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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5068348" data-attributes="member: 4937">I generally agree with your essay, but I'd like to make one ammendment.PC death sucks and is no fun at all regardless of how it happens.  Dying to a monster or trap is not inherently more fun or better for the story or more heroic than drowning, freezing to death, or dying of pnuemonia.  Not dying when you might be expected to die is heroic, but the heroes are heroes for the most part because they don't die whether its a monster or being cast into the ocean and being adrift at sea far from land.   When the player argues that he shouldn't die from starvation, drowning, frostbite, or dehydration, what he's really doing is make an especial appeal that he shouldn't die period.  Of course, he knows that if he made his appeal openly that he'd seem like a jerk and a tosser, so he makes his appeal covertly and based on some sort of reasoning like, 'Heroes never die from ____'   Well, generally speaking, the argument can be made that 'heroes' in this sense don't die period.  Superman doesn't die.  Even when he does die, we know that there is some escape clause which is going to let him come back.  So the argument is spurious and circular.  Generally the player that makes the argument that they can't die from starvation is going to make a slightly different argument about them not dying from traps and monsters.  It won't be an open argument, but it will be there, usually in the form of 'the encounter wasn't balanced'/'the DM was metagaming'/'you didn't give us a fair chance'/'you missed something two rounds ago, I want a retcon'/'Heh, wait a minute, I deserved this extra modifier', etc.   That sort of player always has an answer, and its always an out of game answer.  The player doesn't come up with in game answers for why he won't die of starvation - like say, the fact that he has food.  The player figures he has the answer for most monsters and may believe himself to be (and may actually be) more rules knowledgable than the DM or more tactically skilled than the DM, so he figures that monsters can't kill him.  And if it looks like he might die, he resorts to browbeating the DM for not being fair.But all this is really just a proxy argument for, "I can't be allowed to fail."But of course, if that argument is allowed to stand, then the game begins to fall apart.</blockquote>

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