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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 9069468" data-attributes="member: 20564">I'm late getting to this thread.  Having played a lot of AD&D and AD&D 2nd, I remember we died.  However, a good portion of those I can chalk up to changing expectations on the DM - more antagonistic DMs who saw their role as opposition to the party, as opposed to (co-)storyteller with the players, definitely had an impact.But there were other things that I feel made it deadlier.1. Save-or-die spells.  One memorable event was several players were late (for our weekly Saturday noon until the wee hours of the morning AD&D 2nd game) and two characters, both in high teens in terms of level, went out on their own to deal with an informant in another city.  Teleport over there, meet with them.  Oh look, it's a trap, poison in the food.  No problems... until the characters rolled a 1 and a 2 for their saves.  Dead.  With no other party members even in the same city.  I think we had to true resurect them, and they both lost their primary adventuring magic items.2. Lower hit dice and rolled HPs even at first.  Back then, HD was just the size of the die you rolled for HPs, there was no self-healing.  But a magic user started with d4 in HPs.  I have played a character with 1 maximum HP before, a bad roll on a character without a CON modifier.  (Oh, and CON mod to HPs maxed out fairly low unless you were a fighter class/subclass.)3. Adventures (modules) were often adapted from Convention runs, which were designed to to be hard and kill off characters so they could get scored and ranked.4. Less resources at low levels.  A 1st level magic user had 1 spell a day.  Period.  No cantrips, they needed to use darts, a quarterstaff, dagger or crossbow for the rest.5. In-combat healing was needed and expected.6.  No OA rules or anything like that to protect your squishy characters.And things that made it less deadly.1. Static saves.  Saves only depended on the target.  We had a high-teen/epic level campaign going on and you made your saves 80%+ of the time.2. Expectations of loads of magic items.</blockquote>

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