Fourth edition is for the weak

OK, so we're up to the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Truly, the 4th addition has almost nothing in common with the game I've been playing for two decades. Like most other things these days, it has been watered down until it is a pale shadow of what came before.

Looking at the 4th addition rules, there seems to be no way for a character to die. Oh, a character can be reduced to zero hit points, fall unconscious, and miss out on some experience points, but then the character can just come back to life at the end of an adventure! This rule is quite clearly to appease players who are whining, gutless wonders who have never heard the word "no" when it was addressed to them.

Yes characters can be resurrected in my beloved first addition game, but there are real, permanent consequences for the resurrected character, and my DM makes resurrection hard to come by (and then there is that system shock saving throw). In my gaming archives, I have the sheets for many characters that met thier doom in the course of the game. I really liked some of them. But they died, and circumstances prevented me from having them resurrected. I accepted that they were dead, and went on without whining to the DM, or bitching about the rules being unfair. My gaming buddies and I still tell the stories of how these characters died and laugh. They served their purpose, they provided us some fun and some good memories.

I ask you: what is the point of using dice and keeping track of hit points, if character death is meaningless? When you can come back to life and lose not so much as a point of constitution, then why not just get out the character's sheet, write down whatever treasure and magic items you want the character to have and be done with it? Without true risk for the character, the reward is meaningless because it has not been earned.

Are the latest crop of D&D players so spoiled, unimaginative and egotistically fragile that they can't stand to loose, or even suffer a minor setback in the course of the game? Are they really that pathetic? If so then they should stick to video games when you can just push a button and start over. Table top RPGs are meant to have an element of drama. Without true risk, that drama just isn't there. Without the drama, you may has well play Monopoly, because you're missing the point of RPGs.