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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 3746782" data-attributes="member: 710">In some ways, I can understand your feelings. But honestly, I am also not sure if I really like a "grim & gritty" campaign. My fellow players used to played CoC, for example, long ago before I was in the campaign.One of the complaints they have in retrospect is: If your character dies (or goes mad, and both happens in CoC fairly easily and often) to often, you detach yourself from him. You also will begin to break verisimilitude when creating your characters - suddenly, everyone is heavily armed, in the hope at least this time, they will get to kill the cultists and monsters in time.They liked the mystery part (if it worked, but it's hard to pull that off on a constant base, and the available adventures weren't all great - in fact most were not, at least in their view).I think in D&D, the opposite happens - you grow to like your character, and want him ressourected when he dies, because he is just so fun to play and has so many options. But does the world around you really matter? Most of the NPCs you meet end up dead, and the rest is just there to give you information or orders to find the next villain and his minions.Finding a good middle ground is hard thing to do, and I am not sure I really know a system that pulls it off. (But I don't know have that much experience with games.)But all that said, I still think there are consequences in D&D - Death isn't just a nuisance, it costs money and XP (and that is only true at higher levels. At low levels, Death means Death). And that really sucks, because my cool character just lost some of his cool. But personally, I would prefer if these things would happen less, but had more impact. Wouldn't it be cool if everytime you want to resourrect someone you would have to enter the "Underworld"/"Afterworld"/"Twilight Zone" and get your man out? And the deceased possibly had to fight to get out and not having his soul consumed / send to the eternal afterlife before he is getting rescued. But this would mean Death was still something seldomly experienced, which is plainly not true in D&D.But you are correct - aside from the possible death, fights have no lasting (negative) consequences. Wand of CLW, and if neccessary, get to rest. Part of this is because DMs and/or adventure design somehow allow these rest times. Part of it is because the game is strongly focused on game balance, and it's hard to adjucate the balance if the critical numbers change to much. It's easier to create an adventure where the players can rest if required, than to try to guess how much the losses of each combat will change the EL of the next combat.Other games don't suffer from this problem, because they don't have such a strong concept of encounter balancing or challenge ratings. (Some games don't even get to manage a general character balance, and for some games and/or groups, this might even turn out fine.)</blockquote>

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