Which is why the only thing that seems to strike fear in the hearts of players are rust monsters and level draining undead.
Ah, yes. I lost track of the number of times my character died (including being completely pureed along with the rest of the party an all our gear) and came back to life to carry on between first level beginning and 14th level end, but I got hit by level draining monsters twice and my intelligent magic sword got trashed when we were pureed - those events really sucked.
Death we got over pretty quickly, level draining monsters were a real terror.
PC death is quite on the cards in my games but I frankly would prefer that the players played it smart and took reasonable precautions to avoid it. It means that the flow of the game/story is not interrupted or hampered by losing a valuable team member and his/her resources.
Sure, I'm running Cyberpunk and a lot of GMs and players like it to be a "duelist's world" where might is right, life is cheap, kill 'em all and let god sort 'em out sort of stuff abounds.
I don't personally like that style - I find it both unrealistic and genre-breaking. The world we currently live in has gangs, corporations, clandestine organisations, armed citizens and people who'd think little of killing you for a cigarette. We still don't go rampaging around the streets shooting, maiming, torturing or killing people indiscriminately. And the average person is not at risk of imminent death every minute of the day.
Nor do they in most Cyberpunk literature I've read - they still have strong laws against murder and well-equipped police forces, corporate security etc to come down hard on transgressors.
IRL and in game, there are people whose lifestyles carry the risk of death - and IRL they take steps to lessen the risks. Why should they behave any different in game?
So I run as realistic a world as I can with proper natural consequences - if you honk off a powerful organisation, they will come gunning for you and they've got a lot more resources than you. Honk off the wrong person and he may well kill you - and he won't face you in a fair duel, he'll hide in the shadows and blow you away with a shotgun when you go to your car. Commit murder and you will risk imprisonment or retribution.
So the players, if they were incautious, could get themselves in a pickle from which there is no escape and character death ensues - or they could play it safe and avoid getting on the wrong side of anyone. Sure, screw up that gang's plans - but leave no traces of who did it or (better) frame another rival gang and let them take care of each other for you. (Characters did that in one game - and it turned out that the guys they sikked the gang onto were CIA...)
Sure, gangs and corporations might kill with impunity - but they have the resources to make it work, they're not a small team of four people. For every indiscretion they commit, they have alibis, witnesses and high-priced lawyers to get them off the hook. (Yep, even the gangs - the bigger ones around here, do, anyway - that's the benefit of selling large amounts of methamphetamine).
Smart play, not suicidal.
Replacing dead PCs can be problematic in some games, depending on where they are and what they're doing. You're deep in a dungeon having fought your way past lots of monsters that challenge your 6-person party. One of the PCs dies - do you really think that there's going to be a replacement for that PC wandering about in that area of the dungeon all by his/herself?
Cyberpunk. You don't just trust the first person who comes bowling up and says "Hi, I want to join up with you guys".
There's not always a convenient break point at which to introduce a character or a plausible reason that they would do so. A dead PC could mean the player is out of the action until such time as the rest of the party gets around to finding someone new.
I like to ensure that there's always the risk of character death if the players get silly/incautious but it can also be played in such a way that the characters do everything they can to make sure they survive - and still have a fun game and risk losing something.
I prefer to incorporate fail conditions that do not rely on character death or a TPK. The NPCs have their plots, if the players elect to get involved and scotch those plans, failure will mean the NPCs successfully carry out their plots.
Such plots should not be World Breaking, not all the time. They should be bad enough that the consequences are dire and dreadful and engender a feeling of loss in the players - but not wreck the place so bad that the team cannot carry on adventuring and striving.
IOW, they should not be going up against plots that mean TEOTWAWKI or The Universe Is Plunged Into Darkness - not all the time, anyway.
But say the NPC plot would destroy a village that the players have sworn to protect. Failure for the PCs is the NPC successfully carrying out that plot and destroying the village.
The world is still pretty much the same, there are more people to protect, other villages to defend - but the players have lost their friends, their families, their bolt holes etc and have FAILED.
They can still carry on - shadowed, maybe haunted, by their failure. They have to build up their resources again but the world itself is not broken.
Perhaps there's one crippled survivor that constantly reminds them that they didn't do so hot protecting his village...
You can run plots like that indefinitely - some the players will win, others they will lose - and keep up the "risk" level and the meaningful "fail conditions" without once having a PC die or destroying the game.
That, to me is more realistic than the fictional serials (any media) where week after week the heroes avert The End Of All Things(tm).
How often in our real world do people go out and fight forces that will destroy the entire planet in 24 hours if they fail? Yet I'm sure we agree that every day people go out to avert disasters that would be profoundly unpleasant - and sometimes they lose.
Death is always a possibility if you do something risky enough, but it is by no means the only fail state.
I'd be quite happy for my players' initial characters to survive all the way through the game - I'm not going to go all out to try to kill them. If they choose plots that they can carry out by other means than direct confrontation and sensibly avoid situations that risk the characters' lives, they could still have some thrilling adventures with proper risks of failing.
If, however, they do their level best to upset someone's apple cart and that person starts gunning for them, my money is on the bad guy - sooner or later they will fail an awareness check...
Cha-chick. BOOM!
