[quote=Pachamac]
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.
[/quote]

[quote=Brovo]I'm [b]not advocating that every story needs to contain gratuitous amounts of death and carnage[/b]...[/quote]

:hehe

Death is a tool. Depending on the story you may or may not use it. For instance, you wouldn't likely use it often (or at all) in any kind of academia type RP: You don't use a hammer to nail in a screw. I mean, you [i]can[/i], it's just not going to be nearly as effective as a screwdriver.

It just bothers me when I see a story full of red shirts who IRL would get fucking slaughtered in seconds somehow surviving against a billion to one odds several times over. It's completely nonsensical and stretches my disbelief to its absolute limits.

On the flip side, yeah, I agree, it's trite nonsense to go for extremely gory and shocking deaths all the time. It's just grit for the sake of it, which is neither remarkable or creative. Heck I find the most surprising and hard hitting deaths are the ones that happen suddenly and give you no chance to say goodbye. Character A is standing out in a street talking with his love interest. They thought the area was clear. Bam, sniper shot. Bam, character A falls over dead instantly. Bam, instant shock, terror, fury, and sorrow as everyone else ducks for cover and tries to survive.

Now, in an RP, it's hard to justify where an instant, warning-less death would be appropriate to deliver as a GM towards a player. The general idea being that a player has control over their character and should be allowed to weigh risk and reward to try and come out on top, and there's no chance for them to do that in an instant stealth-execution. So you have to deliver it in other ways, which can be a bit tricky sometimes. You also can't straight up murder the entire cast, if you do, the story is over.