What if death never happened? The PCs always survive because the rules say so. Would that be a "better D&D"?
I mean, at my Dungeon World table, there is no such thing as random, permanent, irrevocable death.
(Note that these are individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for this statement. The death must be
all three for it to get no-sale: it must be random, not the result of either willing intent or willful disregard of serious warnings;
and it must be permanent, meaning it won't get better on its own;
and it must be irrevocable, meaning the PCs have no means by which they could revive the dead character. A death that is merely random and permanent, but revocable, is still perfectly fine. Same with any other proper subset of those three conditions.)
I do not think this would be better for all possible players. But I do think it is better for a lot of players, and in particular, a lot of the more casual players who have begun playing D&D in the past 10-15 years or so. Modern D&D is much, much more character-driven, about the ongoing and evolving story of the party and how each member interrelates with every other member, both individually and in subsets. As a result, where older D&D fans
tended to approach character death more like getting a bad deal in poker, shrugging, and moving on to the next deal, newer D&D fans
tend to approach character death more like the writers of a long-running TV show brutally and unceremoniously killing off a beloved character for stupid, contrived reasons in an unsatisfying way that leaves that character's story threads just dangling.
Now,
some people see that as a cool challenge, how to soldier on, how to remember the dead, how to keep the group's story alive even as individual members come and go. But....well, a lot of people just don't see it that way. Doctor Who gets away with changing actors specifically
because the Doctor is still meant to be the same person on the inside, even as we understand that the actor has changed...and even that is still quite contentious at times! Imagine if some random mugger in the Zocalo had killed off Delenn in the middle of season 3 of
Babylon 5. The fans would have
rioted, and I'm not sure I could blame them! The audience is invested in these
specific people, both because they're interesting people, and because they have history and interact with one another over time.
That's what D&D offers to people that even a slick, well-made MMO rarely if ever can do, the interpersonal drama, the
personal story, the striving for success on goals that might be irrelevant to most people but hugely meaningful to that person. If people want a gritty sandbox challenge where death lurks in every shadow, there's a
dozen wildly different video games to scratch that itch. If they want a mechanical challenge to overcome, are you smart enough or skillful enough to survive, there's a dozen more wildly different games to scratch that itch. But crafting a personal story, that matters to you and to your fellow players, that feels personally meaningful and satisfying? That's something that TTRPGs still have a pretty solid monopoly on.
Random, permanent, irrevocable death very, very much gets in the way of that. So many groups turn away from that form of consequence, because it's not only not interesting to them, it's actively antagonistic to the things that
are interesting to them. (Or, what I sadly suspect is more common, they struggle and struggle and struggle against it, thinking that it's required or that they really do enjoy it etc., never quite understanding why the situation ends up unsatisfying.)
