend to their own critical needs, which isolates them socially (due to lack of time) so they don't even have social support

So, having erroded the family unit (through lack of community definition [church/convention], lack of time [work], and perceived instability relative to cost), ignoring the importance of emotional intelligence (EQ is a pretty good measure of life-long success, even though it isn't something we teach at all in western education), and having a criminal justice system that ultimately accomplishes the exact opposite of what it SHOULD do (ie., making cons into a permanent underclass for drug offenses), you have a society that has, from the perspective of the lower class, stopped caring. For the middle class that is JUST poor enough to have to take on extra work without the agency to have that extra work take on a meaningful form, you now have a group that will live and die by 9-5 schedules, having accomplished little more than creature comforts (or so they can see it). Their life is just comfortable enough to not want it to change too much, but just poor enough that things like healthcare will be a perpetual concern (in USA at least).

The problem with talking about systemic depression by country is that each country has so many different group dynamics that it's pretty hard to make generalizations. You would probably be better off comparing depression among poor people in Canada and America than you would be comparing depression in Middle class suburbia America and depression in downtown Detroit, simply because the groups you are comparing are ostensibly more similar.

tl-dr; modern society makes a lot of people feel abandoned or ignored, it has no real sense of progress or waypoint ceremonies to indicate which role people should take on, we have shitty life-balance, we finally CAN diagnose these issues more often, inequal access to healthcare and drug services mean dual-diagnosis is common, poverty compounds everything, and the stigma means many people don't seek treatment anyway, and labels hurt their treatment.

>Lose
As often as possible. The threat of losing should always be there.
>Die
I typically won't kill off a character unless they make poor decisions.

>When is it ok for the players to lose Veeky Forums?
When they look into the raging inferno and say "Imma stick my hand in it to see what happens" and then they decide to do it again after their arm gets charred off.

That's it, you got your warning, anything you do beyond that is entirely your goddamned fault.

when it makes sense

Thank you for the long reply, you seem to care a lot about your field of study.

Related to this thread, has anyone ever had their players straight up lose the campaign? Is there a way to still make it cathartic? I'm about to wrap up Curse of Strahd (vampire D&D game) and there's a solid chance the party will fuck up and do something stupid (not to mention, he's really smart and you fight him in his home).

>Or you're doing a one-off with traps n' such and don't expect to go back to any of those characters
I interpreted this as the player characters being traps.
This site has ruined me.