[quote=Brovo]
They'll die eventually, one by one. Whenever I see a 'dark' or 'gritty' story, that involves extremely fallible characters, with limited resources and experience, in a situation far above and beyond their capacity to resolve alone... And somehow... Not a single one dies. Not one. It could be six nonathletic, unremarkable, ordinary people, in the zombie apocalypse, surrounded by thousands of zombies, but no matter how insane the odds, they somehow, always, survive.This murders my immersion faster than a hamster in a meat grinder. It completely kills any suspense or concern I'd have for my characters in that situation. If Jimmy Junior is dumb enough to go melee a few zombies alone with nothing but his trusty baseball bat Stevie, then Jimmy Junior should just straight die. The GM should just kill Jimmy Junior if the player doesn't do it themselves. Otherwise, danger is meaningless, and the plot, no matter how violence and excessive, becomes boring and flaccid as a result.I'm not advocating that every story needs to contain gratuitous amounts of death and carnage... But any story that contains survival elements should at least have people, you know, survive from time to time.
[/quote]

I agree with this, but I also want to mention that on the flipside, in my personal opinion I'm done with stories/rps with gratutious levels of death and carnage. When it's done to an excess, it actually becomes meaningless and trite, and extremely difficult to care for any characters when the possible likelihood is that they'll just die. Shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones are actually the worst offenders of this for me. Death isn't shocking. All they seek to do is try and make said death as shocking and gorey and over the top as they can, and again it doesn't elicit any reaction from me other then an eyeroll. Whilst I wouldn't like to see an rp where all the characters survive, considering what the stakes involved entail, I would actually rather have that then ridiculous pointless and over the top murderthons.