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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 3312450" data-attributes="member: 2205">Yeah, there are plenty of ways to maintain a sense of danger without actually killing PC's right and left.  My most successful implementation of this was my Dark•Heritage homebrew, which also used a very diverse and eclectic mix of d20 rules.  There was no resurrection.  There was no Raise Dead, Reincarnate or anything like that.  In fact, the only magic in the whole setting that was available to PC's was the magic system from the d20 Call of Cthulhu book.  I really played up the angle that the setting was a fantasy horror setting, and the players bought into it.  I also started the campaign off by giving them some relatively high powered pregens to play, and  promptly killed them all before seguing over to their actual PCs.  After several months of play, though, and several pretty close calls, we hadn't had a single player death  ((EDIT: player character death!  Although we haven't had a single player death either, thank goodness!)).  There were a number of reasons for this (Action Points being used for auto-stabilize was a big one, and the Unearthed Arcana "armor converts a portion of lethal damage into subdual damage" rule was probably the biggest factor, though) but the point is that there are better and usually considerably more effective ways to frighten your players than to be a hard-ass and kill their characters with frequency.  In fact, that tends to have the opposite effect, in my experience.  If characters die easily and frequently, players tend to get more flippant and casual and shallow about their characters, rather than really taking them seriously. Although an occasional death certainly goes a long way.  They need to actually play their PCs for a while to get some attachment to them, develop them as characters, and then they feel more at risk when something might happen to them.The biggest contributor to having an epic campaign of that nature is having players that facilitate it.  Some of those great roleplaying moments from reading, say, Piratecat's story hour are completely dependent on players who actually roleplay them out rather than "I draw my sword and attack!" any time anything looks even vaguely fishy, which is an all-too common theme with many D&D players.</blockquote>

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