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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mneme" data-source="post: 5559319" data-attributes="member: 59248">There's a lot of badwrongfun in this thread.  Some interesting (if not novel) points as well, of course.I don't think there's any reason the dice intrinsically need to matter.  You roll the dice because you don't want all results to be decisions of the players/the GM, but it's the players and GM who need agency; not the dice.  That said, I don't really like fudging much; it's functionally lying to the players, and it's not good to lie to your friends.  And if you want to banish death from your game, there are lots of ways to do so without illusionism/lying -- you can use monster tactics that don't kill; you can have monsters use non-lethal tactics and strike to knock unconcious, not kill (see: fates worse than death; the concept, not the Dragon article); you can even use house rules that make it harder to die and use other consequences instead.OTOH, it's important that player decisions make a difference.  Otherwise, why did the players show up?  You can handle this by letting players die when they do stupid things...or you can handle it by making actions have consequences, whether those are death or not.  It's all good, as long as what a player does and how they do it -does- make a difference.Now, regarding the idea that without death on the table, a game has no teeth...um, no?  Has anyone here read dungeon_grrl's 3.5 writeups (not family friendly, but awesome)?  The games she wrote up didn't have a lot of character death--but there were certainly consequences for a wipe; big ones.  Having the party wake up, defensless and captured, after a wipe rather than ending the campaign is totally legit re RAW (as is, given the right circumstances, having the bad guys capture a downed PC rather than killing her, then turn that into an adventure hook with the player trying to escape or avoid a horrible fate on the inside, or helpless with the player playing a temporary PC for the rescue), and turns a wipe into plot, rather than a campaign-ender.  What you have the bad guys do with the party after their capture (or try to do, depending), depends a lot on the tone of the game and what the players have agreed to, of course.</blockquote>

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