I was reading about cassette beasts earlier, a pokemon-like game, and how it has a built-in nuzlocke mode. That really bothered me, the idea of a nuzlocke enforced by the programming, and in figuring out why i realised that playing nuzlockes are a lot like playing big fantasy TTRPGs.
(If you don't know what a nuzlocke is, it's a self-imposed challenge for pokémon games where fainted pokémon are lost permanently and you can only catch the first encounter in an area.)
I recently finished a pathfinder campaign. In the final fight, i died instantly to a spell effect before i could basically do anything. No going down fighting, no noble sacrifice, i just got spectacularly unlucky. Games like DnD and Pathfinder always have to tread this line carefully, creating dramatic stakes through the threat of death while keeping their fingers crossed that the players win, or at least lose in a cool way. When we don't, when someone's getting steamrolled and it doesn't feel right, that's when we're glad that the only thing enforcing the rules are us, and we fudge a few dice.
Nuzlockes are technically challenge runs, a way to spice up the difficulty of a famously simple series of singleplayer campaigns for lifelong obsessives like myself, but I love them because they create the same heroic stories of huge triumphs, dramatic losses, and grand sacrifices in the name of moving forward. However, it's not dramatic to have one of my pokemon die because you were grinding and just not really paying attention because grinding is boring. A bit more controversially... if i'm in the dramatic final fight, and I make one fatal mistake, and if I had just not done that, I would have barely rescued myself from the jaws of defeat... Well, I'm only going to feel a little bit guilty about rewinding time.
So yeah, I don't think I need a built-in Nuzlocke mode. Only self-imposed challenge runs have the rule of cool :]
