Hi, I've been running a campaign for 5 scenarios and I've been playing as a player choice-driven but punishing game so far. An example would be when my Paladin waltzed into a mob safehouse using charisma and forced the party to miss all investigation triggers outside, causing the party to miss a chunk of the story explaining the motives and devious plots of their employers. To sum the whole scenario up, he caused the deaths of a young girl and 5 guild registered adventurers, as well as a transfer of criminal power to a rival organization. If a player does a stupid choice, they pay for it. However, the scenario I just explained doesn't seem to have enough impact on the players, 'cause, in reality, they probably would've died in that safehouse. This isn't the first time either, this player, as well as others, have done a lot of poor decisions that impact the surrounding world and plot but not the player themselves. I don't know why they keep doing this but I'm convinced that he just doesn't care about his character (he's literally played the same race and class for the last 6 full campaigns, explaining that his character is just the son of the last one thrust into a multidimensional portal), and I want him and the other stat focused players to care about the plot-driving points of their character. If he or another player decides to do a blatantly stupid decision that throws the rest of the game for the other players, should I kill off their character? btw the next scenario is going to be extremely hardcore so its the perfect time to do so. 

It's hard to do, for me at least, I feel an inner reluctance to pull the trigger. But, as a player, when I see I have put myself in a scenario where my character should die, and the DM saves me, I actually feel cheated. So I say, don't make it happen, but don't save them either, let it happen. The party can pursue resurrection if the players want to and it's available, or new character time and hopefully it ends up being really fun and memorable for all.

Here's a question: Did you have a "session 0?" And in that session 0, did you and the players discuss where everyone stands on player character death? Did you talk about the consequences of role-playing vs. just die rolls?

Some players will get really upset if their character dies. And some DMs will get really upset if a player ignores consequences because the player knows the character cannot die. Your group needs to all be on the same page with this.

Also, some players (mistakenly, depending on the DM -- definitely mistakenly with me) think that as long as the dice don't kill them with hit point damage and failed saving throws, they can't die. What, you mean my RPed interaction with the king gets me killed? But you didn't roll for it!

Again -- you need to be clear with the players that this is the case, and that RPed interactions can lead to death just as surely as failed die rolls. And also that failed die rolls can do so, in case there is any doubt (assuming you want to be that lethal).

I am going to have to do this myself, if I ever actually get around to running the alternate-earth Rome campaign I want to do. The Romans had no concept of prison terms -- of doing the time and then being let out. They had holding cells only for people awaiting trial or punishment, and the holding period were usually quite brief (days). Otherwise, the only punishments in ancient Rome were pretty much flogging or execution -- and really, unless it's a very minor crime, just execution. Patricians (nobles) could get out of it by requesting exile instead of death, but otherwise, in Rome, you broke the law, they killed you. 

I am going to have to be very clear with my players about this before the campaign starts. "Here are the 12 tables of Roman law" (tweaked for a world of magic and elves of course!). Breaking all but 2 or 3 of these laws = death if you are caught, tried, and found guilty. And if you did it, you pretty much will be caught, tried, and found guilty." In other words, they need to be aware that in terms of NPC behavior, if they break these laws, they should expect to die. And as a DM, I will not protect them (though of course, I will allow them to use whatever skills and spells they have to try and get away).

But the thing is you have to have this out with your players before-hand. Most players will not know that Romans didn't have a concept of jail, and might assume that stealing a magic item from a shop would just get them some jail time if caught. Discovering it is the death penalty would be a huge surprise and something that most modern (or even medieval) people would consider wildly out of proportion to the crime. So you have to warn people.

My point is -- have the conversation with your players, if you haven't yet, about what level of lethality you are going to have in your game, and make sure everyone is on board. If they are not OK with having their characters killed, then you as a DM have some thinking to do, about whether you are willing to run a game under these conditions (of lack of consequences).

The challenge is designing encounters and scenarios that are hard enough to be challenging, but designed so that they're clearly beatable, and then let the dice fall where they may.

This is hard! If the players feel like there's no way to win and they just die, they feel cheated because it seems the DM just wanted them dead, might as well had "rocks fall everyone dies". If the DM clearly saves them, then the players also feel like the challenge is fake.

