On player death

It would be all too easy to just let players be conveniently invincible. But then it's not really a challenge- it's sightseeing. Don't get me wrong, I like sightseeing, but there needs to be an element of challenge and fear involved. If you really mess up, you will die. Your resources, including your HP, will be fatigued and exhausted. But that's not fun!

My policy (both for RPs and RPGs) was that no one will die... permanently. It served its purpose nicely, but there was still no viscerality to it. I could make a convincing firefight, but eventually someone will realize- there never was any real danger. There never will be. We can do what we want, and the GM will have to go with it. I'm invincible!

So, I'm putting up new ground rules. This is still a loose guideline, and heavily ties into the "you're special" intro to every campaign evar.

• Players get a "warning shot." Unless if it very obviously should kill them (detonating a nuke), my dice will conveniently miss them. Hopefully they'll get the idea and scramble for meds.
• Anyone who dies will get to go out in the most spectacular way possible. No boring deaths. If they're going to die, then dammit! I'll give them an exit they'll remember for quite a while.
• Resurrect: The character comes back to life, but at a cost. Either XP, or something nasty comes with them.
• Reincarnate: Make a new character with roughly the same XP. I don't want death to be a character replacement mechanic, but at the same time, I'm not going to punish them too thoroughly for dying. The dice are trying to kill me.

This is roughly how I'm going to do things. Warning shot -> spectacle -> resurrect/reincarnate.

In Sunburn, they'll have defib shockers which bring them up to 1 HP. I'll even make them roll dice for it. Certain negative HPs have harder and harder DCs to beat.

(Medicine) + (Ability Dice, D8 for humans) vs Second Wind DC

• 0-10 : DC 4
• 11-20: DC 6
• 31-50: DC 9
• 51-100: DC 12

It'll work for now. More will happen in testing. For a couple of people slugging it out with machine guns doing +2 over the "light" armor, I think we're good.