I don't believe you. I mean, I believe that you want to believe that using magic is dangerous, but in reality, you want it to only be a mild inconvenience. If your character fails to cast magic missile and instead summons Orcus leading an army of undead-demons, that would be 'dark and risky' but it would also end the campaign. A lot of the fun of D&D comes from thinking that bad things could happen, but it usually isn't actually fun when it does happen.
But in D&D it's not mildly incovinient - it's totally relatable unless you purposefuly point spell in a wrong place
How I see things - it's like you have d100(0) table of Minor Mispells, with various effects from purely cosmetic, to somehow annoying - and then if you roll over dunno 93 you get to another table, and so on - and in table 4 you have catastrophic events and so on, and of course there are some Corrupting effects so it's chance one per million to summon Orcus as W1, but more mishaps happen, the risk of big failures is bigger. As in Warhammer it's balancing on the edge - chance to kill yourself right away are slim, but slowly and slowly getting in more problems, that's how it goes.
In a novel or a movie, the heroes win in the end. In D&D there is no author to ensure the right outcome is achieved, but the GM is trying to set up a scenario that is difficult but winnable - get the balance right and it's fun - you need to believe that failure was always possible, but if that's what usually happens, I doubt you'd be pulling up to the table week after week.
Knowing it could happen does make combat feel dangerous, but having your 20th level character taken out by a 1st level scullery maid throwing a frying pan is the antithesis of heroic escapist fantasy.
Dude, I was answering to guy talking about why OSR is popular - and how OSR is not heroic escapist fantasy like later D&D's but more horror/war movie escapism and you loose a lot of PC characters, it's dangerous. Look I also play more heroic usually (because due to my group I play Pathfinder/D&D 3,5 - but I totally get why high letality game is fun where you make five PC's up front to not waste time later, because they will be WASTED, and I really as we go up and up start to dislike this abstract HP bags aspect of mechanics.
So in movies, the hero parries and dodges every thrust against him and every thrust of his sword fells an opponent. In D&D, every attack against the hero does a small amount of damage, and if he's outnumbered eventually he'll fall. Death by a thousand cuts. Hit points are a useful abstraction to support the fiction - for our game we do track two types of damage - one that is plentiful, easy to heal, and represents all those 'near misses', and one that is small, you take penalties if you lose ANY, and if you run out, you die. So if you shoot someone for 1d10+5 points of damage, it comes off the first category and doesn't REALLY count as a hit; if you roll a critical or they're out of the first category of hit points, they take a wound and might die.
The problem is to extent how HP is trying to be both abstract and real indicator of characters help - depending on various aspect of mechanics.
So I'd rather see how with each level you are harder to hit - lot of active defences, and AC reduced to DR (still very important with right balance) and no HP inflation.
High level character should be hard to hit, but each hit happening should be painful, in optimal design.
But we've got what we've got.
Are you familiar with WFRP? It's fairly popular, and it features both high chances of character failure (including death and permanent maiming) along with a magic system that can have some horrendous miscast results. It's not really for those that only want "mild inconvenience" from their failures.
Yes. Though it also varies between editions - for instance in 1 edition you can up your Endurance and Hit Points in a way that makes plate armour knight softer than you - so it's not always as letal as it seems. But yeah that what I was pointing to.
I ended long campaign in WHF 1e - as a wizard - it was 1 e so unfortunately no miscasts yet, just mana points management - still it was quite deadly for some time, until wonkiness of system made us into superheroes
But in first few adventures my wizard apprentice was twice almost butchered and beared very nasty scars, and once a piece of shrapnel in back put him in recovery for weeks. So this letality was very tangible - one bad shot and our leading knight very tough guys almost bled out of leg artery - with only save or die chance won by our surgeon.