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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 2017639" data-attributes="member: 16936">Yes.  And personally, I like it better when the penalty is FAILURE, which is in many ways worse than merely dying and leads to a much more interesting game.As a player and as a GM, PC death seems boring and counterproductive.  It means that for however long it takes to make a new character and re-insert it into the game, the player whose character died isn't playing with the rest of us.  It means that all the character development and backstory that the player put into that PC is now mostly a waste of time.  And that, in turn, encourages most of our players to stop making detailed and interesting characters.  After a while, character death stops becoming a useful and fun penalty: it just removes interesting things from the game and players get jaded with it.But so far, failure has always worked for us.  You know, where losing the big fight means that terrible things happen to the PCs and to the world around them: death would be a mercy, because death would mean they didn't have to make any tough decisions after their loss and wouldn't have to live with the consequences of their failure.  After a big failure, the complications pile up on the PCs, giving them lots to talk about in-character and even more motivations to set new goals for themselves.  And the joy of finally winning a victory after a series of crushing failures is huge, far in excess of the charge you'd get out of finally surviving a big fight after dying in all the big fights before it.Of course, it helps that we don't play a lot of combat-heavy games, and that our gaming group isn't made up of the kind of people who hear "character death is rare" and immediately say "Cool!  I have Plot Immunity!  I mouth off to the gods and then go swimming in a volcano just before lunch!"  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Once the sources of random character death are minimized and the players are on board with the idea of the characters believing that death is likely even though outside the game it's acknowledged that it probably won't happen, you can really invest in the PCs.  Since I don't think you can have dramatic tension without a little emotional investment in the characters, I've always been confused by the people who say that the game needs the constant threat of PC death to maintain that sense of tension: if the PC can die at any moment, there's less reason to invest anything in them, especially if you've already buried a dozen PCs.--killing them is too easy and too kind: making them live with defeat is much crueler and more deviousryan</blockquote>

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