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<blockquote data-quote="Fox Lee" data-source="post: 7233647" data-attributes="member: 4346">Obviously your group has its own priorities, but to me most of those old-school effects aren't actually scary. What they are is super super annoying. I remember re-calculating stats and spells on the fly for level and stat drain effects. Entire builds reduced to &quot;I guess I just try to punch it&quot; by some stupid gear-destroying beastie. But was it scary? No, at least not for us. It just made somebody's day suck, and slowed the game down for everyone.If anything, I find death more of a threat in 4e because you're less likely to die. Does that make sense? When there's the constant chance of save-or-die TPK slapping a boring, narratively unsatisfying ending on a story, my instinct is to presume that there is a fairly mundane way to bring a PC back to life. It's pretty hard to die in 4e, so if you needed to bring somebody back it wouldn't feel unfair for it to be a major quest or a unique ritual or something. So death in the setting can go back to being something meaningful, which is much more satisfying to me than the possibility of dying in what, let's face it, is often a really stupid way.TL<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />R, You could not pay me to put that sort of thing back into my 4e. But I don't need my players to fear death, so much as I need the world around them to fear it.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Fox Lee, post: 7233647, member: 4346"] Obviously your group has its own priorities, but to me most of those old-school effects aren't actually scary. What they are is super super [i]annoying[/i]. I remember re-calculating stats and spells on the fly for level and stat drain effects. Entire builds reduced to "I guess I just try to punch it" by some stupid gear-destroying beastie. But was it scary? No, at least not for us. It just made somebody's day suck, and slowed the game down for everyone. If anything, I find death more of a threat in 4e because you're less likely to die. Does that make sense? When there's the constant chance of save-or-die TPK slapping a boring, narratively unsatisfying ending on a story, my instinct is to presume that there is a fairly mundane way to bring a PC back to life. It's pretty hard to die in 4e, so if you needed to bring somebody back it wouldn't feel unfair for it to be a major quest or a unique ritual or something. So death in the [i]setting[/i] can go back to being something meaningful, which is much more satisfying to me than the possibility of dying in what, let's face it, is often a really stupid way. TL:DR, You could not pay me to put that sort of thing back into my 4e. But I don't need my players to fear death, so much as I need the world around them to fear it. [/QUOTE]

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