Quote from: Gabriel2;78784010.  Letting the dice fall where they may and treating characters as disposable, interchangable cogs is for wargames.

Fixed yer typo.

"Dungeons & Dragons, Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures".

Plot immunity is for Mommy's pwecious widdle snowfwakes who cwy if they lose.

Quote from: Old Geezer;787726Then it's not a 1.  A 1 would be like a WW2 battle; sometimes the way you find out there's a minefield is when your lead tank explodes.

And the way I usually find out there's a trap in a dungeon is by setting it off. If being in an active theater of war doesn't constitute "knowingly exposing [my PC] to a potentially dangerous situation," I don't know what does.

I went at 7.  There's always the chance you can lose your character, but if it happens all the time you don't invest anything in them, just make up something that's stats and no personality because you don't want to get too attached.

I remember years ago I had about a two-month run of my character dying (due to just bad rolls or other things out of my control) each week.  

A little defense against random  botch rolls wouldn't hurt.

My preferences are in the 2-8 range, so I voted 5. My 4e D&D campaign is about an 8; PCs can die but can usually be brought back - we've not had a permanent PC death in two years now, session 27 - and we just had session 75. 3 PCs were perma-killed in session 27 and there was a 4-PC TPK in session 1. It could happen again (I never fudge dice) but the odds are well against it in any one session.

When I run old school D&D games they tend to be around a 2, my 1e/OSRIC game recently had a TPK. Occasionally I'll have PCs captured instead of killed if it seems plausible, but I'm happy to kill them.

I put myself for 2.
I think I play many games with a real old-school 1, but i have too much faith in my subconscious rooting for the PCs.  I do do a lot or parleying and social gaming.

0/10

The distribution between the two polls is interesting, more weighed towards 1 here by a substantial bit. The other is clustered too but not as much towards 10 though 6+ is significant.

Quote from: Old Geezer;787848Plot immunity is for people who play the game differently than I do, with different goals and preferences.

There.  Fixed that for you.

I understand having a preference here but do not understand the need to frame it as an outgrowth of one's personal character or as a moral failing of those who don't share your preference.

Quote from: LordVreeg;787927I put myself for 2.
I think I play many games with a real old-school 1, but i have too much faith in my subconscious rooting for the PCs.  I do do a lot or parleying and social gaming.

That is an interesting point. I do like lethal systems but I also find things often shift more toward parley and social interactions in my games when death is easy to come by. For example, in game systems that don't have huge disparities in health, HP or wounds between PCs and opponents, where they are basically the same and combat carries a high risk of death, my players are much more apt to avoid fighting unless absolutely necessary.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;788133That is an interesting point. I do like lethal systems but I also find things often shift more toward parley and social interactions in my games when death is easy to come by. For example, in game systems that don't have huge disparities in health, HP or wounds between PCs and opponents, where they are basically the same and combat carries a high risk of death, my players are much more apt to avoid fighting unless absolutely necessary.

Socially lethal.

The PCs might dodge the literal bullet. But get totally annihilated at the social level.

We just about had that one recently where the groups mage arrogantly fired at the villain who was giving a little speach to the town. Luckily the shot missed as had it hit, hostages would have been killed where otherwise the villain was going to let them go no matter the outcome as long as he got a good fight out of it.  This would have slit the PCs social throat in that town pretty good. And word would have spread to other towns. Making things hard here and there even outside the area.

Or in Kefra's case. She got mad at some priests red tape bureaucracy which was helping the local villain and ended up severely insulting him. Later she was denied a raise dead. Roll new character AND the political situation is worse now.

1, always.

Quote from: daniel_ream;787789The plethora of "throw the PCs into the meat grinder" responses makes me wonder about the oft-stated preference on this board for making mystery scenarios easy give-aways.

Weird that you would link to an essay that specifically says you SHOULDN'T be spoon-feeding clues to your players.

The only conclusion I can draw is that you consider "the PCs find a clue" to be unacceptable. I would personally love to see an example of these mystery scenarios you're apparently designing where the PCs are never allowed to find a clue.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;788133That is an interesting point. I do like lethal systems but I also find things often shift more toward parley and social interactions in my games when death is easy to come by. For example, in game systems that don't have huge disparities in health, HP or wounds between PCs and opponents, where they are basically the same and combat carries a high risk of death, my players are much more apt to avoid fighting unless absolutely necessary.

Yep.
And so they build alliances more, and learn how to play smart.
Or they learn all the shortcuts to fast chargen.

And sometimes social gaming also has it's own consequence. My main campaign has 2 players lost to play due to imprisonment, one in a gulag, another who blabbed important info and who was taken.  

Lethality sounds like death, in our circumstance, it equates to anything that takes your player off the board.

Quote from: LordVreeg;788187Yep.
And so they build alliances more, and learn how to play smart.
Or they learn all the shortcuts to fast chargen.

That's my main reason, as a GM, for favoring lethal violence in games... the sort of play that happens when combat becomes the true last resort.
As a player I enjoy TPKs and such because I find them hilarious, and failure in general is more entertaining to me... but as a GM it's more about my preference for playing out character interaction and seeing what Players come up with besides optimizing weapons and armor and combat skills.