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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8711869" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Don’t worry, I understand the degree to which many people despise character death. Don’t mistake my fairly dry way of communicating for under-appreciation of that fact.I’m not sure if I’m expressing myself correctly here. What I’m trying to get at here is that the “goal” of a game is meaningless on its own. Let me use a different analogy. Imagine you’re climbing up a mountain and someone comes up in a helicopter and offers you a ride to the top. If you’re climbing it because there’s a rare herb that grows at the top of the mountain that you need to make medicine for your ailing grandmother, you’re naturally going to accept. But if you’re climbing the mountain because you’re a climbing enthusiast and it’s fun for you, you’re going to say no because getting to the top isn’t really the point. The struggle of the climb is what gives value to reaching the top. Games are like the latter case. You have a goal, but the goal itself isn’t meaningful without the struggle to achieve it. That’s what makes it a game.For me, the struggle to keep the character alive is the climb that makes what I’m doing a game, and taking that off the table is offering the helicopter ride up. I suspect that you are playing a different game than I am. Even though we’re both “playing D&D,” your D&D is a different mountain than mine is. You’ve got different goals with a different part of the rules providing the challenge to achieving them. The removal of character death doesn’t remove the game’s value for you like it does for me, because you’re playing for a different struggle than I am. In fact, because character death is such an inconvenience, your game is improved by its removal.</blockquote>

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