Stop talking about "may die". A character who can randomly die will die randomly. A player who wants such will get the chance to die randomly each battle, and the odds will catch up to him. Also, stop taking about "highly likely to drop out" - I've been playing with some players for 10 to 20 years now.MGuy wrote:I didn't comment on something I should have in the last reply but I'll comment on this and this now. You basically admit you are able and willing to handle DRASTIC and MAJOR changes in plotline, character build, and even character PRESENCE whether it be for long or short term. You're able to ignore the highly likely chance that a character will have to drop out completely and may or may not come back. However, despite your ability to handle each and every one of those things you are simply unwilling to do much work for a character that may~ die in the future and assume anyone who wants 'death' to be a state they can have and possibly keep if it can't be reversed is not worth planning for because, while your railroad can handle all kinds of sudden twists and turns based on what the player(s) want, it cannot handle players that want the random chance of death. Am I understanding all of that right?
I play long term campaigns. Years long. My current weekly D&D campaign started back before 3E came out. I do spend the time on new characters, just not more time than on the other characters. Which means that a new character compared to a character that has had years to build up in game ties and background, will be lacking in involvment for quite some time since I'll add to both at the same pace. If I spend 20 minutes per week on character specific stuff, that means the new character has 20 minutes after week one, the old one has had... a couple thousands minutes spent on it. I will not neglect the older characters just so the new character can get up to speed faster. So, yeah, compared to a character from a meat grinder pick up game a permadead character in my game will still have plenty of background, but compared to characters who stay around longer? Not so much.
I can handle a lot of twists and turns, but random permadead characters are the worst, wrecking too much prep work. I also am not fond of having to randomly and out of the blue committ time to integrating a new character. Some may like it, I don't like to hear "I rolled a 1, now you have to free up 4 hours this weekend so I can play a new character next week". Lengthy player absences are usually not random, but planned and so I can compensate. Also, even drastic changes don't mean I lose much work. I take the long view. Even if the campaign will take place in another location for the next 6 months of real time, odds are we will return to the location we were after that. It's not as if we haven't had planned trips happen for such a time (or longer in some arcs).
I don't really know why people raise raise dead. If people talk about random character death I assume it's permadeath followed by a new character. Otherwise I'd ask them why they want random time outs from the game coupled with level loss. Time outs are bad since it means the player is not engaged in the game anymore if it goes on for too long, and level loss plays havoc with game balance in some cases.