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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 5516976" data-attributes="member: 38357">Let me start by saying that, as a DM, I do not like killing off PCs. I consider it one of my responsibilities to run a game where PCs can die, and to actually make it happen when circumstance, player action or inaction, and/or the dice dictate, but I do avoid it whenever I think that I can do so while still meeting that responsibility. This has come up in relation to a response I made in the thread lonebrendan started about his dead, petrified character('s finger).Partly as a result of this I am a long-time fan of the idea that there are far more "entertaining" things that I can do to a player than to "simply" kill off their PC, and that killing PCs is even something of the "easy way out". I've never really wanted to put real fear into the players, that doesn't seem like fun. I don't want them to consider the threats in the imaginary world I've concocted to be "real" so much as get them to have their characters react to them as if they where real for them. And there are some threats that some players seem to feel are "worse than death" - like the idea that you'd rather lose a character and start over than be level-drained or lose a magic item, and that I just don't understand...A lot of the "worse than death" stuff has come out of the game in newer editions. And this is at the same time that we've seen, IMO, a lessening of the problems that character death itself causes. And part of this is maybe a reaction to how some players respond to stuff outside their character sheet - players who, if the NPCs their character is attached to are threatened, make all new characters orphaned loners, rather than trying to defend them.I'm not sure how well I'm getting my point across here, but I'm wondering if maybe I shouldn't be going for the kill a bit more. If it really is more fun for the players to have their characters killed off than to have them messed with, or even if that option is still really valid...</blockquote>

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