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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9534644" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Except that I do want lasting, rules-relevant (from the game perspective) effects that happen and you can't decide not to have happen.I just don't want the one specific thing of "random, permanent, irrevocable death." I'm VERY okay with all sorts of other things, things that can have permanent impact, even mechanically. Generally, I prefer those to be the result of a PC having to make a terrible choice (e.g. sacrificing a limb, which would prevent them from using a shield or 2H weapon, OR not sacrificing the arm, and thus having a creeping corruption inside them that will slowly try to take over their whole body) rather than being just a one-and-done "because your number wasn't big enough, now you've lost an arm."Your stance is the absolutist one here. You require absolute sim. I don't. I like sim; I think it's very useful and emphatically shouldn't be abandoned for light and transient reasons. I just think "this consequence is both more boring and actively draining on the ability to continue participating and enjoying that participation" is an exceptionally good reason to not do things. And my preferred solutions for these problems are, always, diegetic ones. That doesn't always mean I know everything in advance; maybe the player surging to life after they SHOULD have died is an unsettling mystery that the party must now investigate (read: giving me, the DM, time and breathing room to consider the causes). But I try to have stuff prepared well in advance, stuff that the party could know about if they dug into it, but which they may or may not actually DO so.As an example in my current game, the party has all accepted earrings crafted by Tenryu Shen, a gold dragon. I have explicitly told them that this means there is a very small piece of Shen's soul with them wherever they go. What they do not realize is that Shen can sacrifice these little pieces of himself, which would diminish him permanently, in order to prevent their deaths should it prove necessary. Nobody has asked, nobody has really looked too deeply into the earrings or how they function, they've been quite content to just benefit from the other useful functions the earrings have. This is one route amongst several that I have prepared in advance, just in case a character dies, so that if the player would prefer to continue using that character, there is a diegetic means by which they could continue doing so. Several other characters have individual things I could use as well (such as the party Bard's mysterious connections to his devilish ancestor, or the party Battlemaster's connection to spirits and Death which could see him return to the living....albeit permanently marked by the experience.)As noted, all of these things exist in advance; further, all of them have limitations on their use, and can't be simply invoked at leisure. All of them come with permanent costs if they have to be invoked. And, perhaps most importantly, there have in fact been times where even these defenses wouldn't have worked, because the party was doing something very dangerous and even these measures wouldn't have helped. (Such deaths would not be random, and thus would be 100% okay, because they happened in a suitably threatening, and thus suitably heroic, context.) Of course, I'm also pretty good at communicating to my players when something is Extremely Dangerous, so that coupled with their naturally ultra-cautious attitude means they generally do a LOT of preparation before they try to face anything like that.</blockquote>

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