Some friends and I started up a 2nd Ed D&D game a few months back. We just so happen to be going through the Temple of Elemental Evil of all things. So we’ve been in the dungeon for quite a few sessions (it’s BIG) and we encounter a particular room that happens to have not one but two old-school nasty cursed objects in it.

First was the cloak of poisonousness. My halfling thief character tried it on. Bang, instant death. What no save…no roll….nothing? No, you just die, goodnight, thanks for playing. However it just so happened that our priest was able to cast the required remove curse, neutralise poison, and the use a scroll of raise dead to bring me back (rolling 80 out of an 86% chance I might add). It was all a bit of fun, and I was not much worse for wear.

The second was the dust of sneezing (I think it’s called). Any disruption of even the smallest portion of the dust at all, even from a distance with an implement of some kind, will immediately cause it to fly up into the victim’s face, who must then save or die. That victim (not me this time) did manage to save.

At least THAT one gave you a roll.

Now I’m not so attached to my character that I couldn’t handle a death. I can always start another one, that’s no big deal. But it just seemed to me that these items were….well…..really silly. Let me explain why.

Firstly the effect to me seems to be extremely meta-gamey. There is no logical reason I can think of for a fantasy wizard so powerful as to be able to create a cloak of instant death to hang it on a statue in one of the thousand rooms in the dungeon just in case some adventurer stumbles across it and foolishly dons it. It’s like a pit trap in the middle of the desert – not protecting anything and you won’t even know if it gets used.

Secondly it seems jarring to me to not have any save or roll of some kind – literally no chance whatsoever, even if you were a 20th level fighter with 150 hit points. Even the mighty 9th level magic-user spell Power Word: Kill tops out at 60 hit points, above which it won’t work against you.

The original blogger here is quite correct, these things do cause paranoia. Lesson learned, neither I, nor anyone else in the party will ever just “try” something on, in case it happens to be cursed.

But what is the point of that? How does the game or the adventure or the experience of role-playing as a whole benefit from such paranoia? It won’t be scary so much as a tedious procedure we follow, i.e. always identify things before trying them. Good magic items will still be benefited from, but after a delay before they enter into usage. Cursed magic items will never actually cause harm, since all necessary precautions will have been taken first.

The whole thing definitely smacks of the very gygaxian “dm vs players” mentality.

Fear of death is a good thing I think, in a game. Characters should be able to die. But arbitrary instant death potentially lurking anywhere is just going overboard, and rather than instilling fear actually takes you out of the game.

But more than this I agree that the danger to characters has dissapeared, It is a fact that in some situations a Mortal (and most players I believe are supposed to be Mortal) gets into will just kill him outright, this is not a failure of the game, it is in fact a strength.

Why would I play a game that supposedly allows me to play a character in a fictional world when what I actually get is a set of stats on paper that cannot be stopped except by a series of unlikely bad dice rolls.(unlikely because the rolls are fairly easy to make and the bonuses are so high)

Answer: I would not. I prefer to play a role playing game where awareness of my mortality is a factor in my character development choices.

I am confused as to why Danger is shunned by players these days, people talk about how it sucks to have to roll new characters every few games, I do not understand why this would be required. If a party does not try to “TANK” their way through an adventure tehy would likely not have the problem, I think the real issue at hand in this complaint is that many players do not like to think their way through a situation avoiding the suicidal path.

Not every situation should have an “easy button”

Ultimately though, I am at a loss for why anyone in a fantasy game world would spend years of their life learning to become a wizard, much less why the general population would fear them. Perhaps the general population are all minions? Historically they were all treated that way, so perhaps I should treat it as fact. In a game where the characters are ultra heroic, far more so than in any previous edition, why does my wizard need to feel like a second class citizen? Is it because they are so reliant on blast damage in MMOs? Hell, in many of the older (and in my opinion better) MMOs, the blasting folks were also able to “root”/immobilize, or significantly slow their targets, buff themselves and allies, and debuff monsters.

The roots of role-playing games may lay in tactical miniatures war-games, in which individual playing pieces are only an expendable set of statistics, but when Dave Arneson introduced that crucial mutation wherein each playing piece came to represent a single hero for us to guide and nurture — to identify with as we watched his stories unfold — it launched RPGs down a divergent evolutionary path.

That afflictions like level-drain and ye-auld cloak of poisonousness ever existed at all are only evidence that the pioneers of role-playing had not truly grasped what they were unleashing on the world. While such things made sense as evils to throw at unwitting pawns in a strategy game, they break all the rules and expectations of storytelling as we know it. And since the endless possibilities of story is the unique selling point of RPGs, the rules of storytelling apply to a good RPG experience as surely as they apply to a good novel.

It’s all too easy to blame the kinder, gentler breed of D&D on MMORPGs, but the only evils that I hold them responsible for in 4E are easily fixed with a wave of the DM’s magic wand. If what you really want as a DM is to prove you can kill the PCs, just start out your next session of 4E by sitting everyone down and saying, “Ready? So you’re all sitting around the tavern one night when a mysterious stranger covered in blood stumbles in out of the rain. He’s about to gasp out his dying words when suddenly the entire world explodes. You’re all dead.” Then calmly take each of their character sheets and shred it into confetti before asking the players to make up characters for your next campaign. You may not have any takers, but at least you’ll have “won”, and isn’t that what really matters?