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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HeavyG" data-source="post: 1474742" data-attributes="member: 431">Balancing the need for consequences for failure (you don't want your players to feel their PCs are invincible) with the need to keep characters alive in a harsh environment so you can keep telling their stories (you don't want your players to become afraid of heroics) is hard.It's what the debate about easier or harder resurrection boils to, really.I've found that if you want your PCs to brave meaningful dangers, you need to either :- Keep them alive via DM fiat- Allow for easy resurrectionor - Accept that they'll be making new characters all the time and that you better not make the stories too personalLet's face it, it's a dice-based game, no player is going to roll high all the time, so depending on your players to play smart is not going to let them survive to 20th level by itself. (This goes for most RPGs, I feel.)Solution number 3 is unacceptable if you want to involve the player's characters in your story in a deep and meaningful (long term) way.The problem with the first two solutions is that it makes the players cocky, if they know about them.The only solution, I feel, is to give the PCs script immunity (possibly with agreed upon caveats), but to make penalties for failure very meaningful.In my Exalted game, I use this. It's a game where there is no resurrection and the storyline I have planned spans 20 years and mostly involves the PCs backgrounds. Losing a PC would not be a game breaker, but it would be very very boring, especially if it happened randomly.So what I do is, if the dice indicate that a PC dies, the blow will knock him unconscious instead, but the character will suffer a permanent disability instead. Like, say, losing an arm. Or maybe the pretty boy skirt-chaser swordsman will suffer a disfiguring scar (i.e. a fate worse than death <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />).So far, it seems to work.</blockquote>

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