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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6487869" data-attributes="member: 22424">I'm not going to address this one, as I didn't make that claim. <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=":)" /> My preference is that in D&D death should be a possibility, but YMMV of course. And, as you point out, removing the possibility of death doesn't necessarily remove all challenge.It's possible I mis-spoke when I said that - what I wrote could well have been read as "if a PC makes a bad decision then that PC should die", when my position would be closer to "if a PC dies, it should be because of one of these two things..."Well, I did give several examples in my post. But it boils down to this: if the best available information suggests that a course of action is likely to have a bad outcome, and you do it anyway, then it's a bad decision.And, FWIW, I don't agree that the outcome is the only way to judge whether a decision is good or bad. If I had chosen simply to skip work today in order to play video games instead, that would have been a bad decision - even if my employer was then gracious enough to overlook it as a moment of madness.Who said anything about "morally judging"?But, in any case, if you're in the midst of a dungeon environment filled with life-threatening dangers, monsters, and traps, then simply opening either chest #34 or #41 is a bad decision. At the very least, you should check for traps first!This is an important point, though. Simply put, I don't 'trick' my players with false clues. It's simply not my job - my job is to accurately describe what they perceive.Because that is what the dice say should happen.Now, as I said in my first post in this thread, I don't want to see PCs constantly dying as a result of one bad roll. My expectation (certainly with D&D, but also with most other RPGs) is that the designers will have done significant design work and playtesting to ensure that those random rolls hit a lethality "sweet spot" - not too many deaths, but probably a few (especially after a sequence of bad rolls). Even better is if they could outline their thinking in the DMG (or equivalent) with guidance so I can tailor the game to suit myself if needed.But once that background work is done I want the possibility of PC death, and I want that to be at least partially random. (Again, in D&D - the same is not true in all other games.)And, yes, that means that long-held and cherished PCs can die, and it also means that some of those deaths will be of the order of Wash or Newt - not everyone gets the big death scene. For me, that's a feature, not a bug.Of course, I understand that YMMV on this issue, and maybe quite dramatically. Which is another reason I would like the DMG to provide those guidelines on tweaking the "lethality dial".</blockquote>

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