I want to springboard off some RPG discussion from last night. There's this belief in some circles that making fighting lethal and characters fragile helps encourage people to think creatively around problems. Thinking more diegetically and less with their character sheet.

As someone who has run three editions of D&D, played five of them and run and played a whole bunch more RPGs where combat runs the gamut from "non-existent" to "rocket tag", I've found no evidence that this is true.

In my experiences as a player and GM people will come up with non-combat solutions for three reasons:
-Doing so is inherently fun. Players love wild schemes and talking to things!
-Doing so makes sense in the context of the game
-The below tweet https://twitter.com/Mr_Finn_McCool/status/1218403153160232960?s=20

When I first ran a 4E, a one-shot with 4/5 players completely new to the medium, they came up with this scheme to trick some sleeping trolls into a trap so they could save the captured child they'd come to rescue. The game didn't force them to rush in, weapons drawn.

I think the key thing is that if you have games where players are given the opportunities to approach conflicts on their own terms they'll be more inclined to approach problems laterally. A lot of bad GMing and module writing doesn't do that.

All of this stuff is completely orthogonal from "should fighting in my games be extremely lethal?"

One of my most formative games, Godlike, is extremely lethal. And given that you're playing WW2 soldiers it's also inevitable.

It's good for setting things like mood. A campaign where you're WW2 soldiers with superpowers but it's been six sessions and only two original squad members are left is extremely different from something like Masks, where death only happens with explicit permission.

Argh, I didn't do a conclusion for this thread:

Look, if you want to encourage lateral thinking and creative problem solving in games then the source of that is giving the characters situations and tools in the fiction that lend themselves to that and that's it really.

Players will naturally hoard esoteric items and want to find weird uses for it, they'll want to use the environment to overcome obstacles and if something is flammable they will absolutely find ways to set it on fire. Encourage those impulses.