Yes it’s something that occurred to me during our argument, Turtler.
Even if CS rewrote the scene so that we assassinate the king and fight our way past the guard, but the kingdom still gets massacred, then the PC still failed.
I’d rather succeed, or at least fail in a way that it’s not my fault if I don’t want to be responsible for genocide.
Now if anyone wants to let the kingdom get axed, no skin off my nose, but I’d rather set fire to the General to make an opening statement about giving reaver’s their proper respect and then save the kingdom.
Of course if it’s Dain’s orders that make it impossible to save the kingdom it makes it kind of hard to view the empire sympathetically, but honestly I’m not sure if we’re supposed to sympathize with the empire anyway.
After all, if you’re the artist then Dain had your people massacred, if you’re a fate priest Dain had your people massacred, when playing the elf I always had my former boss be nice enough to leave my people alone in return for my service so I have no idea what happens otherwise but it’s probably not pretty for the elves.
Also, while I'm thinking about it, the fate priest probably ought to wonder how Dain's men managed to slaughter an entire temple of people who can see the future. Or at least if they couldn't avoid the slaughter, I can't help but think about Agnes Nutt carrying a bunch of explosives when she was burned at the stake. :)
My fanon explanation is that Dain really does have some probability manipulating powers as the "god of success," but it's too soon to tell if that's where you're actually going or not. It's not like you've had Dain entertain children by flipping a coin heads 50 times in a row or anything.