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<blockquote data-quote="Tuft" data-source="post: 6309101" data-attributes="member: 60045">In my early RPG years I played in an AD&amp;D campaign that had an XP penalty for dying to &quot;make death matter&quot;. That is, if your character died, your next character started with quite a lot less XP than your previous character died with.Quite predictably, that lead to several quite nasty &quot;death spirals&quot;. As the new character was weaker than the rest of the party, it stood a much greater chance of dying - which brought an even weaker character into play for that player....What I noticed was that at the end of such a death spiral, the player just stopped caring about the character, and started taking hair-raising risks, doing really stupid stunts, and quite frankly endangering the common goals of the party. This usually ended in that player leaving campaign, and in some cases even the circle of friends. When I joined that campaign I heard about the aftermath of three such spirals, saw two of my own, and finally after several years experienced it myself in a successor campaign for that same GM (Shadowrun, not D&amp;D, but the same effect). It took me quite a while to emotionally get over that spectacular crash and burn...</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tuft, post: 6309101, member: 60045"] In my early RPG years I played in an AD&D campaign that had an XP penalty for dying to "make death matter". That is, if your character died, your next character started with quite a lot less XP than your previous character died with. Quite predictably, that lead to several quite nasty "death spirals". As the new character was weaker than the rest of the party, it stood a much greater chance of dying - which brought an even weaker character into play for that player.... What I noticed was that at the end of such a death spiral, the player just stopped caring about the character, and started taking hair-raising risks, doing really stupid stunts, and quite frankly endangering the common goals of the party. This usually ended in that player leaving campaign, and in some cases even the circle of friends. When I joined that campaign I heard about the aftermath of three such spirals, saw two of my own, and finally after several years experienced it myself in a successor campaign for that same GM (Shadowrun, not D&D, but the same effect). It took me quite a while to emotionally get over that spectacular crash and burn... [/QUOTE]

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