Note that if you go in deciding you want to kill off a character, that's not "Being challenging" or "hardcore". That's just you deciding to kill someone. Rocks fall, paladin dies, GG no RE. You don't need a challenging encounter to do that, you're the DM! "The paladin trips over his own shoelaces, hits his head on a rock, no save. Make another character." I mean, it's a total jerk move, but it's basically the same as setting up an encounter you want to use to kill the guy, just saves a few pointless rolls.

So I'd say yes to letting character death happen if that's just what happens to be the outcome of an encounter or story, but no to just deciding to kill of a character and then doing it.

Some other responses:

An example would be when my Paladin waltzed into a mob safehouse using charisma and forced the party to miss all investigation triggers outside, causing the party to miss a chunk of the story explaining the motives and devious plots of their employers.

So I don't really see why this is so egregious. Presumably the party wanted to get in to that safehouse, and wanted to learn things, right? So why was it "so obviously" a bad decision to for the paladin to sweet-talk his way in?

Yeah, I know for you the answer is because you prepared "investigation triggers" outside and wanted the party to follow them. But that seems more an issue of the DM guessing wrong about what their party would do than something the party did wrong...

(he's literally played the same race and class for the last 6 full campaigns, explaining that his character is just the son of the last one thrust into a multidimensional portal),

Ugh, that's annoying. That really feels like he never changes either his character or his playstyle or his approach based on the campaign or the problem at hand....

I want him and the other stat focused players to care about the plot-driving points of their character.

I don't really know any way of doing that, short of asking them. Killing them off doesn't make them care about plot-driving points in their character - if anything, it makes them view characters as more expendable, meaning they're *less* invested in character development rather than more.

My opinion is that the players should feel that their characters are in danger.  As long as you can maintain that feeling without killing them, it will be more effective for RP if they survive longer to develop their characters more.  If saving them would make them think that you're probably going to save them in the future, it's probably a bad idea.

Short answer: yes. If the players ever figure out they can't die, there's no excitement anymore. There's no thrill in victory when there's no chance of defeat. As a player, I hate it when DMs won't kill my character, because it cheapens the story and makes me feel like a passive participant who has no control over the ending. Because if you can't lose, was it really you who won?

Side story:

When Joss Whedon produced Buffy The Vampire Slayer, he planned to kill of a major character during the show's pilot.  He wanted to establish in Episode 1, Season 1 that no one had plot armor.  He even wanted to put that character in the opening credits so that everyone watching would think "there's no way this guy is going to die in the pilot; he's in the credits!"  Then he wanted to make you question that reality every episode.

This philosophy has lead to a lot of frustration with his fans.  While it can sometimes be exhilarating to think "oh no he could kill off Kaylee here!" when it has happened, it's done so to mixed reviews.  For ME, it's not a good thing.  Rather than feeling invested in the tension, I get bored because I don't want the emotional attachment and with it the emotional pain of losing a character I like.  When a key character in Avengers got killed, I didn't think "OH NO!" I thought "yep... that's what Whedon does... get you to like them and then whack them."

From a gaming point of view, you need to know your audience.  I don't consider the death of a character a punishment.  I see it as a possible plot point.  If it moves the story forward, I'm good with it.  But if it's the result of bad dice, I'm not so okay.

Likewise, being jailed, stripped of a title, failing in a quest to kiss the barmaid.. those are punishments.  Those are "you did it and you failed".

That said... to the specific case at hand:

Did the players have multiple paths to success?  I've played with a few DMs that have laid out "here is how you win."  When you didn't follow the plan they laid out, you died.  Usually horrifically.  We did a Shadowrun once where we were supposed to commit a hijacking.  We didn't think of one element of the crime, and as a result the ENTIRE run was a failure because we couldn't, mechanically (and to be fair realistically) adjust for the element we overlooked.  There was no 'roll your drive to fix this', or 'here's a contact to call and get the intel'.  It was 4 hours of gamign to be be told "well you mised this point, so you suck and died."

Whee....

Players will surprise you.  Talk to them about why they did what they did and what they want to accomplish.  Lay out the "rules of the world" and make sure all the players (you included) are working from the same assumptions.  Then, let the story happen.

If you don't want to outright kill a player for making stupid (as in, not caring about what is going on) choices, let your other players sort that player out. 

How? 

