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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5635925" data-attributes="member: 4937">A DM's duty isn't directly to kill the PC's, but a DM does have a duty to play ruthless and intelligent bad guys in a ruthless and intelligent manner.  If I find out the DM is pulling his punches for metagame reasons, I'm probably going to find a different DM sooner or later.  The game doesn't have much meaning of the DM is all the time fudging to save you.  Why bother rolling dice then?  Let's just agree to what happens and do it?  That would sure make the game go faster.We've sort of changed topics here.   As I understood it, your point was that a 'death tax' created a situation where the party as a whole was not advancing in level even though the enemies were becoming more and more challenging.  If that was really the problem, then a side quest with CR more appropriate to character level would have allowed time for the party to level up as a group.   However, now it sounds like you are saying that your real problem was the DM's ego, and if that is the case then I don't think you can say that there is anything wrong with the 'death tax' based on the ancedote.  Because if the problem is DM ego, then it wouldn't have been solved by replacing dead characters with ones of equal level and equipment as the DM still would have been more ruthless than you desired.  Indeed, if he really was as bad as you suggest, then it stands to reason that he'd always arrange the EL of the situations to be well above party level so as to insure his ability to dominate the party and enforce his will upon the game.How many PC deaths do you average per session?  If PC's never die, then how you handle it isn't very relevant.   If PC death is very rare, then death is itself its own penalty.  However, rare PC death is a fairly new phenomenom.  I have never lost a character and felt I was being penalized or punished.As for dying a good and heroic death, often that is also its own reward.  Finding a way for a character to complete his story in a way that is appropriate is a real gift.   As for a pointless heroic death, well, don't die.Often as not, that's just the way he rolls.  Changing to a more action oriented game probably wouldn't change the way he plays.  I've got one of these now.  He's bored when he's not killing things and looting the bodies.  But when he is killing things and looting the bodies, he tends to want to wade recklessly into the situation.  His reward - the thing he's enjoying the most - is recklessly wading into a situation and then triumphing like a Barbarian conquerer.  On the other hand I have a player who is hyper cautious and whose reward he is playing for is to handle everything I throw at him and to still come out alive.  Surviving despite all odds is the big thrill he's going for, and not shining moments of awesome.   One guy is as thrilled by running away successfully, and the other guy is thrilled by charging in headlong regardless of the odds.  One way or the other, 'death tax' or no 'death tax', one player is going to see me as rewarding the other guys RPing style.  Truth of the matter though is that I'm not punishing anyone.  Death - 'losing' - is what makes both styles of play thrilling, but no one can actually be put out of the game much less am I making some decision to 'punish' anyone as if by playing the way they wanted to play I was disapproving.   Nor am I 'forgiving' them.  Judgement on my part of that sort doesn't even come into this.  This isn't an adversarial decision.  I'm an adversary of the PC's only in the sense that to enjoy the game, they need an active and imaginative adversary.   But despite my ruthless play of the NPC's, I'm stacking the odds in the favor of the PC's and rooting for them to win every single time.  When the PC's don't win, no one suffers more than me because no one at the table has invested more than me in terms of time put into the game.  We're about 25 4 hour sessions into a campaign (characters are about to hit 5th level), and we just recently had our first character deaths - three way split party divided into a situation over its head with lots of warning that it might be a bad idea.  Death wasn't a punishment for those choices, nor was starting over with 800 less XP a judgment on my part handed down because of poor play.   It just was, because if you can't die in that situation, really, why are we rolling dice?</blockquote>

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