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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5899845" data-attributes="member: 4937">Maybe it is a failure of my imagination here, but though you keep mentioning it and I keep straining to understand what you mean, I still can't imagine meaningful failures that can be summoned up at will to substitute for something like death. I mean sure, on one level people fail all the time and they don't die.  But on that same level, the PC's fail all the time and don't die.  They get hurt.  They sometimes take ability damage or acquire disease or other long term problems.  They swing with their sword and miss.  They fail saving throws and get paralyzed.  They cast mighty magics only to see their foes be immune by virtue of strong will, magical resistance, or immunity.  The smash things only to realize that they are incorporeal or have DR.  They fail skill checks and are caught in traps, or have to bash down doors rather than silently pick locks.  They fall on their faces or tumble off of cliffs.  In short, their lives are filled with all sorts of petty failures. I can certainly think of many sorts of less petty failures - relationships that go sour, valuable property lost or stolen, blows to their reputations, criminal charges pressed against them, loved ones killed, goals and dreams temporarily shattered, ambitions thwarted and so forth.  But these, while they happen in my games, can't always or even usually be made to stand in for death as if they were substitutes for mortality.   Even things like imprisonment, cursed, mugged and robbed, brain washed, maimed and the like aren't always available except as illogical consequences to a given situations.  I don't see how you can use the existance of these other sorts of failure to negate death.So I don't see how you can equate 'lots of characters die' with the absense of other sorts of failure or the presence of other sorts of failure with the absense of death.</blockquote>

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