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Message: <blockquote data-quote="P1NBACK" data-source="post: 5877868" data-attributes="member: 83768">Right on. But, we're hopefully not playing D&D in a one-shot game. D&D is really about the campaign. That depends a lot on what spells they each get too. And, if the elf can survive past 1st level while the MU has access to 2nd level spells to assist. You can't really just compare these things in a vacuum. Fair enough. Eh, you're completely obviating reaction rolls, and circumstances beyond "death". How about being captured? Or, losing your gear? Or, being cut off from the outside world without food? Or, getting a curse? Or, disease? Or, losing ability points? Or any number of non-death things that still suck. In fact, a lot of the non-death stuff might be considered _worse_. If you're dead, you at least get to roll up a new character. <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=":)" /> If death is not a likely result of combat with sharp bladed objects, then... I think there's something wrong.Sure there is. But, more importantly, I don't think the game needs to talk about old school play. The same way AW doesn't need to tell you how to play either. You learn over the course of play what sort of behaviors emerge from play. We call this the fruitful void. There's no "mechanic" or procedures for dealing with old school play. Because of the fact that there are deadly, dangerous things in a dungeon, we learn to play to minimize those risk in a variety of ways. The character abilities themselves are just a tool. I'm not talking about "gaming the system" like we might with 3E or 4E... Oh, I got this cool feat that interacts with this magical item and when I shift and get flanking I win the game! Luck is certainly an aspect of the game. But, I think strategy (not tactics) is far more important. Eh. Semi-free form is certainly an appropriate description. We make a lot of rulings, but they are usually rooted in the mechanics of the game. I like <a href="http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=campaignstories&action=display&thread=543" target="_blank">Mearls' analogy</a> of it being like a band jamming versus 4E's symphony with lots of moving parts all trying to work in concert. We're more riffing off of each other and using the drum beat as our backbone (the rules that are actually there). Very nice. But, what you're missing is that when you level up, you have more resources to bring to bear, so those abilities do matter. And, what happens when you do need to fight something? Of course those things matter. But, they aren't the only aspect to play. I'm not looking at my character sheet every round trying to pick an action. I'm imagining what's around me and using that to inform my decision and maybe something on my sheet can help me, sure, but it's not a description or set of mechanics of my next move.</blockquote>

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