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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 5902610" data-attributes="member: 29398">Funny, I was just thinking about this in another context regarding "adultness" of one's game - does one shoot for Belgariad or Game of Thrones content level?  (I go for GoT, but that's for another thread....)As for death and other assorted delights, I set it up right from the start with a warning in the "blue book" that runs our game, worded something like: The game world is not without risk, and can and will at times be cruel to its characters and, by extension, players.  Death, level loss, possession loss, etc. are part of the game; and you can always roll up a replacement.  I also encourage players to run more than one character in a party, so when one's not functional for whatever reason they still have something to do.Then I let 'em have it.In 28 years of DMing I have had one TPK; and that was only a year or two ago.  I've had several near-TPKs where there were but one or two survivors, and individual deaths uncountable; I've drained levels, blown up possessions, had characters lose their minds, drained abilities, etc., etc. - and they keep coming back every week in large part, I think, because the death and destruction is cancelled out by a whole lot of fun in the meantime. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />That said, I'm not out specifically to kill them off; and characters who show at least a vague sense of self-preservation can and do last quite well in my games.  But a surprising number of them show the self-preservation instinct of a moth flying into a candle, largely due to play style - it's no coincidence that Wisdom is often seen as the dump stat for all but Clerics around here.And then they start in on each other.  There's no rule here against killing other party members provided it makes either circumstantial or ethic-alignment sense (and I wouldn't play in a game that had such a rule); and while some parties get along just fine others, well, don't; and I'll leave off there. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The upshot of all this is that I can run a game for many years without the levels getting out of hand.For the OP: when a new PC joins the party I'll either bring them in a level below the party average, or at an arbitrary start point I've decided on ahead of time to prevent backsliding (I've run parties that have gone backward in level during an adventure, it's a pain).  Right now in one party they start at raw 3rd level and in the other at raw 4th.I don't at all mind having a range of levels within a party, but I'm running a 1e variant and 1e tolerates such things much better than 3e or newer.  One group is 3rd-5th, the other is 4th-7th.Lan-"throw our lives away when we jump in the fountain"-efan</blockquote>

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