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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quasqueton" data-source="post: 2018676" data-attributes="member: 3854">Reading the thread here about the group of new Players who are (at least one is) afraid of their characters dying, make me wonder: Are we coddling new Players?When I started D&D, back in 1980, with the Basic set, we had PCs die by the handful. My very first adventure (In Search of the Unknown), we had one PC die in the very first battle, in the first hallway, against some berserkers. We had another PC die in the second fight against some giant rats. The surviving PCs left the dungeon and regrouped with the new PCs. Then we went back in.Playing and DMing Keep on the Borderlands, I saw a dozen PCs die. Hell, we had a TPK when we took on the ogre as our first encounter in the Caves of Chaos.All through the first couple years of playing, PCs died. Not as often or many as in the first months with this game, but sometimes. And this was all at low levels, before anyone even considered raise dead as an option. When the PC died, we made up another one almost immediately.We didn't fret over PC deaths. It was a game first, and our emotional attachment to our characters was no more than our attachment to characters on a game board. Sure, we had names and personalities for our characters. And through game play we had backgrounds. So the PCs were not just cardboard figures. But they weren't "my precious" either.Would new Players, now adays, be well served by going through a low-level meat-grinder dungeon, just to get over the shock of PC death? Let a new Player see characters die off a few times in an introductory dungeon crawl adventure before actually starting a "real" campaign?Do you see a difference in emotional attachment between a Player with a 10th-level character that is also their first and only character, versus a Player with a 10th-level character that is the 5th character they've played (having gone through the death of the previous 4 at low level)?Quasqueton</blockquote>

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