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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 9065557" data-attributes="member: 6801845">I suspect there have always been, very broadly speaking, two camps when it comes to lethality.  On the one side you have people that enjoy skilled play.  Building the best PC (or PCs) for the job then throwing them at lethal traps and puzzles.  Survival of any individual PC was never guaranteed and if your PC died, well you just bring in PC #32 that you already have in the wings.  Skilled play is what really mattered, not the character themselves.On the other side you have the story tellers.  People want to be the heroes of the story, they want to be Conan or Gandalf.  The character is of the utmost importance, and the permanent death of a character whether the individual's or a fellow party member is not taken lightly.  People may play these characters for years and become heavily invested in them, not just the game play.  Dying because of a bad roll is not fun.Of course the lines are horrendously blurry between the two, with plenty of crossover.  But in the end groups make the game into what they want. I generally fall into the latter camp so therefore I don't want highly lethal campaigns so we set up the games to not be particularly lethal.  For example when we rolled for HP, we kept rolling until you had average or higher because even though I could play that mid level fighter that had rolled 1 for HP every level by hiding in the back and shooting arrows, I wanted to play that fighter that charged into combat when necessary and was the hero I had envisioned.It's not like I haven't had PCs die over the years, every elf I play has died quite early on in their career along with a few others (i.e. TK-421, my warforged fighter, that fell into lava in a 3.5 game).  But that's been a trend that started in OD&D and continues through 5E.  It's just that if given the option, I'll always want to be more on the less lethal side of things and we've always been able to do that.  We've been able to handle both extremes in every version of the game.</blockquote>

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