NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vaalingrade" data-source="post: 8245213" data-attributes="member: 82524">I'm not jumping to anyone's defense here, but this is a real phenomenon that's been going on for a while:Publishers and Producers often push creators to  'up the stakes', wanting to always go for maximum effect in terms of audience reaction. As death is the ultimate stake, that's the lever they demand creators always pull regardless of how appropriate it is for the story being told. This is why for  long time in action and superhero movies the bad guy ALWAYS dies. The fight was always to the death because there is no other stake the creators were allowed to use. This is also rooted in the older decency codes like the Hayes code, which demands evil be 'punished'.This has had two distinct effects in popular culture:1) Incoming creators are shaped by the media they consume. They've learned the advice 'when in doubt, kill a character'--again whether or not it's a good idea or fits the story. This has gone so far that that even genres like sweet romance have been filled with corpses of late. Not usually main characters, but then... Nicholas Sparks.2) Audiences have been trained to expect and even demand death. It is the way the story is supposed to go after all. Especially in comics, where people will literally decide big events had no lasting effect if someone doesn't die. Remember back in Avengers where people were mad a certain character died not because his death was a tired trick to pull the audience's heart strings -- but because he wasn't 'important' enough?Which is a very long way of saying that 'BUT I LIKE DEATH' is not a heartening response... it's hardly unexpected and is pretty understandable. Hollywood and New York have been working since the 80's to make sure we love and crave death in media. Because it's so cheap and easy. Easier than good or thoughtful writing.And really, what is a DM to do when their players have thus been trained to think a story means nothing without maximum over-stakes?</blockquote>

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