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Habukberht wrote:

I preferred that idea, just dropping the XP whatever amount WITHOUT negative levels. Keeps them from levelling, and the only side effect was the variations in level I would get sometimes.. (example.. the cleric and barbarian were at odds. mainly because the barbarian "had his way" with a female priest at the Cleric's Temple... [it was actually a spy from the death cult sent to destroy the temple of pelor] and the cleric failed to heal the barbarian a few times out of anger. the barbarian was around 5 K xp behind the pack). but I fixed this by going the "rest XP" route. It was cheap, but I allowed the barbarian to recieve .5x more the xp in bonus XP at the conclusion of certain games to catch up... mainly cause you can't have a barbarian 2 levels behind the group trying to go toe to toe with a potentially disasterous wizard who turned out to be the leader of that death cult.

The Barbarian ended up catching a VC, venerial Curse. But luckily for everyone, the cleric and barbarian made ammends...

If I had been this barbarian, the next time combat got really hot, I'd step out of the way of the cleric and back of. Let the cleric deal with the big nasties. Then I'd probably find a new group to game with. The cleric obviously didn't care about his own health, or he would keep the meat shield up and running, if for no other reason than to protect his back.

Barbarian looking down a dark tunel he can hear ominous sounds coming from. "I don't hear anything here, follow me St. Vincent and we'll do a quick recon." After getting in real deep with the cleric on his heels briefly stoop down like you are looking at something written in the floor. When the cleric steps up to read the "Writting" (Remember the barbarian is illiterate). The barbarian steps behind the cleric to get out of the way and then pushes the selfish cleric into the room from which ontains the ominous sounds. Then he yells loudly, "Look out, run away" and proceeds to run back up the corrider telling the party it too dangerous and that St. Vincent is hot on you hills. He then proceeds to take a defensive stand at the entrance and lets the cleric take his beating as he justly deserves.

OK, maybe a bit overmelodramatic, but the c leric should get the point whether he goes down or not. Those front line types are pretty important.

Psst... I have a secret for all your hardcore players in here talking about how you've survived so much danger and that you don't fear death...

THE DM IS LETTING YOU WIN.

I know this is a concept that some people will simply never accept, but at its very core, D&D, like almost all pen & paper RPG's, is a complete and utter waste of time. It is not actually a challenge. It's a lopsided sort of chess where one "team" has the ability to say "The sun explodes and you all die and I win" whenever it feels like it, but instead spends its entire time setting up its little chess pieces purposely to lose, all the while smiling and patting you on the back for your "strategy". Here's another shocker: when you were four years old, and you kept winning all those footraces against your dad? You weren't actually faster than him! He was letting you win too!

There comes a time when you need to face the facts of the game: all this talk of challenge, threat, and danger is mostly an illusion. It's not a competitive sport; EVERYONE loses if the players lose. The DM wants you to win. If the party dies, you have to stop playing.

Now, I still love D&D and roleplaying games. As a player, I will strategize and make powerful builds and get excited when we survive a dangerous battle. But when I DM, I'm constantly reminded that my role is to make the players think they're accomplishing incredible acts of tactical genius, while simultaneously doing everything in my power to ensure that they always win every time. The few times I've had a TPK or was forced to fudge a roll or inexplicably alter an enemy's strategy to avoid a TPK stand out as failures in my mind.

My primary purpose as a DM or player is to ensure that an interesting and memorable story coheres out of the games. Rarely have I enjoyed a story that, somewhere in the middle of a good novel, it says "Then for no reason a random bodak appeared and all the main characters died."

I've played a few other RPG's where individual PC death is more or less impossible (for example, you can only be knocked out and unconscious, and only really die if everyone in the party is knocked out), and they are still exciting. We still fought every battle as if our lives depended on it; we still felt a sense of fear when trekking through dangerous areas. It's easy to evoke fear without an actual threat of something happening to the character. People still get excited watching Lord of the Rings over and over even though they know everyone survives at the end.

In the Vlad Taltos series (starting with the book Jhereg), death came easy, but so did resurrection. The idea was that raising dead was common and pretty cheap. Crime groups would punish someone by killing them and dropping them off back home. Then their family would have to pay for the raise dead.

In the books, there was a more permanent way to kill. If you're spine was cut or your brain damaged (e.g. dagger through the eyes) you couldn't be raised. Also, there were certain blades that would make you permanently dead. These were feared in the books.

I don't know if this works for Core D&D, but it would make neat flavor for a home campaign world.