Have the world react to the actions and make sure the punishment consequences affect ALL the other players in the party.  When the other characters can't get back to their home... lose important contacts... become criminals in a large kingdom/city/village, have to change their alignments, are constantly harassed by bounty hunters, city guards, other goody-two-shoes adventuring parties or lose income opportunities because so-and-so did 'stupid thing', the characters in the party will intervene.  If that doesn't work, the players at the table will intervene OOC.

As a DM, you don't have to do everything yourself.

 

Have the world react to the actions and make sure the punishment consequences affect ALL the other players in the party.  When the other characters can't get back to their home... lose important contacts... become criminals in a large kingdom/city/village, have to change their alignments, are constantly harassed by bounty hunters, city guards, other goody-two-shoes adventuring parties or lose income opportunities because so-and-so did 'stupid thing', the characters in the party will intervene.  If that doesn't work, the players at the table will intervene OOC.

 But you also have to ask if this is a thing you want.

My "Teen Game" is dominated by players leaping up to "intervene OCC" with other player choices.  There are a lot of "Big Personalities" in the room and they all want to "Win" DnD.  That can mean things like "Why are you attacking him?" to "NONONO do NOT use Magic Missile, this is a case for Burning Hands!"

I get what your'e saying about having the group self-police but you also need a group where that kind of interaction is welcome and expected.  If it's always one player who is being "intervened" on, it can really build some bad blood within the group.  IT may need more OCC conversations as a group rather than "In the moment we're playing" interventions.

I get what your'e saying about having the group self-police but you also need a group where that kind of interaction is welcome and expected.  If it's always one player who is being "intervened" on, it can really build some bad blood within the group.  IT may need more OCC conversations as a group rather than "In the moment we're playing" interventions.

I second this. Again I think this is a case for some around-the-table OOC discussions about the situation. What do the players all want to get out of a D&D game? And is it the same thing the DM wants? And, if not exactly the same, are the two able to be reconciled? If the players just want to be murder hobos and you want them to care about plot points and world and lore, you're going to have trouble. Talk to your players and explain what your issues are and see what they say.

Well, to be a devil's advocate, let me say that the DM already has a huge workload in preparing gaming sessions.  Asking a DM to be mother hen too is a bit much IMO.  It's never too late to have a session zero, but at some point, the group as a whole has to make an effort.

To explain the whole safehouse ordeal, the players chose a kill job provided by an anonymous employer. The target was in the safehouse and was being guarded by many mob members. My players thought the target was like a mob boss and decided that it was morally justified to kill the target. The big reveal was that the target was the nine-year-old daughter of the mob boss who had no contributions to criminal activities. Their employer was from the opposing organization had also implemented several fail-safes in case the PCs couldn't complete the job. The two most prominent ones were an explosive marking on the side of the building, hidden in an alley, and notes/weapons left behind by a sniper on a neighboring rooftop. For both of these triggers, my players literally got within feet of discovering both of them right before the Paladin decided to charisma roll his way through the safehouse.

For my next scenario though, I don't mean that I want to do a TPK kind of difficulty, I want to provide a hard challenge. The general idea of it is that they now are going to a black site and are tasked with retrieving a rune containing vital information for the campaign. The black site is located in the badlands and is infested with monsters. The type of monster I'm throwing at them is a homebrew that has no eyes but has sensitive earing and vibration detection (whatever sense that is). The map style is a series of large open rooms with doors that separate each section. The monsters can telepathically communicate with each other at a certain distance and special variations can alert ones from other rooms. The attacking style is a quick but weak horde that can deal heavy damage. Obviously this is a stealth-based scenario which means that the players blatantly can't do any dumb moves without alerting several monsters. I feel that if the players can find a way to stealth their way through it (someone takes off their loud armor, they cast silence, make the barbarian float, etc.)  then they get rewarded and live. But if someone decides to do something dumb (use explosives) then they have a higher risk of dying. Its a combination of needing good rolls and smart thinking in order to make it through this one.

Quote from BigLizard >>

 

Characters getting killed by their own choices or by randomness of dice is quite possibly the single most important thing to preserve in the game, its why players sit down at the table to play the game, because there are terrible consequences for failure.  Remove it and the story is completely irrelevant and players cannot have player agency, it becomes scripted theater where they are an audience or worse they become emboldened by the plot armor your giving them and use their player agency to fearlessly do as the OP describes. 

 

I don't think it's possible for me to disagree with you more.

