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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 978786" data-attributes="member: 4937">"If it wasn't so riduculaously easy to get killed in d&d i might agree. As is though one crit or one failed save and your toast all too often. The absurdly high offense and low defense of the game almost necesitates relativly easy access to raise dead spells."And this is opposed to what? Chill? Call of Cthullu? GURPS? Shadowrun? L5R? Please tell me about the system by which in comparison it is so tough to get killed.  About the only system I can think of that compares to D&D's player durability is WEG Star Wars.  By and large, it is rather tough to get killed in D&D.  It is so tough to die in D&D that it totally changes the way that D&D players (especially those that only play D&D) approach the game.  Even getting injured in a fight is a pretty significant thing in most other systems.  Once hit in GURPS and you go into a shock cycle from which you are unlikely to recover, even if that first hit didn't cleave you to the floor.  In D&D, you are good to go right down to 0 hit points.  Hack-n-Slash is so definatively D&D precisely because there is a pretty good chance that a reasonably high level party can fight thier way out of anything, so you end up with parties whose solution to anything is to whip out swords and start slashing.  As others have said, it is almost impossible to impress on the average party that they are outmatched and should surrender or negotiate.  Players tend to fight to the death in every situation.Raise Dead being an effective repeated solution to party death is a relatively new edition to the rules.  In 'old skool' D&D every time you got raised you not only lost CON, but you had to make a resurection survival check (a type of CON save) to see if you had experienced final death.  Even dying once was potentially grevious to a power gamer, if it meant his CON dropped from 16 to 15 or such.I am in the camp that says that miracles shouldn't grow on trees, but that is hardly my primary interest.  My primary interest is getting players to act like getting killed is a big deal, not an annoyance, so that they actually try to avoid and start playing a little better.  After sufficient story line gets invested in a character, even I don't want to see characters die so I control the hazards accordingly.  But the last thing I want is a party of six characters with 28 resurrections between them turning my story line into a video game.  Finally, whenever the DM feels that the character's death was just plain bad luck and the character was worth saving he can always fiat the character back to life through a plot device and coming up with the 500 or 5000 g.p. is the easiest part of doing this.</blockquote>

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