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<blockquote data-quote="Voranzovin" data-source="post: 8708041" data-attributes="member: 7020495">Another thing I appreciate about deathless games is that they let you take the kid gloves off. When I DM conventional games, I always sweat over the difficulty of encounters, because while death is explicitly on the table, I don't want it to be a frequent occurrence. This tends to lead to fudging, and other DM behaviors that are (in my view) undesirable. I'm much more free to throw challenging encounters at the players when a failure doesn't mean they lose their character.While there are certainly interesting narrative things that can come from death--even if random--I think there are others that are very difficult to get at in a game where failure usually means death. In real life, we fail all the time, and the consequences of our failures are not usually deadly. Fiction is full of characters who fail, and then have to overcome the consiquences of that failure, for good reason. There is something powerful in the archetype of the hero who gets knocked down, loses something important to them, then spits out the blood and comes back for round 2, and that's not something you normally see a lot of in Dnd without the DM putting their thumb on the scales a little too much for my liking.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Voranzovin, post: 8708041, member: 7020495"] Another thing I appreciate about deathless games is that they let you take the kid gloves off. When I DM conventional games, I always sweat over the difficulty of encounters, because while death is explicitly on the table, I don't want it to be a frequent occurrence. This tends to lead to fudging, and other DM behaviors that are (in my view) undesirable. I'm much more free to throw challenging encounters at the players when a failure doesn't mean they lose their character. While there are certainly interesting narrative things that can come from death--even if random--I think there are others that are very difficult to get at in a game where failure usually means death. In real life, we fail all the time, and the consequences of our failures are not usually deadly. Fiction is full of characters who fail, and then have to overcome the consiquences of that failure, for good reason. There is something powerful in the archetype of the hero who gets knocked down, loses something important to them, then spits out the blood and comes back for round 2, and that's not something you normally see a lot of in Dnd without the DM putting their thumb on the scales a little too much for my liking. [/QUOTE]

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