I built a one-shot around this idea on a heavily-modded Tiny D6 system, letting people choose which of the 4 they wanted to be with variants like wealthy or scientific Victorian, captain or gunner pirate, disgraced or retired Samurai, cattle driver or 49'er, and so forth. I set it in San Francisco to get some good conflux of cultures.

Of my 4 players, 3 of them chose to be rich Victorians. facepalm

Our player who likes doing this to the DM: "So they're giving us horses? What are the horses' names?" Our DM: "....no. You choose."

"Look, I'm sorry, I just had to check whether a stake through the heart would kill him. It didn't really occur to me that it would kill normal people too." ;)

First off the development of that backstory is beautiful.

Also my rogue lost all her dignity to a mimic recently. 2 mimics. I shot the second one and tried to hide from it on a bookshelf but it frog-tongued me. Also lost almost all my hit points.

I suppose the correct pedantic way to say it is "Lego bricks" even in the plural. But brevity in titles is a thing I strive for. Less so in the comments section. Also marbles. Marbles feel surprisingly sharp for spheres when stepped upon.

I did check! It went something like: Me: Before I go further into this room, I'm backing up to the wall and shooting everything to see if any of it bleeds. Party: You sure you're not going to get eaten by the wall? Me: ...well if the wall is a mimic I'm already dead.

If anyone really wants a vampire deer token. The blood was a very hasty add.

Eh, I'd definitely say it's not a "don't ever do this" scenario. For player agency matters- if luck had been on our side (if I'd rolled a longer fuse, if we'd coordinated better, if I'd gone down instead of up first) then yeah, we could have diffused them. Regardless, I think it works for the story. First off, it's something I gave myself in my backstory, not something I earned in-game. Secondly, I acknowledged that having this bar to defend was reducing my character's desire to go after the main story line (so I shouldn't have been surprised ;) ). Third, this is intended as a short campaign so I think bigger character's-life-changing events are reasonable if not even expected. And most importantly of course, I trust my DM to make a good story, and he trusts me to help move the story forward in interesting ways. (despite what I said about defending the bar, I can find character reasons to move forward if I need to and have in the past.)

In this campaign and another one where a different pc had a familiar, the DMs incentivized not killing them off by limiting the places you could find material components. I'm stocking up next time.

This is the other reason I chose owl, fly-by is very convenient for not getting offed. (or would be if she ever lived long enough to try it.)

ok no but that's actually perfect. The flavor he has for his character is they like posing questions to everyone. "Would you rather brawl with a lion or sleep with a viper?" is one he asked last night. (They said lion, he suckerpunched them and responded "interesting choice, let's see how you do.")

My current rogue started out sharing loot fairly but it's become a running joke that she stashes so much she jingles when she walks. To be fair, half of the party actively don't want money and she'll share when asked (if she can't get the five-finger discount on whatever the party's trying to acquire) so essentially she's acting as the party bank.