K wrote:Unless you've got PCs dropping every battle, you aren't going to make your point at all. PCs are already armored by the fact that they can make new characters at will AND that those characters are designed to win most battles that they will fight.
Believe it or not, most real soldiers survive the majority of combat encounters they turn up in. The US Marines is not the 40K Imperial Guard. Casualty rates weren't even that bad in Vietnam. Hell, casualty rates weren't that bad on the Russian front.
You can't say that losing a PC is a crippling blow to character-based plots and then flip-flop back and say that the players won't even notice the loss of a PC unless it's a constant meatgrinder. Of course players will notice the loss of a PC, unless that PC is a hollow pile of stats. My players (like most, I imagine) make actual characters and if one of those characters died it would mean something, and that's cool because plot twists are
good.
Second, you don't have to use the same rules for NPCs as PCs. Players can empathize with NPCs who die because you give NPCs worse rules.
Sure, but I could also write a book. If you aren't taking advantage of the interactive form of the medium, if you aren't recognizing and taking advantage of the medium's random elements and multi-author nature, you're working in the wrong medium. Don't GM like you're haphazardly writing a book with battles randomized and four other authors with bizarrely limited inputs. GM like you're running a roleplaying game, build your plot to make use of the dice rather than being destroyed by them, build your plot around immersing your players in the one role they actually have rather than drawing attention to the artificial nature of their place in the narrative.
Third, as a DM you can choose to kill NPCs whenever you want and you should. Just focus a few extra monster attacks on them or have them do something stupid and they'll go down.
Sure, but they won't die. Because that's how the death rules worked, and if the death rules
did work that way,
most of my NPCs wouldn't survive more than two or three battles alongside the PCs. I mean, granted, I have NPCs to burn through, but all of them have a place in the plot and I can't chew through them
that fast.