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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 9256829" data-attributes="member: 86653">I mean...going RAW...character death is effectively eliminated from the game. There are vestigial bits that can cause characters to die, but they typically only happen in incredibly corner cases that involve the dice going hard against a particular PC, the referee targeting that same PC, and the whole rest of the party abandoning that PC to their fate. There's so much healing in 5E that you basically have to refuse to heal at all for a character to die. You also have to have a party that doesn't work together, i.e. not healing, not stabilizing, etc for a character to die. But that's all predicated on the dice utterly hating a PC and a referee intentionally nuking a PC. Short of that, PCs are immortal in 5E. Especially after resurrection comes online at 5th level. The referee has to go out of their way to prevent the PCs from gaining access to the material components of the relevant spells. And short of outright banning those spells, the PCs will have access to them.It's really bizarre. There's effectively no mechanical danger. But we still pretend that there is. While playing this game about pretend danger. It's all kinda meta.But there's no reason to kill a game when the characters die. Have them wake up in prison, wake up in their afterlife of choice...and have to fight the god of death to escape, be brought back by an evil necromancer...and have to fight to escape, wake up in an afterlife not of their choice...and be given a divine command to go right some wrong, etc. Character death and TPKs are nowhere near the hurdle people seem to think. It only takes a little imagination and leveraging the high fantasy genre to get around death.Well, depends on the players. Most that I know would literally stop playing if there were no risk of character death. They enjoy the chaos of the dice. I know others (mostly online) who say they'd rather not play if character death is a possibility or things are in any way random. It takes all kinds. Some people play these games for the challenge, others play them to be told repeatedly how awesome they and/or their characters are by simply winning all the time. Personally, I can't think of anything more boring than that. But, from experience, that kind of motivation to play fades over time. It's just too boring to constantly win without effort. Part of the problem is the OC (original character) mindset and how long character creation takes. The game's lethality should have a reverse correlation to how long character creation takes. Character creation takes a long time in 5E, so the lethality is quite low...to the point of being effectively nonexistent. People who prefer OC play also spend a lot of time crafting their characters outside the mechanics, with long backstories, character motivations, descriptions, childhood traumas, etc. If you spend that much time creating a character you don't want that to be thrown away because of a random roll of the dice. Trouble is, 5E is a game with random rolls. The dice go against you sometimes. I've had a player rage quit a 5E game because their character took one (1) point of damage. Not get knocked out, not die. Took literally one (1) point of damage. The idea that their character wasn't perfectly invulnerable to everything at all times was simply too much and they bounced. It's like we're not even in the same hobby...yet, somehow, here we are.All this is why I vastly prefer old-school games and the OSR. Gimme quick, random character creation where the character's backstory is "he's a peasant," characters can die from a single bad roll, and we jump into the game and play.</blockquote>

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