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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9536895" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I wasn't asked, but I can do something with this.Something I have tried to do with my campaign is give each character a connection to something in the background of the campaign. Sometimes these are pretty mild things, e.g. we had a Druid to start with, and I wanted to make a faction of evil druids, so...done! No need to work further than that, that's enough of a connection to get things started.So, let's say we've got characters who have a reason to care about the various major threats running around. Cool. Now one of those characters dies. Alright, that's fair; just because the one person died doesn't mean nobody else has motives, we can develop new stuff with time.But now imagine a full-on TPK. Say the players are game for this, and get invested in a new crop of weirdos. Now something new and different has to connect them to the villains, otherwise the story quickly moves in a pretty dull direction of "we do it because we're paid". I imagine I could probably do this a second time, though it would probably be quite rough around the edges for a while.Now imagine a second full-on TPK. Okay...now we need a third crop of weirdos, and all of them need new and different connections to the campaign. Now imagine a third, a fourth, a fifth TPK.By the time you've lost the whole party three times, it becomes really, really difficult to tell a satisfying, long-term story. You just don't have the time to play out character development, to see relationships or rivalries form between various PCs (or between one PC and other NPCs), unless you use really canned, prewritten stuff (e.g. "I'm Roberta, sister to the late Robert, and I will avenge the death of my brother!") Constantly losing the whole party really does lead to an inability to meaningfully tell a story outside of something really basic. Basic is good as a sometimes food, or as the day-to-day stuff between major events, but making it the whole of your narrative diet really does drag the experience down.That's a thing where "overuse of character death" is an issue, in an actual gaming space. (Of course, the same problem occurs for the same reasons in a narrative setting, if you kill off all the main characters in a book even once, you are GOING to lose most of your audience--the only difference is that the line between character and audience is removed with TTRPGing.)</blockquote>

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