Player Killing

My thoughts on player killing in RPGs. Copied from a debate post I wrote on Ryan's site:

Okay kiddies, the topis is this. Should the ST arbitrarily kill characters because of bad die rolls?

One thing that I think we can all agree on is this. Bad decisions can kill characters. If the first level wizard is going to rush a red dragon, and the player is aware of the consequences, there is no excuse but to kill them off.

Okay, I have to say that I'm not a fan of die rolls arbitrarily killing characters (that means without ST fudging, nudging, or helping in any way shape or form). This is for two main reasons:

1. I suck at die rolls. I just do. I can't understand why, I just do. Casinos are not my friend, and niether is d20 stat rolling. Some nights I'm okay, but some nights I cannot roll a 3 on a 1d6. I'm not trying to blame luck for all my problems, but as Aaron can attest, it would have killed my character off many times if he hadn't taken matters into his own hands.

2. I LIKE my characters. I honestly make most characters up thinking of how they might develp as the years pass, and how I'd like to see them in a happy ending eventually. I build emotional complexity into them and try to come up with cool backstory ideas and work with the ST to build those backstories into events as much as I can. I don't want to see all that effort and (yes) some level of emotional connection to this character wasted all of a sudden by a bad die roll when I needed it to count. Action Points and Willpower and such help with this somewhat, but not completely.

Honestly, I have played both types of games and found one thing.....when the GM killed characters arbitrarily by bad die rolls, people would play them safer. The players would be more worried about losing this character they had grown attached to and they wouldn't do nearly as much heroic adventure stuff. To me, that sucks. I watch I, Robot and I'm not concerned whether Will Smith is going to die or not. He takes crazy risks and it's fun as hell to watch and cool as hell to do in a game, but being constantly afraid that if you do something that out there that you're going to cack off due to high target numbers bogs things down. I think most games, especially Exalted, need to have more willingness to make up a kick ass character and not be afraid if this is the session where his number is up.