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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6254608" data-attributes="member: 5143">Why does it mean nothing?  It's our groups philosophy and it works pretty well.  To us, if your group chose not to have a cleric in it in order to cast the spell, that's one mistake.  If you fight monsters in such a way that you get below 0 hitpoints in the first place(either because you chose to fight monsters that were way too powerful for you or you used tactics that allowed them to get the upper hand on you) then that's another mistake.  Then you need to ignore the dying person for a number of rounds and they have to get hit a couple of times or fail a couple of saves.If you make all those mistakes, one of the party members should die.  If you make smarter decisions, you get to live.That is just not satisfactory at all.  We want people to die.  A game that said "You cannot die" wouldn't satisfy me at all.  On the other hand a game that says "If the party gets attacked by a really nasty encounter that prevents them from helping their dying companion the companion dies.  But this should happen very rarely" is great.I think the main difference is that a crit that happens to do enough damage to kill someone outright will happen randomly and none of the players or the DM can predict it.  Also, sometimes a number of bad die rolls in a row will end up dropping a PC when the monster probably shouldn't have been all that dangerous.When you drop there is at least a little bit of added tension.  What happens if all the enemies decide to turn on me next round?  3 hits and I die.  What happens if I fail my saving throws and the party decides not to heal me because they are busy fighting off the monsters on them?  I could die.Even if 99% of all combats end up with nobody dying, at least there is that 1% chance.  Which means each combat has to be taken seriously because this combat COULD be the 1 in 100 where someone dies.  Without it, even running the combat seems pointless since the result is already a foregone conclusion.In fact, it's precisely because it happens to rarely that it adds the tension it does to the game.  No one has died...does that mean it's just a matter of time?If this is left entirely up to DM fiat then every time someone dies it just feels mean and vindictive.  We don't want to end up hating each other at the end of the game, so that's just not an option.</blockquote>

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