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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 3699997" data-attributes="member: 1165">No. However, for me it's true. There has to be a risk of death. Just not too high!Many of the other possibilities are worse than death. I know I don't want to be captured (I hate prison-escape plots as they almost always make the villains look like idiots; many GMs are bad at writing these plots; villains rarely have a reason to leave PCs alive and in captivity anyway and frankly I don't have the 200 point IQ necessary to break out of a prison the way characters do in novels - well, not that the novel character need a 200 point IQ, as the villains are almost always idiots, but GMs usually run more competent villains) and DnD 3.x rules makes losing items so harsh that many players would just suicide their character and bring it in a new one.FATE has something like that. If you "die" you're "taken out" instead, which can mean anything (eg forced to run away; the rules are free-form enough that running away is easy; no AoOs, no one ever chases you due to the rules, etc). FATE rewards you for letting the villain live, though. Beating a villain is difficult, but often bringing them to "taken out status" just takes too long and too much effort, so they "offer you a concession", which means you get a fate point. Also, arresting a villain makes sense. I've yet to fall into a situation where I was knocked unconscious by villains without PCs to rescue me, and for that matter any time a FATE PC ran into that situation I've always gone out of my way to make sure they survive.Falling unconscious is pretty harsh in DnD. Why wouldn't the villain kill you if they've disabled you? You have less than ten hit points left; one quick stab and you're done. I've seen lots of PCs in this situation who didn't die only because the villain was so busy they couldn't spare an action to stab the -5 hp guy.Villains have this bad habit of being evil, and the higher-ranking ones are usually smart enough to realize why leaving the disabled PC alive is a bad thing. The only way that PC lives is if the rest of the party wins, or at least manages to escape while carrying a badly wounded and unconscious PC. (That tends to slow you down, especially if the PC wore heavy armor.)I agree, but this (fear of loss of treasure) is the fault of the rules. In D20 Modern I never saw this happen. You can always get a new AK-47, often by beating someone over the head and stealing theirs, but getting a new life is impossible, so death was feared far more than losing gear. (Of course, the PCs still feared jail...) The rules made equipment so non-valuable that PCs complained of having nothing to spend money on.Maybe it's just this example, but I don't like it. Character development should be up to the player. I would not want my character altered like this; and if another player didn't like the idea, it shouldn't be forced upon them. A player might just drop or suicide a character like that and start a new one.</blockquote>

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