That's patently false. For example, no matter how many games of Soul Calibur I play, I don't get any better at wielding a pair of nunchaku and dressing like Elvis.
You may be right. I've never played Soul Calibur or aspired to be a nunchaku wielding Elvis impersonator. But could it also be that you're just not trying hard enough?
So I think it all comes down to deliberateness, as I said above. How one goes about training and to what end? If one is training towards some end or ideal, like heroism, it is possible to use almost anything - short of those vices which are intentionally anti-heroic - to advantage. If however one is shooting to become a nunchaku wielding Elvis, or maybe a sixty story tall lizard painted as a rodeo clown who shoots laser beams from his eyes and has radioactive morning breath, then maybe Soul Calibur isn't the best training tool to use. Then again maybe D&D ain't either in circumstances like that.
And yeah, I'm just being smart-alecky. Maybe Soul Calibur is good for that kinda thing after all.
But all pretending isn't training.
Yeah, I seem to remember someone saying something like that somewhere.
Toning down the games lethality is imo a healthy thing. I mean, how many characters have gotten split apart in our game in the last year or so... 7 and counting. Only 4 of those deaths have come from poor decision-making. 3 deaths were no-fault to the player, they could have easily happened to any character.
I don't know the circumstances of your particular campaign or situation. I can say that even in dangerous occupations, like soldiering or being a policeman, even most people who go into combat or shootouts never get killed and the majority of those who are injured, even seriously, recover. (Of course medical care nowadays is a lot better than ever before, but magic could be used as a sort of analogue for modern medicine, so it would all even out.)
So death, whereas it is perfectly natural and should be played that way in my opinion, is also beatable in a great many instances, even in extremely dangerous situations. So whereas I don't know the level of lethality in your campaign or setting, or if you guys are just venturing into particularly hostile or moribund territory, but, even so, and even though I am a proponent of realistic death situations, many death situations can and should be avoided.
That becomes especially true with experience. When you encounter dangerous situations more or less frequently, you become a better judge of how to avoid the most lethal aspects of a combat, of a trap, or of a situation which "just doesn't feel right." You begin to develop a real and experiential "sense about things." You recognize ambush scenarios, you begin to see evidence of sabotage that you would have never noticed when younger, you know when somebody is acting squirrelly and agitated, hostile, suspicious, or dangerous. In the same way you learn to become better at killing, or better at tracking, or better at gathering Intel, you gain experience with danger, at recognizing how it looks and feels, and at avoiding circumstances that would be lethal to less well trained and less experienced individuals.
So whereas death to me should flow naturally from the gaming scenario, so the ability to avoid and overcome death should also flow naturally from both player and character experience. I'm not saying "death or danger avoidance" should be a feat or magical spell or anything like that, though it could be, but simply that men and women possess many skills which come from experience, and that these skills really operate, and often very effectively even if sometimes sub-consciously, when danger is apparent, and that I've both personally experienced these kinds of things, and seen them experienced in others. Once you've walked into a couple of ambushes, or infiltrated a couple of nests, you start to develop a sort of, for lack of a better term, a suspicion of
"this mutha sumthin is not right at all." TMSINRAT. It just smells all wrong, like a pile of dead rats dumped over a butchered corpse, and I think most people are like that to some degree or another, able to detect that something evil this way comes before it ever shows it's grinning skull. Fool me once and so nearly kill me, shame on you, fool me twice, and shame on me. Skills develop in people which not only allow them to do certain things, but that also allow them to avoid certain things. Even if only sub-consciously sometimes. Not all skills or capabilities possessed by an individual are describable in mechanical and game terms, yet they remain real nonetheless.
And that kind of thing should be exploitable in-game.
So, put in the way you described above, and if I understand you correctly, seven dead characters in a year or so, shows either that players and characters are not gaining experience with how to avoid death and lethal, the characters are being often and intentionally placed in very lethal, maybe excessively lethal, circumstances, or the DM is overplaying the "lethality card," so that death is not just the end of a character, but an end in and of itself.
So whereas I'm with Reynard that death is important in the game, that doesn't mean it is consistently inevitable, or not avoidable with cleverness, cunning, and experience. Of course Reynard never said it wasn't avoidable either, I'm just saying avoidability grows with experience to some degree.
