D&D 5E So, how hard is it to kill PCs anyway?

FrogReaver said:

Basically, death saves give PC's a little extra plot armor. Blows that would kill a non-PC tend to only knock PC's unconscious because they are freaking movie heroes and never get killed that easily. It's easy to justify why enemies would attack something other than a downed hero when you accept this.

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This and I think in general monsters should not be optimizing their tactics for a party of adventurers. Most monsters would never have fought an actual party before. Most would have fought mobs of other monsters.

If my players are going to fight a group of monsters optimized for fighting PCs, I'm going to signal that to them.

Like everyone else has said...killing PCs becomes a lot easier if you adopt the same makeup and tactics of a party....combined arms vs combined arms. Disable the meatshield. Suppress the artillery. Fix your target. Defeat in detail.


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I have never (really, never in decades of DMing) had a TPK. Lots of PCs have fallen to my monsters, some permanently dead. A few times I came close to a TPK but the players always managed to find a way to avoid it. In 5e it is harder to kill middle level PCs than higher level. Around the time my group hit 8th level I noticed the higher power monsters were punching way harder and chewing through PC hit points much faster than was happening for the previous several levels. The healing available to a high level party can offset that but those big monsters often put the PCs into serious trouble in a couple of rounds so I see high level PCs rolling death saves more often than 3rd-7th level.

The answer to the question I believe is yes, using good tactics with lower powered creatures can cause a total party kill, in the time I have been running 5e I have found that groups of monsters that do split the parties fire are much more difficult encounters than often the one off 'boss' is, especially if the players don't play it smart which they often don't with do with what they see as lesser creatures.

As for the what would parties do if the NPCs were healing it would be interesting to see. I currently run 2 groups on alternate weeks and my long term play is for them to meet in a show down (2 players have characters in each group) - both groups are basically Good (it is not a good and an evil group) just with different expectations around what is the same basic goal. So how the combat will run (if it gets to that) should be interesting and fun.

CubicsRube said:

So, how hard is it to kill PCs anyway.

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Dead easy, if you'll excuse the pun. There're really no checks to speak of on the DMs power in 5e.

But, if you want to make it sporting - equal enemies, equal footing - so it comes down to luck & tactics, PCs do have one advantage: it's easier for 4-6 players to keep track of their PCs than for the DM to manage all the monsters - especially when they're established PCs vs one-off monsters...