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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4037373" data-attributes="member: 2067">It is difficult for me to accept a heroic being (a 20th level fighter) dying by random accident. It's not impossible, but the more possible it becomes, the less heroic that being is, and the less heroic the world is, and the less I feel like I'm playing a heroic fantasy game.If he had a heart attack or a stroke or choked to death on a fig, it is too obviously transparent to me as a metagame descision, and too 'realistic,' to me, to fit in a heroic game, so it makes the experience unsatisfying for me.If the DM introduced rules for these things, I think most of us would agree that they'd be pretty pointless rules, and would add very little to the game. If the king was a 1st level Aristocrat instead of a 20th level fighter, all these things could kill him without me raising much of an eyebrow, because all these things routinely kill normal people, and the king uses the rules for 'normal person' and not for 'heroic being.' If the DM intended it to be a mysterious "accidental" death that the PC's could investigate, I'd gladly send my character after that little trail, knowing, in-character, that Slayers of Dragons don't just choke on normal figs. We have rules for drowning and for running out of breath and for old age, and as long as what happened to him falls within the bounds of what the rules describe would happen to him, those don't really violate my sense of realism. If for some reason he was underwater too long to hold his breath (given that a high CON probably means he can hold his breath for quite a while), he can die. If he's roughly within the age range for an old character, he can die. It won't break me out of the game, and the DM can adhere to those rules without ever rolling a single die. And we can say that the falling rules, or the aging rules, or the drowning rules suck, and we can make new rules to replace them. The aging rules are a perfect candidate (and I'd bet that 4e doesn't have any height/weight/aging rules, though I bet the averages are described for each race). Heck, we can decide that the hit point rules suck, and change those. The point is to remain internally consistent, so that even when the camera isn't in focus on an event, it is still running 'invisibly' by the same rules, because for me, D&D isn't a story. It isn't a simulation, either, it's a game, and in any game, all the players should abide by the rules that are relevant to them.Which means when someone falls, the results possible and likely are already described, either 'on-stage' or not.</blockquote>

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