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I think this question depends greatly on what you want out of the game.

Are you looking for a simulation of living in a dangerous fantasy world?  Then you probably want random death.  The world kills people, that isn't any real suprise, just don't name your character right away. 

Area you looking for a series of hard fights, tricky traps and deadly puzzles that culminate in you finding treasure? Then death is probably the one thing making the game interesting, the chance of failure is important.

Are you looking to craft an epic high fantasy story?  Do you care more about narrative then realism? Then random death kinda sucks. Your characters have goals and histories, and characters should die when their either good an ready or when they can do something epic and worth dying over.

Dec 16, 2012 -- 3:15PM, StevenJones wrote:

Dec 16, 2012 -- 11:50AM, erachima wrote:

You just used 250 words to say virtually nothing.

In fact, that's the problem with this entire thread: you're being completely inarticulate. If you were actually phrasing your positions coherently, I'd wager we barely disagree, but you're really not doing so. This leaves the rest of us with little choice but to either project opinions into your writing and then argue against those or just not pay attention to the thread.

So, work on that.

Ooo, getting personal.

The only one getting personal here is you, since you're interpreting constructive and conciliatory criticism as a personal attack.

Dec 16, 2012 -- 9:04AM, Man_in_the_Funny_Hat wrote:

..."window.parent.tinyMCE.get('post_content').onLoad.dispatch();" contenteditable="true" />Instead, the game designers only approach has been to simply make it harder to kill a PC at all, much less permanently.  Oh, and the "rules" for resurrection should be different for NPC's and PC's for obvious reasons of setting design.

Which is why their game design has been fairly bad in that regard. It is attempting to make something foolproof when fool-technology is always advancing. You can't create proof against a fool.

Instead, your only real option is to remove death all-together if one does not want it as an outcome. This, however, is to ignore fail conditions in a game. Since the structure of D&D revolves around the games point of character advancement, the only true full fail condition is the removal of that character from the possibility of advancement (IE death). Removing it is the equivalent of putting godmode on Doom...a large part of the games challenge has been removed and its difficulty has been reduced to navigation and little more.

In the end, it makes for a less compelling product because people want to be challenged. Also, by removing a failure condition like that, it diminishes the accomplishments one makes because the challenge is ephemeral.

The game requires better game design and better thought put into it, especially in regards to what will actually have traction with gamers. "Nothing worth doing is easy".

All of my players fear death...they welcome that fear. They've told me as such. It makes what they do in-game worth it because there is weight to their decisions. I also wisely accomodate the possibility of death with a combination of in-game and metagame design decisions so as to avoid the classic pitfalls of "Dead PC syndrome"...none of it has to do with removing the real threat of death, though. In fact, we played a session last night and last Thursday...last Thursday the paladin literally came 2 HP away from being kaput.

Dec 16, 2012 -- 4:36AM, chaosfang wrote:

I have a different take on the matter:

A good time for a PC to die is when that death matters.

In detail:
I think everybody would agree that telling your players, "rocks fall, everyone dies!" is almost a sure sign of bad DMing.  However, if the DM would spin the whole thing just right, even that can be spun to his advantage.

I remember reading in one of the threads here that there was this one DM who had his group create characters in great detail.  Then the first encounter began with, "You're all dead," causing a lot of unhappy faces (I do believe one player even snapped his pencil at that).  Then once the anger had subsided, the DM continued the adventure by having all the PCs float around as spirits as they investigated the events behind their characters' deaths (who did it? how did it happen? why were they killed? etc.).  Long story short, that session was a pure stroke of genius.

I also remember reading one post where there was this player who talked with his DM in private, then sessions later the DM instantly killed the player's character, no questions asked.  No attack rolls, no damage, not even save-or-die, just "the helicopter blows up, and crashes on the ground with your buddy Jimmy on it".  The shock on the faces of the rest of the group was priceless and the player didn't end up tearing his character sheet and walking away.

I also recall my own PC's death, along with a few other posts about PCs dying in combat.  There's only one thing that I find common with all of them: all of them died for a purpose.

Part of the negativity on PC death is the assumption that PC death equates to the end of a character's story.  I suppose the Gygaxian approach of "don't name your character until he's level 5" is a huge contributor to this perception, but the point is that groups often fear the death of the PCs not only because of the time and effort invested on the PCs, but more because of the attachment involved with the PCs combined with the detachment involved with PC death.  To be specific: the unwritten assumption that a dead character is forcing your character to retire permanently or until they're raised from the dead.

When people think of deep, engaging stories for their characters, only to see their characters die meaningless deaths, it doesn't matter how they died, the result is the same: frustration, annoyance, rage quits.

This is the very thing behind the hate on save-or-die, "gotcha!" moves, and "rocks fall everyone dies".  Reducing the HP of PCs to zero is still a painful experience but there's one thing about normal combat that makes it much more appealing than SoD or insta-kill: if the PCs are going to go, they won't be taking it lying down.  You'll more likely see PCs:

• fighting until they drop to 0 HP and a TPK occurs (even if they see how powerful the enemy is)
• reviving their allies and aiding each other to the best of their effort
• buying their allies time to escape even at the cost of their own lives

And in general they do their best to be heroic. The tension, the dynamics, the fact that you'll always be giving it your all; all that combined results in an enjoyable encounter even though one or two deaths occur (or even a TPK happens).

Remember, the whole point of TRPGs is that you are able to make stories happen, regardless if it's impromptu, scripted or anywhere in between.  Normal folks don't like having their part in the story end prematurely -- which is what usually happens with surprise deaths -- so if they find themselves in a situation where their character dies, make sure that the said character would've first left a lasting impression to, and a legacy on, everyone.

Finally, the most important thing here is trust.  Its presence is what keeps the group together in spite of TPKs and character deaths and the like, and its absence is what fractures a group even if it's just because of issues that aren't as big as character deaths, whatever those issues may be.

I would say a large part of that mentality is actually looping back from how some DMs have been portraying their role. When a DM portrays their role as that of a story-teller primarily (or entirely) with a narrative for the players, naturally character death will seem both pointless and absurd since the DM is supposed to be engaging the players in a story and to have a "pointless" (I prefer "sudden") death interrupts the story.

Of course, the game is not meant to be a narrative in that manner. Story-telling is a small part of the DMs role with their role as judge, refereee and rules-arbiter being their mandate above & beyond everything else.

When the story belongs to the DM, the players have a "right" to feel betrayed when killed...but when the players are the ones pushing the "story" forward with their actions and goals, death then is merely a reality of their efforts. Instead of something foisted upon them by the DMs "story" it is something that has resulted from their own actions.

Essentially, this is a snowball effect of trying to shift the role to storytelling-first and game-second.