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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5954776" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=11300]Herremann the Wise[/MENTION]I've personally got nothing against death spirals. Rolemaster - the game I GMed for nearly 20 years before 4e - has one. Burning Wheel - the game I hope to GM after my 4e campaign finishes - has one.But both systems have the death spiral fully integrated from the ground up.RM, for example, has very (notoriusly?) swingy combat, which helps make the death spiral survivable, or at least not boring. Even at severe penalties you can still roll, hope to get open-ended high and then to roll a good crit - and every RM table has seen this happen often enough that the possibility makes the player stay engaged (this is what WotC was going for in 4e with the 20+ death save, I think, but at least at my table I've never seen it happen yet).(Rolemaster also conforms, at least roughly, to your approach of wizards/scholars etc differing from fighters much more markedly in their incapacitation threshold than in their death threshold.)Burning Wheel has an advancement mechanic that makes it advantageous to be wounded - because rolling with fewer dice makes any given challenge harder, and hence (everything else being equal) more likely to contribute to advancement. Of course wounded PCs will fail those checks, but BW is premised on the assumption that failed checks thwart the PC but not the player.If D&D is going to introduce a death spiral, it needs to be in a way that makes sense within the play of the game (not just the fiction).  [MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION] had a good idea in a recent post where taking wounds could be linked to accruing fate points, which could then be used (now or later) for bonuses/benefits that otherwise are hard to unlock. Thus giving players an incentive to throw their PCs into harm's way, and helping to generate the fiction that most people seem to want of (moderately) wounded heroes pushing on through their injuries because the stakes are just too high to back down!</blockquote>

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