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  • Don't play Dungeons and Dragons or Satan will get you.

    • *don't play DnD with a killer DM.

      Unless you're into that. (I assure you, it's way more exciting if you let me occasionally kill a character. I promise it won't happen too often, and it'll be in the oneshots... which i tune to be challenging.)

      but if you play with a carebear DM... you'll get fluff campaigns.

      • Killer DMs are fine, so long as they show up with a stack of character sheets and you know what you're getting into. There's a D&D variant called "Kobolds Ate My Baby" where you immediately respawn the turn after you die as a new Kobold and charge right back into the mix.

        if you play with a carebear DM… you’ll get fluff campaigns

        Story heavy campaigns with generous rules for resurrection and a focus on social interaction over combat give you more time to engage in high drama. When you're not worried about a bad die roll ending a character arc, you don't feel the urge to minmax in order to have fun and can play up the fluffier aspects of the game.

        Perma-Death also tends to mean more when it happens less often. Having an "In Memoriam" game for a beloved character means a bit more than throwing half a dozen alts into a ditch.

        • Yup!

          So, like during Covid, I might have gone a little stir crazy, and built my own little universe with this massive (and tweaked-as-they-went) collection of story arcs. I used stardrifter’s rules

          I touch one of those characters and I’m a dead dm. But they’ve been playing those characters for years now.

          The way I’ve learned to do it is to build some sort of resurrection system in as the game progresses. The one shot style single-night campaigns with fresh characters, those are where I’m allowed to create new and interesting (and usually hilarious) ways for them to die.

          • The one shot style single-night campaigns with fresh characters, those are where I’m allowed to create new and interesting (and usually hilarious) ways for them to die.

            Ah, yes. We had a Skull & Shackles pirate campaign where we kept a roster of lower-level crew members who would do Red Shirts tier missions when we didn't have a full table. Lots of spoofs and goofs, and the main character cast didn't have to lose sleep over getting eaten by a giant claim or seduced to the bottom of the sea by sexy merpeople.

160 comments