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Beginning at the End: Character Death
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<blockquote data-quote="Mishihari Lord" data-source="post: 6031625" data-attributes="member: 128"><p>As a player of early editions I can tell you that it's very easy to have the lethal situations you describe. But you don't have to. I found that the real possibility of death was fun for my group, but death with no way out was not. </p><p></p><p>For the cockatrice example, if they didn't have <em>Stone to Flesh</em> then there was something else they could do. Maybe a patron gave them a potion for to deal with the hazard. Maybe a local cleric could fix it for a price. Maybe they heard lore that a cockatrice was in that location, letting them avoid the encounter. Maybe they saw it first, or had a good opportunity to run away. The most commonly used one in published adventures was to have a potion in the monster's horde, but I never much cared for that one.</p><p></p><p>In my game if they ended up irreversibly turned to stone, then they were either unlucky (which happens even in vanilla combat) or they ignored at least one, and usually several, ways to avoid it.</p><p></p><p>In the early days (and probably still) DMs that inescapably killed PCs were called "killer DMs" and for the most part weren't highly regarded. There's a big difference between death being a real possibility and inescapable death.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Mishihari Lord, post: 6031625, member: 128"] As a player of early editions I can tell you that it's very easy to have the lethal situations you describe. But you don't have to. I found that the real possibility of death was fun for my group, but death with no way out was not. For the cockatrice example, if they didn't have [I]Stone to Flesh[/I] then there was something else they could do. Maybe a patron gave them a potion for to deal with the hazard. Maybe a local cleric could fix it for a price. Maybe they heard lore that a cockatrice was in that location, letting them avoid the encounter. Maybe they saw it first, or had a good opportunity to run away. The most commonly used one in published adventures was to have a potion in the monster's horde, but I never much cared for that one. In my game if they ended up irreversibly turned to stone, then they were either unlucky (which happens even in vanilla combat) or they ignored at least one, and usually several, ways to avoid it. In the early days (and probably still) DMs that inescapably killed PCs were called "killer DMs" and for the most part weren't highly regarded. There's a big difference between death being a real possibility and inescapable death. [/QUOTE]
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