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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Matthias" data-source="post: 6190496" data-attributes="member: 3625">I would only have house rules for instant death if there was some way for a PC to pay to get out of it, such as with Action Points, Hero Points, or whatever.I generally dislike instant death rules for the same reasons instnat death spells and instant death traps are bad, because it's hard for PCs to come back from the dead at low levels, and trivial to do at high levels--so for most of the duration of a campaign, they are just 'unfun' parts of the game that might or might not happen, but when the rules do get invoked they do not really make the game enjoyable for the players.Of course, without any actual risk of PC death, the game also ceases to be fun, so you can't simply design the game to make it impossible for a PC to die and still expect the player to realistically portray a character with an intact survival instinct. You have to allow for the possibility of death to maintain a measure of tension in any encounter, no matter how trivial the chance of ultimate failure may seem.But there can be an implicit risk of PC death without automatically ruining the game. Generally the players will balk at seemingly nonsensical death, but most reasonable players will accept a death as the result of terrible luck on the dice or bad player decisions. The problem is that instant death rules as usually adopted are still too arbitrary and are perceived to give too much power to bad luck for the players to not get upset when the instant death does occur. There may be no true statistical difference between a really rare 1/8000 chance of a triple-natural-20 instant-kill, and a string of total misses for the player characters and some really good crits and high damage rolls for the monsters that in combination lead to the death of a PC. But the triple nat-20 death will still be thought of as unfair and arbitrary death, however rare, compared to the series of bad-luck rolls experienced otherwise.Anyway, most instant death rules as designed tend to apply equally to all classes and levels, and in practice become  more deadly and permanent for a low-level character than for a high-level one. Because most campaigns begin at low-level, their unintendedly severe penalty will be experienced by more low-level than high-level characters, further tarnishing the system's reputation. And the all high-level characters were once characters who were low level but managed not to get killed off by things like instant-death effects.</blockquote>

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