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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KidSnide" data-source="post: 5846516" data-attributes="member: 54710">I think character death is one of those things where there is a big gap between actual preference and reported preference.  Folks like the feeling of danger.  They like the excitement of not knowing if their characters can pull it through or not.  But the presence of excitement isn't the same thing as actual risk of failure.  People like action movies.  It's exciting and "dangerous" but the good guys always win.  The excitement comes from the creating the illusion that the protagonists might fail, even though they were scripted to succeed.  Nobody (or almost nobody) wants to play D&D with a script, but I think almost everyone wants to feel as if they might lose vastly more frequently than they actually lose.  In-combat healing is a classic example of this dynamic.  Because PCs typically have access to much more in-combat healing than their opponents, you can have situations where individual PCs are at (or past) the edge of going down while keeping the party very far away from the edge of defeat.  That sort of dynamic gives most players a desirably heightened sense of danger.Of course, creating the feeling of danger is very dependent on the table.  What works for some people doesn't work for others, and some D&D players are analytic enough that statistical illusion doesn't work well and it's hard to create the feeling of danger without danger itself.  But the point remains that in a survey situation, it's hard to tell if people are voting for an actual level of danger in their games or a perceived level of danger in their games.-KS</blockquote>

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