Player agency is not, in my opinion, the same as "the dice will decide all of your fates" or "if you didn't want to die, maybe you should have rolled better.  You are right, without player agency, that is some freedom to choose a path for their character, there is no Role Playing in the RPG.  And likewise, without some kind of random factor, there isn't "game" in it either.  But I think that's where our goals for RPG's / DND separate.

Example:  Kids on Bikes is NOT DnD but it is an RPG.  It doesn't have Hitpoints or Saving Throws or most of the "survival" mechanics of DND.  It's a perfectly servicable RPG on it's own for what it is.  For a player to "Die" they have to end up at a point in the story where physical death is possible, and then they need to fail so badly that's the only logical outcome.  The fact that this RPG works and works well for what it is, is the main reason I personally reject that "plot armor is the worst possible thing" and I reject that "if your life isn't always on the line, then we might as well not do any combat at all, you all win gloriously!"

Now, that's MY playstyle and all I can comment on.  At my table as DM, I tend to not invite people who don't "get" the limits of "Plot armor".  Player who act Chaotic Stupid because they believe that the game is about more than just STats and Combat rolls, don't get invited back again.  Or we at least talk about why we are all there.  Is it so that they can say "I have the best AC and Prof Bonus, I want to see if this character can solo a drake!"?  Or is it to "tell a story with other characters about how our party overcame some challenge"?  Your mileage may vary.

Then again, as many of us have said in this and other threads:  If this is how your group rolls, that's what you do.  If you want to do the hard core mechanics driven combat thing, you do it.  But I think it's unfair to say that ALL DnD requires we play that way.

My thoughts about the paladin smooth talking his way into the safe house.

1. Player's tend not to see your "hints".

I don't know how many times I think it should be perfectly clear to the PC's what I'm hinting at, but then understand they don't have a clue. Was the players aware that someone might be double crossing them? That they were played? I suspect that they might (and at least the paladin) wasn't that concerned about this.

2. You allowed the roll.

You allowed the player to roll for smooth talking his way in. By doing that YOU opened the door. I've done it myself MANY, MANY times. You could simply have said that it wasn't possible to smooth talk your way in, or you could have raised the stakes. You could have said, yes, you might get past the guards at the door, but it's a huge possibility that you will get killed once inside. The point is, when you let the players roll, be very clear on what the outcome might be, but if they succeed, you must accept it.

And no, you shouldn't kill the player as some kind of "revenge". You could have killed him when he did the "stupid" thing, but that opportunity is gone. Talk to the player, and try top find a common ground for what you want to get out of the sessions. What does the player need from you as a DM to not do those "stupid" things? I mean, he is a paladin, so his deity could have tapped him on his shoulder and said "NO, NO" when he was about to enter the house - quite blunt, but better than a situation where you want to start to simply kill off your players.

Quote from blakmajik >>

To explain the whole safehouse ordeal, the players chose a kill job provided by an anonymous employer. The target was in the safehouse and was being guarded by many mob members. My players thought the target was like a mob boss and decided that it was morally justified to kill the target. The big reveal was that the target was the nine-year-old daughter of the mob boss who had no contributions to criminal activities. Their employer was from the opposing organization had also implemented several fail-safes in case the PCs couldn't complete the job. The two most prominent ones were an explosive marking on the side of the building, hidden in an alley, and notes/weapons left behind by a sniper on a neighboring rooftop. For both of these triggers, my players literally got within feet of discovering both of them right before the Paladin decided to charisma roll his way through the safehouse. 

I'm gonna critique your setup and handling of this scenario because I think part of the issue is that you have a predetermined idea of how a scenario "should" go, and you come down on the players too harshly if they stray from that. From a logical perspective, why would the party's employer even bother hiring the party if they were planning to blow up the building and/or use a sniper anyway? That doesn't make sense from a story standpoint; those "fail-safes" weren't for the character, they were for you because you wanted the scene to go a certain way.

Charming your way into the baddie's lair isn't bad gaming - it's excellent gaming. You can't complain that your players don't roleplay enough and then punish them for literally using roleplaying to resolve a challenge you set up for them.

As a player, I come to the table and I want to be engaged, I want to be put in tough situations, make decisions, conceive clever plans and try to execute those plans with my fellow adventurers.   To me as a player, most consequences are meaningless, the only one that will really stings, the one that will make me sweat and squirm in my seat is losing my character or causing someone else to lose theirs.  When I know there is a risk of that, I feel the game, it becomes real, the tension isn't some faked theater like they have on Critical Role, we are actually in the moment .  Without that looming over us, without that fear and potential outcome every decision and clever plan is superficial at best, more likely completely meaningless.

