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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6254792" data-attributes="member: 5143">Yes, it's a mistake because the rules make them mistakes.  That's the same way all games work.  It's only a mistake to sacrifice your queen in Chess because the rules make it your best piece.  If the rules made it your worst piece, it wouldn't be a mistake anymore.It's only a mistake in Settlers of Catan to place one of your settlements at an intersection of a 2, a 12 and a desert because it's horrible according the rules of the game.You play a game given the rules of the game.  If you make a mistake in your strategy given those rules, you might lose.  If you make a REALLY big mistake according to those rules then you should definitely lose.As for whether a cleric is needed in a party, I think that point is debatable.  We've had a group who didn't have a cleric(and a battle or two where the cleric went down in the first round so it was functionally the same).  They functioned pretty decently.  Though they were less powerful than if they had a cleric.  "I cast Spare the Dying" is nearly functionally equivalent to any PC using a Healers Kit to stabilize someone.  They won't be up and helping but they aren't going to die.  One healing potion does the same thing only slightly better.  If someone has the Healer feat they can also bring people back up with one action.  Having a cleric around just makes it slightly better yet.Not having a cleric is a tactical mistake.  But you are right, it isn't incredibly stupid, you can work around it.  In order to actually die you have to make a number of mistakes in a row, of which not having a cleric is only the first.No, quite the opposite.  I was responding to your comment that people who like character death to exist but be extremely rare should suck it up and either accept that death will happen all the time or force the DM to mete out death only on a whim.  I am arguing that the current method is a compromise between the two.People who like death can be rest assured that it is possible to die using the default rules.  If they want it to be more deadly, they can remove Space the Dying, Healer's Kits and the Healer feat.  If they want it to be more deadly, they can also change the number of death saves you get, or change how much damage it takes beyond 0 it takes to kill someone.In the other direction, they can increase the number of death saves or increase the damage it takes to die after getting to 0.  They can even go as far as to say that you don't have to make death saves at all, thus making all PCs effectively immortal.I think the problem with this line of thinking is that there are more than two camps.  People are more a spectrum."People who hate character death" are consist of such groups as those people who hate it but still want it to happen because their sense of fair play and challenge won't allow them to play a game without the possibility, and those people who hate death only because it causes narrative problems when PCs die in the middle of something that involves them very personally.  Sometimes these are even the same people, sometimes they aren't.Just like "people who don't mind character death" also range from "those people who dislike death but don't hate it as long as it happens only once every campaign" all the way though "people who love to die every session so they can play a new character next time".Obviously, there isn't one good solution that will help everyone.  I think the current one works pretty well as a middle ground.So far, my second D&D Next campaign just started recently and the Wizard in the group died in one crit while he was low on hitpoints in the first session.  During my first campaign I killed 3 or 4 PCs.  I certainly don't think the current system prevents PCs from dying at all.  It just makes it so it doesn't happen every session.</blockquote>

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