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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6197412" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm in to the 3rd real life year of a campaign, at over 60 sessions.  The rules are generally D&D 3.X or would be familiar to anyone with experience in 3.X (they are as different from 3.0 as 3.5 is from 3.0).  I've had 6 players most of the campaign.   I've had 8 PC deaths, largely in two brutal sessions, with basically zero DM force in use.  In 7 of the 8 cases, the PC death occurred when party cohesion broke down, the group stopped playing as a team, and the party became separated.   In the 8th case, the PC death occurred facing the mini-boss that had been the central antagonist for the first two years of play.  In that last case, I wouldn't have stopped the death but might have arranged to allow the PC to return from the dead, but the player was moving to another state and so would have to quit the game anyway.  This made the death an appropriate dramatic finish.   In the other cases, there just wasn't a good excuse or method for bringing the party members back, and though I had a dramatic hook possible for one of them to survive it would have seemed like favoritism in context to save one character and not one of the others.I LOATHE PC death.  It isn't fun for anyone, least of all the DM who is suddenly deprived of continuity in the story and a host of plot hooks and depth.  I have only a single survivor at this point from the original party, and all those deaths take away a certain amount of value from the story.  The only thing I loathe worse in an RPG than PC death is no real possibility of PC death.  If DM force is being used to ensure that the PC's can't die, and that all failures are softened to something palatable to the player and all falls occur onto a softened play ground surface, then the story just doesn't feel as satisfying to me.   As player who earned a death, if I knew the DM had saved me from it, the character would still feel dead to me and continuing to play it would feel like cheating.   I do 'fail foward' running a game for my 8 year old daughters who likely can't emotionally deal with the trauma of losing a character or anything else dramatic and where I really am being careful when treading around grief, loss, murder, and any other adult theme.   But as a general assumed resolution method, I don't think it works for a fantasy RPG or really any game where violent combat is central to the mechanics and play.  As player in a game with other adults, I wouldn't want the game to work that way and so as a GM in a game I don't have the game work that way either.</blockquote>

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