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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jdrakeh" data-source="post: 4017795" data-attributes="member: 13892">I don't agree with this, personally. I think there should be a threat of death in combats that matter (i.e., combats that are central to a given adventure) but I've seen the above attitude used to justify the death of a supposed hero at the hands of a peasant with a broken stick in systems (including D&D) that employ critical hits -- and, really, if a peasant with a broken stick can hand your ass to you ever, you weren't much of a hero to begin with. You were a joke and pretending otherwise is pointless. In a game where the PCs are supposedly heroes, unheroic death should never be on the table. That said, let's not confuse this with death by low-level creature. That's fine. Getting killed while fighting goblins is heroic because it's something that normal folks don't do as a general rule. Getting killed by the local bully in a pub fight intended to serve merely as a set-up for adventure because of blind luck is not heroic (at all) and should never happen. It's not a matter of lethal versus non-lethal, but heroic versus unheroic. If you're running a game that is supposed to be heroic, then it had better be heroic. Telling your players that X is a game of heroism and adventure, then running it like it was Papers & Paychecks will drive away players just as fast as a non-genre appropriate level of lethality in combat will. That I have no problem with, though it's worth pointing out that this kind of death is hardly random -- the DM chooses when PCs come into contact with potential lethal threats of the stated nature. If by "random" you mean that these threats deal a random amount of damage that may or may not kill characters. . . well, so do sword blows. I think you'd be better off calling this kind of death "Death by Environment" rather than "Random Death". I agree with all but the last sentence. There is an entire successful sub-industry of RPGs devoted to giving players the kind of narrative control which you seem to think can only succeed in driving players away from the table. Multiple companies and several RPG products seem to suggest that the reality is quite a bit different. There is an established market for games that give players a large degree of narrative control including (and, perhaps, especially) the right to narrate their own character's death. I agree with all of the above cited commentary with the caveat that, sometimes, a "time out" isn't a bad thing and, indeed, may be preferable depending upon the sub-genre of Fantasy being emulated.</blockquote>

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