Quote Originally Posted by 1337 b4k4 View Post
Death is definitely a play style issue. There are plenty of players (such as myself) who view character death, by whatever means, as just as much a part of the story as any pre-planned plot point. I think this stems from a different view point concerning the story telling that happens around the table.

People who like their PCs to have plot armor tend to view the role playing game as a vehicle to tell an existing story. In this perspective, it makes sense that a PC can't die until the player decides, because their story isn't finished yet (and, to a lesser extent, because their story doesn't involve a quest to resurrect them).

The other group tends to look at the game as a vehicle to create a story, where the players and the DM alike are discovering the plot as they go along. From this perspective, non plot related character death makes sense because the story is ever evolving and changing and not everyone gets to be the hero through the whole arch.

Incidentally, I would wager that if you took a poll, you would also find that those same perspectives closely correspond to whether you prefer a high degree of randomness in your game in the first place. That is, Group 1 people also are likely to dislike random character generation, swingy combat and damage and things like wandering monster checks. Group 2 are more likely to prefer those things, or at least not mind them.

Both are valid viewpoints, but they require different approaches to death, and yield different stories.
And D&D has successfully catered to both styles and many more for decades already. The idea that 5e can all of a sudden make D&D customizable is nothing short of trying to sell us the game we already have through the power of pure rhetoric. /tangent

So can the rules of Next just have both, and ask the DM to select his 'temperature' setting? That's supposed to be what will sell this edition to us, but we haven't seen anything like this in any actual materials yet.