How bad should it get?

Depends on your players. The whole point of RPGing is to have fun and if something is unfun to the players, why should it be included in their leisure time?

For me, I like lethal games. I enjoy OD&D and Classic Trav and WFRP 1e, but players who I don't know at a table I will never see don't need to enjoy what I enjoy.

Quote from: Bill;603204Could you elaborate? Not sure what you are responding to.

You're all over the drama, but heaven forbid anything should leave a lasting mark on Your Precious Character.

I like the excitement that comes with the risk of death, but I do find it frustrating when a favorite character gets killed before he can really come into his own.  I want my deaths to be epic ("I'll hold the bridge until you can get the refugees to safety!"), not pathetic ("And your barbarian failed to escape the randomly encountered black pudding once again... You take 16 points of damage, fall unconscious, lose your rage HP, and die.  Start rolling a new PC").

Bring it all on. I can handle it.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;603287You're all over the drama, but heaven forbid anything should leave a lasting mark on Your Precious Character.

Fair enough.

But to clarify, it really depends on what the lasting mark is.

I happen to dislike losing limbs the most.

But I certainly don't mind bad things happening to my characcter.


Wading into a fight and lamenting that my injuries left me unable to walk ever again would have been a better example.

Quote from: Sir Wulf;603290I like the excitement that comes with the risk of death, but I do find it frustrating when a favorite character gets killed before he can really come into his own.  I want my deaths to be epic ("I'll hold the bridge until you can get the refugees to safety!"), not pathetic ("And your barbarian failed to escape the randomly encountered black pudding once again... You take 16 points of damage, fall unconscious, lose your rage HP, and die.  Start rolling a new PC").

Epic or at least involving roleplay; prefearbly both.

It depends on the genre. If it's four color supers, no one really dies, at least not for long. If it's Appendix N, then bloody, messy, horribly stabbitideath should lurk around every corner.

I never had much of an attachment (whether emotional or intellectual) to any D&D characters I created.


Back in the day, I played in some games where we were churning through as many as twelve (or more) characters per session.

To speed things up, one of the other players wrote a computer program (on a commodore vic 20) which would randomly generate a new character according to the constraints of the DM.  So after one character dies, it was a matter of pressing a few buttons to create a new character.

It started to resemble a "conveyor belt" system after awhile.  :cool:


I didn't realize D&D wasn't suppose to be played this way, until I started playing with different groups.

Quote from: Doctor Jest;603424It depends on the genre. If it's four color supers, no one really dies, at least not for long. If it's Appendix N, then bloody, messy, horribly stabbitideath should lurk around every corner.

See, I think this is the crux of the matter for me.

If we're playing Star Wars, then when a character dies, it had better be a dramatic moment and totally epic.

If we're playing a sandbox D&D game, then whatever. If I'm on my fifth character in six sessions, then so be it. That's part of the fun!

Also, I think character life should correlate pretty strongly with character creation time. If I spend a whole session making a dude, I really don't want him dead in the first 10 minutes of the next session. If it's D&D and I can roll one up in 5-10 minutes or something, and he lives barely that long in the game, I'm a lot less heartbroken about it.

Level drain I can take or leave.

This (and the book version, of course) is how bad it should get.

I have no problem with any kind of situation, so long as its emulative.

My Players' characters die quite regularly, and have other terrible things happen to them.  My issue with things like level drain and poison are not about how bad or "unfun" they are, or even if they're "unfair", but just what they emulate and whether there's a way to make them more emulative.

I've already commented about level drain in my other thread; but for example with poison, I think the idea that (almost) all poisons are save vs. instant death is not particularly emulative, or particularly interesting.

I have ZERO problem with a character dying from poison, but what I want is that instant death-by-poison be limited to the most powerful (usually supernaturally) venomous creatures.
For more ordinary poisonous creatures, I vastly prefer a situation where they're hit, and I tell them that they feel poisoned, and then a certain number of rounds later, they'll have to do a saving throw, often versus death, but sometimes against other effects (paralysis, blindness, incapacitating pain, etc).

PCs might be able to use this time to try to neutralize the poison or take an antitoxin or the like, but that's not why I do it that way; I do it because I feel that prolonging the tension, particularly when the Players can't know when the save is coming, whether they have 3 rounds to keep fighting, or 20 minutes before they might drop dead, means they have some interesting and difficult choices about what to do with themselves.

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