Primo, death.

I write stuff.

A lot of stuff.

I mostly hide it in my verbal brain cheeks like a furious paper squirrel. If you don't know what that is, then you have excellent literary taste. Or not. I can't judge, my mouth is full of words.

This particular pile of verbose spew will be related, most likely, primarily to D&D. Also books. And words. And possibly the ulcers caused by HOARDING WORDS LIKE A FURIOUS PAPER SQUIRREL. It will also be full of me trying to sound overly wordy. It happens.

So.

Let us begin, with death. In D&D, specifically, but also in games and stories in a corollary fashion.
I run a 4E game.
Players kill things.
I play in a 4E game.
We kill things.
I played in a 3.5 game.
We killed things.
Adventuring parties kill a lot of things.

Now, I know that 4E's mechanics mean that the game ends up being about a bunch of increasingly ridiculous supramortals.
But, accounting for minions and bosses, a party is going to come up against, over a campaign, about 125%-150% of its own size in 'things to kill'. And it's likely that kills are not spread evenly across a group, either. The Leader is going to have far fewer kills than the Striker or Controller, generally.
Give about 8 encounters a level, and by the time they've hit level 10, there is a damn lot of murder in their past.

3.5 isn't much better.
While the game design is itself not required to have overwhelming numbers and can work better with fewer, tougher monsters, you're still going to see kobold and goblin hordes wiped out.

Either edition is also open to seeing the wholesale slaughter of swathes of comparatively harmless populations. Nothing is preventing a high-level dude going back down to wipe out that tribe of filthy creatures that was niggling them back when he was L2.

Adventuring parties will end up being the cause of much death.
Now, assuming said heroes are in a world where they are not the first adventuring party to stalk its loot-littered lands...
How is death now viewed?
Is that just how things are solved?
D&D is a roleplaying game. Ostensibly it could be played as a wargame or tactics game, but it is still a roleplaying game. And that means stories. And stories mean drama.
And death is dramatic.
As such, law enforcement is trigger-happy.

When there are bands of mystical murderhobos roaming the lands (and there must be many, because otherwise the magic item merchants would be out of business), killing people for 'looking funny' or for being in front of a pile of treasure, then how long before so-called civilisation just throws its hands up in the air and stabs someone?
I'm not saying that the town guard are all going to shoot first and and questions later.
Just that they are far more amenable to solving a problem via the application of thrust into sensitive areas LIKE YOUR FACE

I'm not condoning or condemning the fact that adventurers kill a lot of stuff. I think it's required. Defeat foes. Take their stuff. Feel powerful.
It's a role-playing game, but it's a GAME.

Still. Adventurers make death common. How long before that shapes the rest of the world?



Oh, and welcome to the Pit.