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="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 4033163" data-attributes="member: 32164">Ah. I see. So you actually spend 5-10 rounds rolling a d20 check for every NPC and monster in your campaign to see if they stabilize on their own? That's an impressive dedication to "equal treatment."Given a DM like that, I'd make sure never to play a character that was too heroic. Because my PC would be the one who walked around after every fight slitting the throats of all the dead monsters, "just to be sure."That may be to your tastes, but it doesn't work for mine.But individuals can have very different opinions about what makes for a 'good' game. In my world, I like there to be a relatively large buffer between the PCs and the events of the world. What you call "scripted hack melodrama," I call the "life of a hero." When I play D&D, I don't want to replay The Dirty Dozen, The Magnificent Seven, or any of dozens of other movies where half the heroes are dead at the end, I want Silverado, or Star Wars where the good guys get to ride off into the sunset, at least most of the time. (More on this below, as I realize even the movies I mention here don't reflect the possibility of random death at any time.)While "realistic" death may be what you're after, I certainly don't want my D&D games to look like the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, without the player knowing whether he's Tom Hanks or "Extra #6" when the party hits the beach at Normandy.There's nothing wrong with heroic sacrifice, but the death should be heroic, damnit, not random. Even in The 13th Warrior, where most of the "heroes" die, some of them live. Even most of the characters in The Dirty Dozen and The Magnificent Seven live until the climactic scene. They aren't killed off by "Desperado #4" in the second scene. That's because the characters who die randomly in an action movie aren't the main characters. They are, for the most part, extras. Or you've created a situation where most of the characters dying is key to setting the right "tone." I submit that while stories like that might make for very good movies, they usually make for crappy games, since the player whose PC dies in Scene 2 is out of the rest of the adventure (without the contrivance of a "replacement character" joining the party everytime a hero dies). Which is, IMO, usually way more cheesy than just having the original PC survive.Wait a sec. I just had a thought. Are you one of those DMs who thinks "attrition-based adventuring" is "fun?"</blockquote>

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