Deadly Games- Now without Death

One of the common conflicts one sees in online RPG forums is that between posters who say that the PCs risk death in their games, and those who want to play their characters without worrying about losing them to random and often meaningless events. The former call the latter wimps and pound their chests about how hardcore they are.

Previously I personally didn't care much about either side, not because I didn't have a opinion- but because I play both ways depending upon the campaign's genre. I took them at their word and passed them by.

However I've noticed something about "Our Campaign is so Deadly" types that arose out of our Only War experience a bit back. On of the players in the online campaign made the statement "this game is so deadly...", but no one had died. How could he say that? Then a thread over on therpgsite referenced my posts about those campaigns and the same subject came up there and so I put the question to the 'deadly game' proponents there.

And guess what? None of these players of these so called 'deadly games' actually could give an example of a significant PC being killed.

The key word there is *significant*, as I did get examples of characters that hadn't been played long dying, 1st level guys in a D&D dungeon crawl, newly created 5th level D&D characters intended to introduce new players to the game, or a PC in a CoC that wasn't meant to last more than a few sessions anyway. Those were the examples I got. But of characters dying after years of play with real history behind them? None except for those I provided myself.

In short, these 'deadly' campaigns would kill the hamsters (i.e. short lived PCs that don't really have much player investment) but long lived ones were in practical terms as safe as the wimpiest 'PCs don't die unless they want to' campaign.

And to add an even weirder outcome, most of the people who started the thread making the claims of deadly campaigns- ran from the thread and repeated their clearly untrue claims in other threads. They were completely unwilling to face the fact that their threats of 'deadly campaign' had been proven empty by their own history. I must wonder if they are lying to themselves as much as they are lying to others.

So in the future dear reader, if you see one of those types- asked when was last time he had one of his long played PCs die. Or anyone else in the campaign. Odds are good that you're get a blank look, or find out that they don't do long-run campaigns at all.