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<blockquote data-quote="Dannager" data-source="post: 6308377" data-attributes="member: 73683">I hope you're not confusing this with a player entitlement issue (and really, let's not go down that road; it doesn't end in a nice place for DMs). This isn't about player entitlement, or spoiled players, or anything like that. This is about a play philosophy that, at its core, threatens the connection that players have to the game. That is something that you want to threaten sparingly, because a player who is invested in the game is much preferred to a player who is not.It's okay to kill characters in ASoIaF, because readers follow a whole bunch of them and are no more inherently connected to the story via one than any of the others. It stings, but that's how the story plays out. It doesn't reflect on the reader, personally, and it doesn't reduce the value of reading the previous chapters of the book.It's less okay to kill characters in D&amp;D, because players are intimately connected to one character. When that character dies (barring resurrection), they must begin with a new character and re-establish ties to the game's narrative. On occasion, this can be a welcome change of pace. More often, though, it comes as a punch to the gut. It's a question of personal investment and risk - if I expect my time running each PC will be short, I have little incentive to explore that character. If I expect, on the other hand, to have the same PC for an entire campaign, I will probably be much more willing to invest energy in fleshing that character out.There's a time and a place for high-lethality games, but I think that time and place is usually one-shot, hyper-casual adventures, not lengthy campaigns.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dannager, post: 6308377, member: 73683"] I hope you're not confusing this with a player entitlement issue (and really, let's not go down that road; it doesn't end in a nice place for DMs). This isn't about player entitlement, or spoiled players, or anything like that. This is about a play philosophy that, at its core, threatens the connection that players have to the game. That is something that you want to threaten [I]sparingly[/I], because a player who is invested in the game is much preferred to a player who is not. It's okay to kill characters in ASoIaF, because readers follow a whole bunch of them and are no more inherently connected to the story via one than any of the others. It stings, but that's how the story plays out. It doesn't reflect on the reader, personally, and it doesn't reduce the value of reading the previous chapters of the book. It's [I]less[/I] okay to kill characters in D&D, because players are intimately connected to [I]one[/I] character. When that character dies (barring resurrection), they must begin with a new character and re-establish ties to the game's narrative. On occasion, this can be a welcome change of pace. More often, though, it comes as a punch to the gut. It's a question of personal investment and risk - if I expect my time running each PC will be short, I have little incentive to explore that character. If I expect, on the other hand, to have the same PC for an entire campaign, I will probably be much more willing to invest energy in fleshing that character out. There's a time and a place for high-lethality games, but I think that time and place is usually one-shot, hyper-casual adventures, not lengthy campaigns. [/QUOTE]

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