iserith
Magic Wordsmith
Great comments. In a D&D 5e context, I've run a few games where death was taken off the table because I didn't think it fit with the theme. One campaign was a very pulpy Eberron serial hero game, and the other was a D&D/supers mashup. So the rule there was that you're just taken out of the scene if you "die," perhaps with a lingering penalty to work off afterward, but otherwise, you're alive and kicking. That is, unless the player assessed the situation and thought it would sell more pulp to die (and, of course, come back in some future surprising way).I agree; taking your second point first; when setting up a campaign one question I always ask is "how often should we expect a character to die?" and typically I get an answer of "one or two per year of play time". I'm running Pendragon at the moment, which has a higher rate, but that is because it specifically has character death as an event that does not eliminate roleplaying.
In most games a character dying ends roleplaying opportunities. We play the game to roleplay, and you cannot roleplay a dead character in most games, so character death is essentially saying "you will no longer have any fun with this character". For some, they find that threat makes the playing of the character more fun, but I find it a tired and banal threat. If the best a GM can do to set stakes for an encounter is "if you fail your character will be taken away, then I'm honestly a little disappointed in the GM.
Pendragon has the concept of playing a family of knights though, so a character death is mitigated. You'll play the former knight's son and that character will still be a strong presence. So for Pendragon, our players are happier with increased lethality.
And that leads into your first point -- it is too terrible a burden for the GM, and it need not be so. In most campaigns if the mechanics call for a player death, I'll ask the player how comfortable they are with that. It doesn't have to be my decision. And I have mature players who, actually, are usually fine with it. Maybe one time in five they will take my alternative out.
Like many things in GMing, talking it out upfront, and then presenting players with options to give them agency in their character's fate is just a good way to go.
And in another game, a one-shot in this case, it was set up so that death was actually beneficial - dying honorably gave you double the points you would normally get for other milestones, which made it easier for you to get into Valhalla. So that was fun to see how players would try to have their characters die in awesome ways before the session's end to grab those points.
But also, I'm sure avoiding character death isn't the only incentive to fudge. There's also the matter of preserving a plot the DM planned in advance, whether that be the overall plot of the villains doing their thing or the subplots based around the characters' backstories. I don't do either of these things (or rather, I don't care about them be derailed), so I have no need to fudge here. And in the event I did run these kinds of games, again, I would take death off the table so that there was nothing that could prevent us from exploring those plots and subplots to their fullest.