Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kurotowa" data-source="post: 7303117" data-attributes="member: 27957">I can see two completing concerns at play here, coming from different sources.It's a thematic concern that death should have consequences and not be cheap or trivialized.It's a gaming concern that players don't want to discard a PC they're heavily invested in due to an especially unlucky string of dice rolls, nor do they want to sit inactive for long periods of time without a way to participate in the game.I'm reminded of the old line from business, "Fast, cheap, and good: pick two." Sometimes there are items on your want list that conflict in such a fundamental way that you simply have to pick which one matters more and give up on the other. Refusing to pick your priorities and trying to do it all can mean failing at everything and succeeding at nothing.The baseline rules of 5e favor the gaming side. The death rules are forgiving enough that it's hard to be taken out of action for long. This is a deliberate design choice to keep the players engaged over any sort of verisimilitude or desire to make death "count". Now, is it possible to house rule and change that? Absolutely. But what people in this thread are trying to point out is that to do some comes with a cost, and it's a cost you need to be clearly aware of.I've had DMs who ran what was effectively hardcore mode, with no resses and the dice being as they fall. I've had DMs who made an up front promise that the only permanent PC death would be when it was dramatically appropriate, and anything sort of that would be fudged as "temporarily knocked out of action" in some manner. Both styles were acceptable because the DM was clear and up front about what sort of game they were running. If you want to do something like that, I entirely encourage it.What I'm less sure of is keeping the idea of resurrection magic while attaching progressive stat loss to it. That sort of "you're not gone you're just permanently less cool" penalty is not any sort of fun. Doubly so when the penalty puts you at greater risk of dying in the future and compounding the effects in a downward spiral. It's just forcing the players to choose how much they're willing to pay in medical bills for their favorite pet before they decide it's better to just put it down. How miserable is that.So what I'm saying is, don't go for half measures. If you want death to count, say that death counts and let the players know they should invest in more defensive options. If you don't want to break their favorite toys when the dice go bad, don't scratch them up as a compromise. Decide what you want your game to be like and go all-in for that.</blockquote>

Verification