You have every right to feel this way but this is not necessarily the way the rest of us feel, or the way the rest of us play.

For most of my RPing days, I played, not D&D, but Champions (the original pen and paper game, not the abomination that Cryptic Studios put out under that name). Champions is about superheroes, and in the superhero world, combat almost never leads to death, and almost always leads to unconsciousness. Traditionally heroes do not kill. And although some villains may be murderous, and willing to kill the "normals" (non-powered characters), usually the villain will have "other plans" for the heroes rather than just merely killing them. There are exceptions of course, and modern (post-2000) superheroes and villains are a lot more lethal than they were back in the day when I played Champions... but overall, hero/villain fights lead to defeat, not death. Consequently, Champions combat used two different types of damage: Stun, which knocked you out, and Body, which could kill you. Most attacks did far more Stun than Body (except "Killing attacks" which did about equal amounts of both, on average). Even attacks that did a lot of body had a hard time killing a character. You had to go to negative your-Body score to die... so if you had the (default) 10 body, you had to go to -10 to die. Most heroes and villains had more than 10 (12-15), so now you're looking at going from +15 to -15 or so, and that just didn't tend to happen the way the system was designed. In all my years of Champions, I only managed to have a villain kill someone outright (another villain, btw) with actual die rolls. It's just that hard to kill a character in Champions.

In fact, the game's writers explicitly tell GMs that killing characters off is not a good idea as a general proposition, and they stated in multiple places that killing off a player character "just because the dice say so" is an absolutely terrible idea. That's because, in the superhero world, neither heroes nor villains die as a result of some random battle on the street. Character deaths in comics are milestone happenings -- recall the Death of Phoenix in X-Men 137, or the Death of Superman in the Doomsday saga. These were not the equivalent of "random die rolls" in a "generic encounter," but climaxes to months or even years-long plotlines. This is how heroes die in the comics... not from some punk on the street who got lucky with his 2D6+1 RKA roll (ranged killing attack).

If we were to accept your premise that consequences are meaningless if you can't die, then no one would care about anything in Champions, because as a general rule, characters don't die in Champions. And yet, my players cared about lots of things that have nothing to do with character death. For example, when one of my players discovered that his love interest had a crush on his hero identity and therefore was not interested in his secret (i.e. real) identity, he cried out, "Oh no! I'm jealous of my own alter-ego!" And laughed... and then took steps to make his alter-ego less attractive to her and his secret ID more attractive. In the end he had to "come out" to her, and then that led to all sorts of high jinx and what not. But my point is, he cared what the NPC thought.  And when the mastermind villain was able to arrange it so the heroes got a black eye with the public and were seen as bumblers rather than heroes, and booed the next time they showed up -- you better believe my players cared about that. And took measures to out that villain and prove their innocence. And were all beaming when the mayor publicly apologized and gave them the key to the city.

My point is -- it's all happening in our imagination. Even character death only "happens" because you have decided that this arbitrarily determined threshold of numbers on the dice says so. As a player, you decide what you choose to care about.  I care if my character dies, but I also care if my character's family is safe... if my character's performance (as a bard) gets her some applause, etc. I don't only care if she lives or dies -- and I have never had players who only cared about that either.

Characters should face consequences of their actions (both good and bad) because that is what makes this made-up world feel real.  But "consequences" and "death" are not the same thing.

 To me a DM who saves our characters when they clearly would have otherwise died, if he takes that out of the game, he is taking the real tension and excitement of the game away from us and frankly we deserve it, we want it, it's what we are after in these games.  We want the pressure, tension, the excitement and risk in our game.  Yes its sad when characters die, I have had people cry at the table when a beloved character perished, but I wouldn't trade those moments for anything.  To play in a game devoid of that tension.. I suppose you have to experience it to understand it, but its a beautiful thing.  

You have every right to want it that way but I have to tell you, that the players at my table, in Champions at least, would not have agreed. One of the reasons I was liked as a GM was because the players knew that although I usually went with the die rolls, I was not a "killer" GM. They knew that as long as they wanted to keep playing their character, I probably was't going to kill it. KO it sure. Capture it you bet. Embarrass it or have it lose its "hero" status for a while, yup. Girlfriend break up? Yep, more than once. But killing your character from random rolls, was not going to happen at my table, at least not in Champions (IMO, D&D has a different "contract" with the players, especially old school "save or die" D&D and no such expectation was to be had at my D&D table).

