The Threat of Death is a Good Thing

I've seen several posts lately that have suggested that PCs dying in a campaign is a bad thing, and that GMs shouldn't make a game "fatal." While I can appreciate players not wanting their characters to die (as it should be!), and not wanting to feel like they're in a meat grinder, it's important to remember that the threat of death is a good thing.

In most cases, the PCs are big damn heroes trying to save the region or world from some major threat. The context is usually (but not always) life and death, and in the process, there have to be stakes. It's one of the biggest cliches in the world, but "no risk, no reward" is very much in play here. In an ideal situation, players will create characters that they want to survive, and even more ideally, that desire to have those characters not die (but still live heroically) will guide their actions in game. It doesn't always work like that in practice, and bad rolls and short-sighted strategies can get the best of any player. But knowing that the very real possibility of death is on the line should sharpen one's perspective. If there is no threat, there are no consequences for poor play (or bad luck). In the case of bad luck, you sometimes have hero points as a buffer, so it's the "bad play" aspect that I think the threat of death punishes the most.

Anyhow, I recognize that I'm preaching to the choir for the majority, but there's a sizable chunk of the playerbase that truly believes that character death should be extremely rare, and while I understand that mentality, the reality is that knowing that death is always possible should encourage better choices and stronger gameplay overall.