DinoInDisguise
A russian spy disguised as a t-rex.
Oooh boy. Gonna have to completely reject that penultimate sentence of this bit. Death is not a structural necessity. There are plenty of games, including some versions of D&D, that do not have character death. Consider Dragonlance stuff. Very much D&D--but the modules explicitly had rules against deaths for named characters prior to certain events happening. Hence death cannot be a necessity of any kind, structural or otherwise.
Nah. I had a whole thread about this topic a long, long while back (couple years at least now). Death is not the only thing that achieves these goals. It is merely one way to do so. IME, it actually is not the best way, because the extreme severity means a significant number of players turtle up and disengage, becoming no-experimentation, no-risk, no-derring-do types, because they're afraid of having their participation taken away. And no, in my experience, it EMPHATICALLY is not effective to try shock therapy on these folks. Quite the opposite; that's the fastest way to drive them away from ever participating in TTRPGs ever again. Further, because death is simultaneously maximum severity and maximum impersonal-ness (impersonality? hmm), it doesn't really motivate players very well in my experience, other than scaring them off. If you actually want to motivate them, they need a reason to dare, not a reason to be scared of daring--which means other motives are actually a lot more effective. Again, all IME.
So with the very foundation of your argument challenged, it's hard to really respond to the rest. You're working off an assumption I find not only personally inapplicable, but objectively incorrect. There are, in fact, versions of specifically D&D, not just any TTRPG, that involve no-death or minimized-death rules, and yet they still hold together, they still have weighty decisions, they still have meaningful tension, and still have stakes both general and specific. My DW game still has plenty of edge and isn't flat, even though I have told my players that they will never be subject to character deaths that are all three of (1) random (=fluke of the dice, not the result of an intentional incredibly dangerous choice or of accepting one's fate), (2) permanent (=character is dead and isn't going to come back on their own e.g. Gandalf in LotR), and (3) irrevocable (=players will not have the ability to reverse the death in a reasonably short period of time by expending resources or promising something to a being that can do the job.) My players are still highly invested and indeed even the brand-new-to-TTRPG players care a lot about many things in the world, and have done rash or dangerous things to protect who and what they care about.
I don’t think we’re in total disagreement. My prior post may have framed death in a bit better of a light than I actually believe. I don’t mean to argue that death is the only way to provide stakes, just that in traditional D&D and games with similar mechanical assumptions, it’s one of the structural consequences that helps frame risk and decision-making. If you ditch it, and the players know you wont kill them, you end up with odd player behaviors. There might very well be a way to fix that, where death isn't on the table, I just have not seen it.
I also agree with your point about turtling. If death is handled poorly, such as a sudden, meaningless punishment, you are correct, it absolutely kills experimentation. But to me, that’s a table culture issue more than a death issue. Some GMs use death as a blunt instrument, others use it more narratively. I’ve been on both sides, I’ve mishandled it before, and yeah, it shut people down. I've also seen it be a very powerful and positive force in a game when done correctly.
If I came across as advocating for death as an ideal outcome, that’s not what I meant. I believe the threat of death is usually enough to prevent the behavior issues I fear when it's off the table. And I haven't, personally, killed many PCs. What I was trying to contrast was death and forced persuasion. Because when death happens (at least when it’s done right), it’s the result of the player’s choices. Forced persuasion, by contrast, hijacks the character’s inner life, and rarely involves a choice they made. That involvement of the player's choices is core to what I feel seperates the two.
Personally, I’m already skeptical of status conditions like paralyzed or stunned, they can rob players of meaningful choices, and I’m not convinced they add much. So I’m not dogmatic about death either. Maybe in a year I’ll be convinced that it’s unnecessary. But I still think forced persuasion, especially when it overrides established character beliefs, is in the same category as the worst ways death can be handled. So I stand by the idea that it’s possible to be pro-death (in mechanical terms) while still opposing forced persuasion as poor form.
TLDR: Someone who is better at running games than I am, might be able to remove the threat of death and not cause issues. I can't, not yet anyways.
Edit: @Eric V for visibility, as this kind of addresses his reply as well.
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