NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 6487967" data-attributes="member: 20564">I like my players to sweat and the *threat* of death to be real, to give more meaning to the victories.  That said, in the last campaign I ran we had three character deaths/death-like (turn to stone, etc.) total over seven years of bi-weekly play, none permanent, so I don't think I qualify as a killer DM.  <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=":)" />  I did have the party run from encounters, or scout out and then completely avoid encounters.  I've reduced them to negatives, had encounters end with multiple people in single digits, and otherwise put fear into them.  And I roll in the open in combat and play it how it lands.  Planning a session, I'm looking for challenging and fun encounters, knowing my players are good and regularly "box above their weight class".  (And the occasional cakewalk to show them how cool they've gotten.)  But during the session I'm cheering for the PCs even as running the foes as intelligent (or not) and as fearless (or NOT) as they are.  I celebrate their tactics and cheer their crits, even while throwing hordes of foes against them.Steven Brust has a series of books where resurrection magic is commonplace.  Assassins are used to send a message much like breaking kneecaps in a more gritty world, since unless they destroy the brain/spine or use soul-sucking weapons the person will come back.  (And those types of assassination cost more.)  Death in D&D with the default rules, apart from a TPK, is rarely permanent for PCs above the first few levels.  Really, it more like a game of monopoly where someone eliminated needs to sit out for a while.  (And give them some monsters to run to attempt to inflict the same fun on their comrades-in-arms to avoid that.)  There's a buffer between dropped and death, and then another buffer between dead and out-of-game, and those can let you free yourself to challenge the party without trying to kill them off "for-reals".While this is a 5e post, 13th Age has some lessons we can yoink about lethality.  First is that their raise dead spell works easy on a PC once, and then it's harder and harder to bring them back.  So there's a safety valve for bad luck, but real penalties to stop "invulnerable foolhardy" from becoming an alignment.It also has an optional sidebar from one of the designers about how they won't kill you with an unnamed foe.  Though that doesn't mean the gnoll that dropped your PC won't take you back to the *named* gnoll shaman and set up a big ritual sacrifice that the other PCs have to rescue you from.</blockquote>

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