One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.
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probably gonna turn this into a longer post later but a correlation I think should exist in ttrpgs is that likelihood of death should directly relate to the ease/fun of your character creation system.
if it takes me an hour to build a new guy then you should provide safety nets- death saves, what have you.
if i can roll up someone new in 2 minutes and wind up with a new little freak than you i should be able to die with one bad throw of the dice.
Whaaaat, you mean Shadowrun making it easier for you to die the longer things go is a bad thing?? I thought everyone loved death spirals!
This post brought to you by exhaustion with Shadowrun.
This, yeah. Once someone pointed it out to me, I started to seed sure ways to revive dead characters in games like D&D 5e and looked for alternate pressures to ratchet-up tension - in-game deadlines, status conditions, curses, etc. These days, I save deadly gameplay to the rare times I get to run something with quick character creation, like B/X D&D, or where the character death-and-creation cycle is built into play, like A Rasp of Sand.
I mean this would be a bigger post about D&D's focus is combat/is violence. If you are in a situation where people are swinging then I'm generally able to gesture towards the idea that you are risking death. Like an enemy critting with a greataxe is bad luck for you but it can also create wonderful tension if you allow the table to feel it instead of immediately getting angry or something like that. In a game like that- its on the table at all times because its a game about violence. And the players are generally, ya know- trying to reduce enemies to 0 HP and kill them.
It's a weird thing to me because if you are playing a game about violence but you go okay this fight here? It's the big one and it's where I'm putting death on the table as an option. It immediately deflates the others for me? It's like oh these are just a resource tax then? It kills my ability to engage. For me it's more about say... safety nets. It can take awhile to roll a character in D&D, etc, so they've got death saves and the like. You don't just die when you hit zero.
To re-iterate, just stating my own preferences and not make grand prescriptions for every table.
Yeah, I don't take this as you declaring absolutes about games here. I can see where you're coming from. It's not really my view of making 5e specifically work for the folks I play with, but that's the nice thing about tabletop games - you can adjust for the crowd's preferences!
