A long, long time ago I was invited to my first game of AD&D. The campaign had been going on for a while before I joined, and my very first character died in my very first game. And it was a blast. My first character didn't die heroically, however. He died because I was one of 10 teenage boys crammed around the table playing a game.

Our DM had a few house rules. If your character died, you'd roll a new character and start at the same level as the lowest level character in the surviving party. If you were disruptive during play, or loud enough that no one could hear what he was telling us was going on, your character would get hit in the head with a red brick. The first brick of the session was merely a warning and did no damage. The second brick of the session did d6 damage (which could kill a 4th level character if your hit dice rolls were unlucky). The third brick was the worst. It wasn't a brick at all. It was a nasty "random" encounter where we would be seriously out-matched in one way or another. And if you were the player who caused the last brick to fall, your new character started at level 1. It was a harsh rule. But it was a blast.

We eventually began to call ourselves The Order of The Red Brick. The deaths were so many that our highest level character would carry a bag of holding to save all the bricks, and someone would carve the name of the dead PC onto it. We made jokes that our adventuring company was cursed by these errant falling bricks. When one of our players finally had a fighter high enough level to build a keep, he used those bricks for an entire section of wall inside the dining hall. We thought we could build an entire keep out of those bricks, but we realized that we were getting fewer and fewer bricks, and we were slowly getting to higher and higher levels. Eventually, the bricks became a running gag, and we would find random skeletal remains in dungeons, forests, mountain paths, with cracked skulls and a red brick laying nearby. The curse of the Order finally being lifted. We never gave it a thought. We had sort of forgotten about that house rule.

It was a harsh rule, but a needed one at a time in a teenage boys life when they have that fundamental need to be recognized and heard by their peers. We all eventually learned to play cooperatively through shared PC suffering. I learned how to be a considerate player in those campaigns and never even realized it.

I still regret we didn't have enough bricks for my Wizard to build his tower.

I'm very glad that this rule worked out for you, but I've also heard plenty of stories of fights that broke out over similar D&d house rules. Gotta be careful sometimes, but if it works hey, that's great!

Like I said, we were all teenagers. That's how he wanted to handle it, and we accepted it. We did have the occasional "You got my character killed" argument, and once in a while a player would roll a new character with the express intent of killing one of us. But it was all pretty fun, and no one really took it to heart.

That's a great story! I love hearing about things like that. We had similar things back in my AD&D days as well, but nothing as memorable as the order of the red brick. The DM we played with used to fling bags of dog poop at our characters "from out of no where" and the bags got bigger, until a character got crushed/killed by the Flying bag of poop. Yup, to be 12 again. LOL