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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6155292" data-attributes="member: 37579">Death is really a lovely example of a gaming Catch-22. Well, Mexican Standoff really as there's more than one factor.If death is motivated by the story and you can only die when it makes narrative sense, why are you playing a game? You're really just engaging in shared storytelling. If you're just going to regularly ignore the rules when they get in the way of the story, why have them at all?But if death happens regardless of the story then you might very quickly have a party of characters unconnected to the start of the story with far less narrative tie to the events. Death makes it inefficient to have characters with real personalities, backgrounds, and goals as they're just going to die. Without the risk of death, combat is less thrilling; the game loses the opportunity for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat or sudden last minute reversals. But if every combat is a grim struggle to survive the game becomes exhausting and the thrill is lost.Save or die effects make the game cheap and swingy, adding an artificial difficulty to encounters and monsters. But without monsters that are variably challenging and more deadly, monsters can become samey.</blockquote>