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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 1899251" data-attributes="member: 15470">My group is very heavy on the playing-of-a-role aspect of the game, and very light on the game-mechanics-of-combat aspect of the game. The group includes role-players who are good enough at separating "I the player" from "The character" that the characters act as though combat could be lethal, even if the players haven't seen a character die recently; the group tends to get bored with a dungeon-slog. Personally, as a player in a world-spanning campaign, I'd find it very frustrating to lose a character I'd been playing for 3 years to a random-chance encounter with some mook who got lucky; conversely, if my character found himself in a position to sacrifice his life for a cause, I'd be very satisfied with a heroic character death. In a one-off or short campaign, I wouldn't care as much: I haven't had as much time to empathize with the character, so 'losing' him wouldn't hurt as much.As a DM, I want to tell an epic world-spanning tale; that requires some amount of continuity. I don't want to see a TPK, and I don't want to play with 'save or die' mechanics: I want both my PC's and my BBEG's to have long-lasting 'epic' battles with each other, not two-round magical explosions. That said, I'm not going to treat the character with 'kid gloves' just because he's a PC: One of the most memorable PC deaths in one of my campaigns went as follows: Its the middle of winter. PC(a fighter)'s river-boat is attacked by pirates (random encounter). As the crew dies around him, he realizes that the battle is untenable. The crew start to surrender. 'I dive into the river.' 'Uhhh... are you sure? Its winter, the water is little above freezing, and the air is well below, AND you're wearing armor...' 'Umm.. yeah, I dive in.' PC actually made the succession of swim checks to get out of the armor and reach shore, but was unable to light a fire, and while freezing to death was stumbled over by a pack of wolves... Had he surrendered, there were chances to live; had he fought to -1 HP, I might have seen fit to stabilize the character, or have the pirates recognize that he wasn't just an average part of the crew, and save him for ransom... but diving into the freezing water? Interestingly, I've also run the sort of world which someone described much earlier: highly planned out, with NPC's, monsters, etc., of high level 'available' for the determined 1st-level party to go die on; the players knew that there wasn't any guarantee that any encounter was 'balanced' to their level. This led to a very low-combat game with no PC deaths! The players were very unwilling to draw their swords, since they had trouble determining if the enemy was an appropriate encounter or not, and several encounters that came to blows resulted in a subsequent disengagement. YMMV.</blockquote>

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