I get it -- you would have hated my Champions campaign. You'd have quit because there was no chance of death. And that's OK. I'm just saying that at my table, my game group didn't just put up with me not being a killer GM -- the liked that I wasn't. So everyone has their own threshold, and you should not assume that I was "depriving" my players of anything.

There are lots of ways to role-play and I'm not suggesting there isn't but there is a purity to a game with real risk, real tension, real heartache.  I would never deny my players that experience and I know as a player I wouldn't want to play in a game where a DM denied it for us.

I think it's rather limiting to consider character death the only cause of risk, tension, or heartache. As a general rule, Superman can't be killed, pretty much ever, in most Superman stories, but there can be tons of tension, risk, and heartache. Look at Donner Superman -- when he flies into the sky crying over his inability to save Lois Lane. You're telling me there was no heartache? No tension? Superman couldn't die in that scene -- literally he was unkillable in the movie. But there was tons of drama and tension.

Again, death is not the only possible source of these things. In fact, I would argue it's like trying to conduct surgery with a sledgehammer. As a GM, most of the time, I prefer to use a scalpel.

Interestingly l'm seeing a lot of these posts here and elsewhere. That is, posts where it seems like the DM and players are playing two separate games. The question here (and which has been addressed by others) is not really if you should kill characters. It is how to handle the game. Being a DM is a difficult job. There is a reason there are far more people willing to play than to run a game. And part of that is because, as a DM or running any game you are going to have to adapt to the needs and expectations of others. Which is difficult in life in general. This is why, again as others have noted, a session 0 is key. As a DM you have to understand your own limitations and make sure that whatever intellectual stretch you need to make for the players to have fun is something you are able to do. If you and your players expectations (or "the rules" you set) are too far afield that is the time to make corrections, cancel the game or whatever alterations you need to make.

Ideally, the goal is fun and both you and the players work together for that purpose. Just my opinion but the problem isn't that your scenario is bad, with one exception. You had a good idea, set up some obstacles with a notion of how is can be solved and set the dice to work. The exception is the fail-safes. Not that they exist (though having both seems like overkill to me) but that you decided to leave it up to the players to puzzle them out or they get sprung. I know this can be frustrating. You really want the players to be involved and see all the clues and you have this scenario in your head and how exciting it will be.

Don't set yourself up for disappointment by this expectation. Players often do things you won't ever guess, focus on minor things you had no intention of being important and miss things you thought were obvious. Now we get to the crux of it, player agency. Because they missed your clue(s), do you take the agency away from them? Generally I stick to the "yes but" or "not but" rule. The Paladin fast talks his way in. Does it work? Yes but now we have roof top sniper waiting to see the job gets done or a ticking bomb waiting to go off. In either situation you've now taken away their ability to have a choice in how things resolve. You may feel this is justified because you gave them a chance but as I said before, this is an erroneous assumption. From their point of view you are just dropping a (literal one in this case) bomb on them. 

Instead, after discovering it is a young girl while they debate (assuming they don't go through with it) the sniper takes the shot. He misses. No roles. Roll a die to pretend perhaps. Now the characters get to have agency again. What are they going to do? Or the bomb goes off, fake roll dice again. No one dies, maybe 1 or 2 extras as you shake your head and look at the "damage". So the players get the sense death is possible. The building is now on fire and going to collapse. What are they going to do? Again, consequence for missing the clue but give them a chance to take control.

Now if someone leaps out the window to attack the sniper as is killed by them, it is their choice. If the Paladin (being a Paladin) hoists the fiery beam for the rest of the party and the girl to run under as the building collapses on him, it was their choice. They might not enjoy getting killed but if that's how the dice play out, at least they had some input.

Quote from BigLizard >>

Death is by no means the only cause of risk, tension or heartache, but without death they loose their meaning and impact in the context of the game. 

You can play play poker with fake money too and I'm sure people have fun doing that, but there is a reason people play poker for real money.  The tension, anxiety, competitiveness and challenge feel real, it gets the blood pumping, creates real, raw emotion, brings the whole thing to life and a whole different level.  Yeah its uncomfortable to lose a bunch of money at a Texas Hold'em game, but there was also a chance you were going to win and that is why you play. 

