I was thinking about TTRPGs when I was a kid; how they didn’t have a clear win or lose condition, and that was really different from the rest of my life. Aside from AD&D’s level limits for non humans (and EVERYONE hated them!) there wasn’t a clear wrong choice of what to be; though oddly now it feels more that way and I’m facing that baggage again.
That got me to remember how terrible it felt to lose randomly generated adventurers I didn’t care about to The Tomb of Horrors, it wasn’t that they died it felt like I was doing another adult testing if I was smart enough.