Lethality - Dicing With Death

I had a D&D character go up 255 levels of experience in one game because of one action (but that's a whole other story for another time)

Whenever he comes up in conversation, I always get two responses from DMs. The first response is

"I would've kill him"

Now this is so lame for three reasons:

1. The DM can kill any character in their game. They don't even have to give a reason:

DM "Your character is dead. Roll up a new one"

Player: "How did I die?"

DM: "You don't know because your character is dead. Roll up a new one"

Player: "Well did I feel anything in my last moments that might give me a clue"

DM: "No because your character is dead. Roll up a new one"

You get the picture

2. Since when do you punish players for making the right decisions? Not once has a DM said, "I would've prevented you from succeeding". No instead, they say "Well I wouldn't have been clever enough to stop you so I would've just killed you afterwards instead".

3. Since when did death become the end of the game? There are gods and an afterlife. Vikings believed that they had to show bravery in the here-and-now so that they were worthy of Valhalla when they died. The whole of Egyptian culture was about the afterlife. So if you kill my character, you haven't ended him; he's just gone to be with the gods. That's hardly a final solution is it?

Number 3 bears some looking into. Since when did death become the end of the game? Well according to a recent podcast about the subject of gods (Save Or Die 112: Oh My Gods) it was the first casualty of the edition changes. Somewhere just before 2nd Edition, death became an undesired option for characters. They were no longer happy dying. And D&D obliged. When gods, the afterlife and demons were dumped in 2nd Edition, it was only because death for player characters had already been removed. This became the difference between PCs and NPCs - NPCs died, PCs didn't.

But there's a problem with that: if you not going to die, you can't lose. And if you can't lose, winning is inevitable. And if winning is inevitable, then there's no skill in winning. And if there's no skill, what's the point in playing well because you're going to win anyway. And suddenly the game stopped being a challenge and stopped being fun.

It wasn't long before gods and demons found their way back into the game - and, by extension, so did the afterlife. But death never came back. And a major motivation for playing the game it vanished forever.

The stupid thing was that dying was just like losing a game of Chess. Your character may have died but you, the player, got smarter (hopefully) and learned not to do something. So your next character survived a bit longer. So death wasn't a punishment, it was just the result of poor choices.