Again, this really depends on the person. My friends and I -- the same people I played Champions with -- played poker tons of times. Always at my house because my parents had the chips (not sure why, they never played that I ever saw). We played for chips, no money exchanged. What did we play for? Bragging rights. My friends and I liked to win. And then lord it over the other person for the next week until we played again, or whenever we played next. Nobody cared about the money -- we cared about winning, and people protected their chips like real money because they wanted to win. So again, it depends on the group of people you are with -- your "group culture" as it were.

Nope... they are not complaining that characters don't fear death. That's not the problem. The problem is that the players are not taking the game experience seriously. It's not because they know they can't die -- most players know no such thing. It's because they are coming at D&D from a viewpoint of it being a "beer and pretzels game" where they just do whatever and screw the consequences. And the DM is looking for a more serious approach in which the players take the world, the setting, and the NPCs seriously.

I think it is quite obvious that most of the threads about this are concerning players who literally would not care, and probably would laugh it off, if you killed their characters, because they already don't believe in the world, in their characters, or in the "reality" (imagined, of course) that is happening. 

Not everyone takes RPGs seriously and not everyone cares if their character gains a level, is wanted by the law, or dies. I have known people like this -- you kill their character and they will shrug or laugh or say cool, I get to make a new one. These people are not being dismissive of the campaign because they don't think their characters can die. They are being dismissive of it for other reasons -- either, they simply are not invested in D&D as a general proposition, or else, the DM has not done enough to convince them of the verisimilitude of the world.

But it's not because "they can't die."

Quote from Nat_30 >>

Quote from blakmajik >>

To explain the whole safehouse ordeal, the players chose a kill job provided by an anonymous employer. The target was in the safehouse and was being guarded by many mob members. My players thought the target was like a mob boss and decided that it was morally justified to kill the target. The big reveal was that the target was the nine-year-old daughter of the mob boss who had no contributions to criminal activities. Their employer was from the opposing organization had also implemented several fail-safes in case the PCs couldn't complete the job. The two most prominent ones were an explosive marking on the side of the building, hidden in an alley, and notes/weapons left behind by a sniper on a neighboring rooftop. For both of these triggers, my players literally got within feet of discovering both of them right before the Paladin decided to charisma roll his way through the safehouse. 

I'm gonna critique your setup and handling of this scenario because I think part of the issue is that you have a predetermined idea of how a scenario "should" go, and you come down on the players too harshly if they stray from that. From a logical perspective, why would the party's employer even bother hiring the party if they were planning to blow up the building and/or use a sniper anyway? That doesn't make sense from a story standpoint; those "fail-safes" weren't for the character, they were for you because you wanted the scene to go a certain way.

Charming your way into the baddie's lair isn't bad gaming - it's excellent gaming. You can't complain that your players don't roleplay enough and then punish them for literally using roleplaying to resolve a challenge you set up for them.

 Ironically, I had no predetermined idea of how the scenario was supposed to go. I simply gave the players an objective: finish the quest by killing the target. Everything between taking the quest and running away was all by player choice. The employer is from another criminal organization that used the PCs as a scapegoat for the attack with other operatives to reinforce it. They didn't need to know this but if they figured it out who the employer was or who the target was then maybe the scenario would've gone much differently and I accept that. My problem was that the one player through the game for the rest of them since they were literally within feet of figuring out the clues. He made a decision that went against what the general party consensus was and that's on me for allowing it to happen. And he didn't roll play, he just rolled a charisma check and got above 20 cause of his class.

I'm a big fan of players being able to die. It ratchet's up the tension massively. But the problem as I see it, is the way you transfer your style of game.

You've allowed the game to become a safe place where you're going to bail the players out no matter what. You may not like it, but that's what the style is. I don't think it's fair to say "I'm not doing that anymore, you're in a killbox now and if you don't play it perfectly you're going to die."

You're changing the rules very suddenly. You either need to have a chat with everyone and explain the sudden change in your philosophy so they can adjust (I don't think this is fair either, because people don't change as quickly as you announcing a change, they still need to adapt) or slowly increase the danger. This is obviously going to take longer, but it's the fairest way to move from a loving DM who won't let anything really bad happening to an uncaring distant DM who lets the chips fall where they may. I kid, but you get the idea.