Which is better: Character death or item destruction?

[Seeten]

I cant answer this question qwithout knowing what class I am playing. Am I Fighter or Barbarian? Death please.

Am I a Cleric? Item destruction. I can always make more, or perform miracles, and if worse comes to worse, I can just use my awesome magic to simulate items.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

It might (might) depend on the campaign. In a fair number of the games that I have run under 3.X resurrection magic is rare to nonexistent. When character death means 'generate a new character' it is a bit different than 'lose a 5000 gp diamond and a level'.

The Auld Grump

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Item loss is easy to adapt to; character loss requires rolling dice.

 

[takyris]

Regardless of level, I'd rather lose loot than my life. I know intellectually that yeah, I'm one Raise Dead or Resurrection away from returning, but if I'm any kind of roleplayer in a game with any kind of stakes, I'd rather lose my loot.

 

[Dross]

I'd rather item loss, as it means my "buddies" get less to loot from my corpse.

 

[Dross]

As a serious answer,
Character death generally creates more hassles to the plots of our games than an item being destroyed.

So Item destruction.

 

[Aaron L]

I put a lot of effort and time into developing characters. Coming up qith new characters ideas isn't always easy for me. Once I went through 7 characters in less than 2 months and I just ran out of ideas and sat out of playing for a few months because I got worn out from the effort of making characters that got squished for no good reason.


So, items, without question. I get attached to characters.

 

[Woas]

Item Destruction.

If the character dies and can not be raised somehow... then in effect all my items are 'destroyed'. And if the character is raised then my buddies grabbed some item(s) thatbelonged to my character and sold them off to pay for it so the item(s) are again 'destroyed'.

So yeah. I would much wrather lose one item than all (or a number) of them... who wouldn't?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

You did not specify whether you are talking about DnD or any system in general.

For DnD 3.x, I would think it a hard choice, but would probably choose death. It does depend on level, though.

For d20 Modern, I would rather lose the equipment. Lacking kits gives me -4 to a skill check, which is not bad at all IMO. Combat Martial Arts makes a nice backup. Not so great for gunslingers but still not horribly bad. Alternity is almost the same, although martial arts is a lot more expensive in Alternity than in Modern.

Sorry about the lack of apostrophes. My computer has a REALLY weird error.

 

[BryonD]

This is an in general question not dealing with specific situations.

In general the answer is: "depends".

In specific situations there may be more precise answers. But it is no cop out. As a flat out general question, neither answer is correct.