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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Badwe" data-source="post: 5558791" data-attributes="member: 61762">For me, the constraints of death revolve more around player consideration.  While I have given up on story considerations for when players can't make a session, I still try to make sure that character death/departure/joining has some place in the story.However, my particular group is a bit constrained: some of the people are traveling to our session via a 2 hour drive, and we play for 6 hours per session, with sessions generally occurring no more than twice a month, sometimes once a month and even (much to my sadnass) missing a month.  We play 4e and generally the combats are fairly lengthy. This is due to my players being very strategic and just a little bit meta-gamey (and getting distracted by laptops, but that's neither here nor there).  Having a character outright die is first off going to take them out of that combat, which could potentially just be getting started.  Next, the adventure itself derails.  If the PCs are trapped in, for example, a "pyramid of shadows", if you will, access to ressurection may be difficult.  Therefore, a player would more or less have their session ruined if they die, and worse still if they brought their laptop they may divest from the game completely.  Even that is almost preferable to the worst case scenario: they get up and go home.  For someone that drove all the way from a neighboring state, for me that just wouldn't be worth it.Now, this is not to say I wouldn't LIKE to create a campaign where death is more common, but I just don't think it would be a good fit for my current campaign.  I even tried to experiment with death by sending my PCs on "spirit journeys" where they experiened fights in which death would not be permanent.  Of course, knowing they had time to spare, the party rested after each fight and expended all their dailies.  Just the same, I was able to nearly wipe them out in a few of the fights, and other posters have correctly noticed that just dying, even if it's of no consequence, FEELS a lot like failing.  When the blue dragon a few levels higher than the recommended max level for an encounter used an AOE to deal damage equal to the wizard's bloodied value to half the party, the table got extremely stern.</blockquote>

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