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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9065820" data-attributes="member: 29398">In our case it's quite the opposite: those things have generally succeeded, become popular (hugely so in the case of wild magic), and stuck around.That said, I'm not familiar with the specific "good hits and bad misses" table you're referring to.  Homebrew?  Or something I missed in Drag-Mag?I bolded the key word there; a word that where you use it you probably instead mean "character".And it's a very big difference.  The game itself can and does quite happily roll on despite the loss of any number of characters along the way, with the exception being if-when all the characters are lost at once, i.e a TPK.  Put another way: the game is bigger than any one character.And if adventuring is to in fact be the dangerous life-threatening activity that the advertising says it is, then Bad Things* have to be able to happen to PCs.  Further, every now and then some of them should actually happen even if just by bad luck.  Otherwise, the "danger" to the PCs is all fake, more like a great big Halloween haunted house display than actual danger.* - death, level loss, limb loss, wealth loss, and so forth.=======================Tangentially related to the above, I ran the numbers a few years back as to what was the cause of death for each of the very many character deaths we've seen in our 40+ years of games.  Needless to say there was a huge variety, mostly because I broke "creature" down into creature type.  I also looked at source in order to distinguish e.g. poison from a trap vs poison from a creature.  The data's not perfect; some of our early game logs aren't all that specific sometimes, but the general trends become obvious.The number one source of deaths: the characters' own party.  This includes mis-aimed spells, intentional PvP actions, fumbles, party-caused wild surges, self-inflicted deaths (intentional or otherwise), and so forth.The number two source: other adventurers.  This includes any kindred-species opponent with a class and levels - the evil wizard, the black knight, the highway bandits, the third guard to the left, and so forth.Number three: Giants (all types, batched).  Then a large drop to...Number four: Dragons (all colours, batched).  Then a large drop to...Number five: Demons (any and all).  Then another large drop to Golems at six, after which it become a long-tail list of many dozen other other creatures and sources e.g. traps.As for the cause of death, number one is melee combat and it's not even close; melee causes more character deaths than everything else combined.Number two is spells and spell-like effects from devices, at about 1/4 the melee rate.  Then there's another big drop to...Number three: Traps, though we're into minor stuff here: there's about 12 melee deaths for each trap death.Close behind is Wild Magic, followed in order by Breath Weapon, Petrification, Missile Fire (including Giant-thrown boulders), and Curse.To my great surprise, Falling and Poison were way down this list.</blockquote>

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