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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6293333" data-attributes="member: 4937">Though I do get your point, I'm not sure that given the writer/producer of the series that random unexpected death of characters is out of the question.I haven't seen the show and I don't know the context of the quote, but I do know that in generic superhero movies its usually established that in general, the superheroes act as if they had a 0% chance of dying early on in the movie.   These scenes establish the heroic competence of the characters, that they know they outclass the opposition and really have nothing to fear from normal threats and dangers.  Captain America jumps casually out of an airplane without a parachute while continuing friendly banter about the fact he isn't dating anyone, for example.Later in the story line we generally establish that these same characters have become fearful, and this establishes the competence of the villains and that the stakes have become higher.  I'm not entirely convinced that a character saying, "I thought there was a 97% we were going to die", isn't in fact the character's awareness that their survival rate has been extraordinary.  Whether or not the characters have reason to be fearful is a different question, but to the extent we are talking about D&D I think there are strong parallels.    There have been several times in the campaign where the players expected to die with what was a higher level of probability than the actual odds of death, and they have certainly said things like, "I thought there was a 97% chance we were going to die".  The odds of death weren't 0%, but they weren't 97% either, however the players assessed the chance of death as high because I the story teller was pushing them to do so in order to make the players fearful of the death of their characters through that make the characters act as if they were fearful of their own deaths.  The real odds were probably closer to a 25% chance a character would die. At the same time there have been times that the players underestimated the threat, like the time the player decided to try to pick the lock on a door with a death trap on it despite me hanging some big drapes on the scene that should have indicated to them that this was a puzzle trap (that they had two different ways of solving, neither or which was explored).  The result was a dead PC that hit them completely out of the blue.  Fortunately, the cleric had just taken a Heal skill related feat that gave her a small chance of resuscitating a character that had just died and she rolled well on her Heal check, leaving the character stable -9 life.  After receiving the benefit of the cleric's cure serious wounds, the same player had his character solo charge the enemy necromancer in the room despite knowing that the necromancer had been alerted to the parties presence and would have had time to prepare and the fact that as an injured Sidhe rogue he's got almost no hit points.  The result, one vampiric touch later, was the character dead again.  Again, the cleric rolled to resuscitate, this time initially failing - but spending a destiny point to get a reroll - and another lucky set of rolls later having her Goddess bring the character back to life.  This set of events allowed the player of the Sidhe rogue to retake what is a coveted title at my table - "Character who has come closest to death and improbably lived."I'd assess the long term probability that a character dies in my game at close to 100%, which incidentally is the same chance I'd assess to some character dying a meaningless random death in a Josh Wheldon story.   I'm not sure that the players or their characters are in any sense blind to whatever the conventions of my story are.  No, I think you are entirely wrong in all of that.  Batman certainly killed in his earliest incarnations, and yet had reoccurring villains anyway.  And many characters in DC comics have no qualms or at least no explicit qualms about killing foes and yet face reoccurring villains.   Batman's no-kill moral code has been justified in story in two or three ways, and has been explicitly something that Batman is forced to wrestle with and is something that his reoccurring villains causing the death and suffering explicitly taunt him with.   Batman's no-kill moral code is justified by (what I find to be) a superficial understanding of what makes violence depraved that reoccurring is presented in fiction of all sorts as being commitment to purity and higher good.  This is mostly based without much reflection on memes that ultimately have evolved out of Christian ethics regarding priests - what you might call the Christian Pacifist line of thought.  Secondly, Batman's no-kill moral code in later years (say since the 1980's) has been justified by the fact that Batman himself knows that the line between himself as a costumed vigilante and the villains he fights is thin, and that his own dedication borders on mental illness and indeed may even be a sort of mental illness.  Thus, Batman maintains a sharp bright line because he knows that if he crosses it, he personally won't be able to distinguish between himself and the people he fights.  This all occurs out in the open in the comics, movies, and so forth and is continually challenged by the writers.   Batman is continually questioned about the fact that he doesn't kill, and must repeatedly justify it to himself and others and with them the reader.</blockquote>

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