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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5810249" data-attributes="member: 2205">These are probably pretty obvious, but here they are nonetheless:1) There are ways of making the game feel very dangerous without actually killing PC's willy-nilly.  You need to wrap your mind around when a combat needs to end, even if it means foes die at the "appropriately dramatic" time, even if the notes you have behind your screen that the PCs will never see or know about says that he still has more hit points.  To some people, that's "cheating."  To me, it's just running the game, and any GM who doesn't have that knack is unlikely to be as good as one who does.  A good GM, even one who assiduously avoids any hint of railroading and "my precious plot" should still master skills learned from TV, movies and novels like pacing, the ability to control tension and suspense in a session, and stuff like that.  In fact, I'd say that goes a lot longer than a bunch of encounters towards engendering a feeling of danger.2) Some players get this, and some don't, but as a GM you need to encourage this attitude: bad things happening to your character does not equal bad things happening to you!  In fact, I'd venture to say that any book, movie or TV show in which nothing bad happened to the main characters would be boring as dirt.  There's another knack of presenting challenges, failures and other "bad" results as an opportunity to make the game more fun rather than a punishment for "losing" the game.  For example, in one game I ran, barsoomcore's womanizing Don Juan character was killed after mouthing off to a powerful demon-queen.  Who then felt bad about killing her favorite mortal plaything and reincarnated him in the body of a recently killed Fast Times era Phoebe Cates character.  In fact, it was such a fun opportunity to do something challenging and different with the character that another player manipulated the game so that he could die and be reincarnated too--into the body of a gorilla, in his case.Granted, that was a little bit more silly and wahoo than is always my style, but it worked brilliantly in this campaign for these players.3) Let the PCs face non-lethal challenges.  Think of things that you might see in an action or thriller type movie or book, and adapt them.  A footchase through the city streets.  A challenge that is for some physical pursuit other than mortal combat (I dunno, cabre tossing, or something.  Skeet shooting with a crossbow.  A long distance cross-country style race.  A Ben-Hur style chariot race.)  The players will get much of the same sense of tension and gamesmanship that makes this more fun than just sitting around telling each other stories, yet without the risk of PC death.  Heck, one of my favorite encounters was a pie fight, of all things.  Nobody was at any risk there, unless it was the risk of gaining a few pounds.4) It works for comic books, soap operas and long-running TV shows with a defined villain--PCs that are assumed to be dead can come back after a time.  Ta-da!  I was only mostly dead!  You never found the body, did you?  Etc.  Takes a little behind the scenes work for the GM with the player, and him probably playing a "temp" PC of some kind in the meantime, but how many players wouldn't leap at the chance to pull something like this off?  In fact, the PCs can come back having done something on his own while "gone" that brings new clues and a fresh take on old plot lines that aren't getting anywhere as fast as they should.5) Be very careful about utilizing a PC and/or his back story as the lynch pin for a major campaign element.  It's important to create the illusion--even in a game where PC death is rare--that the PC's could die, and sometimes, of course, that means that they will.  The best way to handle this, IME, is to make sure that the campaign doesn't miss a beat with the PC dead.  Gamers who (like me, and it seems, you) approach the game with a kind of "collaborative screenwriter or novelist" approach to the game don't want disposable PCs, but by the same token, you can't make a character so crucial to the game that without him it falls apart.6) I like the idea you mention above--and have used it many times myself--that the PCs are a forward team of a larger organization, so that if someone dies, well, there's recruits already waiting in the wings to take their place, potentially without stretching credulity or verisimilitude.7) Read books, watch TV shows and movies, and even play games that are in a different genre, and don't presuppose magical healing, relentless dungeoncrawling, or resurrection magic or stuff like that.  See how they're handled in those games/books/movies/TV shows, and borrow shamelessly the stuff that works.  I'm always amazed when D&D players tell me things like, "you can't possibly run a game without a cleric in the party.  The game just isn't balanced otherwise."  The fact that most other RPG's don't suppose magical healing and yet work just fine makes that an obviously untrue statement.  It does mean that you may want to mess just a bit with "the story of D&D" though.  If the story of D&D is "go into a hole in the ground that's full of monsters and don't come back up until you've killed everything there and taken all its stuff", then tweak that to one that works better.  Frankly, if you're a GM who appreciates a more story-focused game anyway, then the story of D&D is probably not very compelling to you anyway.  I know it certainly isn't to me.</blockquote>

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