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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 8854208" data-attributes="member: 6801845">All I'm saying is that characters did not die with any greater frequency back in the day than they do now.  The game was as deadly as the group wanted it, just like it is today.  About the only house rule we had for PCs with survivability was that when you rolled for HP you always got 1/2 max (round down) or more.  We also tended to be fairly lenient with stat rolls, but the game was different back then and I don't remember any PCs having super high con.I can go more all out as a DM in 5E than I ever would have in early games, I regularly have one or more PCs down in a tougher encounter.  That's something you couldn't really do in older games which I think adds to the tension of the game.  I roll death saves secretly and if I want to I can always double tap (hitting an unconscious creature is an auto-crit and causes 2 death save failures). Even then back in the day if somebody did die (which, again, was rare) most of the time you just had to haul the body back to town to get a cleric to raise dead.  You'd have to do a favor for the cleric if you didn't have enough money but that was it.I've had PCs of mine die in every edition.  Mostly because I keep insisting on running elves now and then.  But the overall rate of them dying has not changed and most groups I play with rolled out in the open.We didn't use house rules.  We rolled in the open.  We may have avoided some monsters and been more generous with healing potions or NPC clerics in town, I have no clue.  But we didn't modify the rules on dying.  We didn't have a half dozen hirelings as meat shields.  The rate of PC death, even temporary death, was still relatively low.I don't care that RAW it was more easy to kill a PC.  It did not happen any more often than it does now.  I get tired of having to repeat that.  Based on other people's responses my experience was not unusual.</blockquote>

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