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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jdrakeh" data-source="post: 4520547" data-attributes="member: 13892">I misspoke. What I meant to indicate was that a PC death should be heroic or meaningful in D&D, as that is what D&D is about. In making a death heroic or meaningful, it becomes a plot point (no planning necessary). For example, dying in the midst of combat or even being poisoned by a lethal trap in the pursuit of wild treasures due to a bad die roll (or series of bad die rolls) is pretty heroic. Dying because you tripped over a tree root on a day hike and broke your neck is not. That said, there are plenty of DMs who go out of their way to avoid letting PCs die heroically and, instead, try to kill them in the tripping over tree roots manner (i.e., they turn unimportant, mundane, situations into opportunities for character death). For example. . . A friend recently related to me a story where a DM killed an entire party of adventurers because they didn't build a campfire correctly (i.e., in-character, they said "We build a campfire" rather than walking the DM through the BSA-approved campfire building process step by step). Apparently, the DM decided that not disclosing the process for campfire building turned the task into a life or death situation on which the future of the entire camapign should hang. After a high/low luck roll, he declared that the entire party froze to death in the forest clearing overnight. All of them. Naturally, this ended the campaign. It also ended the group because the players signed up for heroic adventure, not "Rudimentary Campfire Building, The Role Playing Game" <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" />And you're right, death like that does suck. Likewise, so do DMs who dabble in it <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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