The swinginess of low levels.

[Mercutio01]

If the "goal" of D&D is to not die

Whoa, whoa, whoa, horsey. Who says that's the goal of D&D? It's certainly not mine.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Die as in outright -Con or -10 or whatever system "die"? In a combat heavy campaign (meaning more than 50% of all experience was earned from fights to the death), probably 1 every level between 1 and 3. Dropped to negative hit points and at death's door requiring the use of magical healing? Roughly every combat at level 1, every other at level 2, and every three or four combats at level 3.

Remember, that's a rough estimate, and it's also in a combat heavy campaign, which is not usually what I want to run. Sometimes player actions change my intent (it frequently did when I had the time and group for F2F gaming, in fact). In the average campaign I ran, which was probably less than 50% active combat, death came less often from combat (because combat was less frequent) and had accordingly fewer deaths.

That's what I meant about combat being dangerous and surviving combat an accomplishment. Combat was something that was dangerous to engage in, and thus not engaged in nearly as frequently.

You know how many PCs we lost in one recent 4e campaign I was a part of? An average of 1 per session. 1 per level sounds like playing on easy mode by those standards. I was killing at least 1/level in my WoBS campaign. As for reducing people to less than 0 hit points and making them take death saves? All the time.

How lethal things are is down to the DM at least as much as to the system. 4e PCs are just harder to death-spiral.

 

[Mercutio01]

You know how many PCs we lost in one recent 4e campaign I was a part of? An average of 1 per session. 1 per level sounds like playing on easy mode by those standards.

Don't you houserule the length of time it takes to recharge spells? Of course you're going to kill more people if you play by houserules. And, like I said, if you have more combat, you will have more deaths. I was talking specifically about the average campaign that is run strictly by the rules as written without modification.

How many of your encounters were on level per the rules? How many were combats with death on the line? What level?

I mean, if I just cherry pick one campaign I ran, I'd have 1 death per session, too, but that's not the average over the course of my experience.


ETA: Also, it sounds to me like Hussar would hate to be in your campaigns.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Can I ask you the same question then? How do you define "very dangerous"? How often do 1-3rd (low level I think) PC's die in your campaigns?

See, I look at the math and it shows a somewhat different picture.

Take a Basic D&D fighter. He's got 5 hp on average. So, any given hit with a weapon has a 1 in 3 chance of killing this character. That's pretty high. However, that's not the whole story. A 1st level Basic fighter will likely have plate mail and shield (easily affordable at 1st level in Basic) so an AC of 2. The baddies, by and large, have a THAC0 (yes, I realize Basic didn't use THAC0, but, the principle is the same) of 19 and very little way to gain attack bonuses. So, generally speaking, they're only hitting about 15% of the time. A 1 in 8 (ish) chance of hitting and a 1 in 3 of killing means that you've got about a 1 in 20 chance of dying in any given round. Not particularly high.

AD&D is largely the same. The fighter will probably have an AC of 3 (banded and shield is easily affordable) and given a somewhat more generous chargen method (4d6 arrange to taste vs 3d6 in order) he's likely better than 5 HP and/or 3 AC. The baddies deal about the same damage and hit about the same number of times. Again, about a 1 in 20 chance of dying.

3e changes things significantly. The fighter now has 12 HP (not unreasonable) but only about an 18 AC (Scale+Large Shield+2 for Dex) and the baddies now have about +3 on their attacks and can fairly easily gain additional bonuses - flanking, flat footed, etc. Plus, the baddies, instead of dealing 6 or 8 as maximum damage, now deal 12 or 13 points. So, they are hitting twice as often and dealing almost twice as much damage. Sure, the fighter has twice as many HP, but, he's taking four times as much damage. He's got about a 1 in 10 chance of dying.

Move over to 4e and the combat numbers don't significantly change from 3e. The attack bonuses and damage dealt are pretty close. But, the fighter now has twice as many HP as the 3e fighter. Plus, he's got healing surges which means he's likely going to access even more hp in a given combat. So, the chances are probably lowest of any edition. There's still a chance he's going to die, of course, but, it's probably around 1% rather than the 5 or 10% of previous editions.

Now, the question in my mind is, what's a reasonable chance? To me, 3e was just too damned lethal. It was ridiculously lethal if you played it straight and never fudged. There's a reason that Paizo AP's are considered meat grinders. They really are. To me, a 10% chance of dying in any given round is too high. That means that someone should be dying just about every combat.

And, if they aren't, I really have to wonder why?

If the assumption is that straight-up combat is unavoidable, and is required to gain experience then yes, you have a super high turnover rate and meatgrinder games.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Don't you houserule the length of time it takes to recharge spells? Of course you're going to kill more people if you play by houserules. And, like I said, if you have more combat, you will have more deaths. I was talking specifically about the average campaign that is run strictly by the rules as written without modification.

My 1/level was WoBS without houserules - the recharge was something I adopted later. I rewrote many of the combats (especially in the first module - both Flaganus Mortus and the Boneshards were replaced and I had a twist for all fire zombies in the second) but they were all just about EL appropriate. In almost all the cases (excluding landing two crits in two attacks) I could track back the PC death to a major tactical mistake (normally getting separated from the party). But it wasn't always obvious at the time that something was a tactical mistake. (And in one instance it was obvious to me that it was a tactical mistake to be there but the PCs had botched their perception rolls).

How many of your encounters were on level per the rules?

In WoBS, almost all of them except the TPK at the end. Which was the direct result of kamikaze players. But there is literally nothing saying you must run ECL-appropriate level encounters; that is DM guidance.

How many were combats with death on the line? What level?

What do you mean 'death on the line'? The monsters died (or re-died) almost every time.

ETA: Also, it sounds to me like Hussar would hate to be in your campaigns.

Depends. It was [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] running the 1/session death count. One of my other groups has lost one PC in the tier. This is what I mean by it being DM-dependent or more accurately campaign-dependent.

If the assumption is that straight-up combat is unavoidable, and is required to gain experience then yes, you have a super high turnover rate and meatgrinder games.

And that's DM material. Or 2e or 3e by the book. 4e has XP for skill challenges and quests explicitely.

 

[Mercutio01]

I lost a post because I hit backspace, dammit, but my personal experience with RAW in 2E, 3E, and 4E turned out differing levels of swinginess, with 2E hitting the preferred niche of both players I had and myself (both as DM and as player) better than the others. 4E just took too much work to challenge the parties, but that's because I only played a year and wasn't about to give more money to a system that I wasn't enjoying. And by the time MM3 came out and fixed the math to make the system more challenging, it was just too late. Suffice to say my personal experience doesn't mirror your own at all.

As for the XP for combat thing - you're just flat wrong. 2E had a huge list of things that DMs should keep in mind for awarding XP, including traps, diplomatic encounters, story/quest awards, individual experience awards, group awards, individual class based awards, and even an optional rule to use XP = gp. 3E's list is slightly shorter, but it too includes traps, story awards, and the XP there is not for engaging NPCs in combat. That's only one of the ways to beat an NPC, and the DMG even goes so far as to encourage beating encounters specifically outside of combat. And to go even further back, BD&D gave XP for a list of things other than combat just like 2E. The smallest list of ways to gain xp rests in OD&D and 1E. They pretty much only gave xp for gold, with minor bits for beating monsters.

What those previous systems don't have are uniform tables of exact XP to grant. But it's completely disingenuous to pretend that previous editions only granted XP for killing stuff. As far as I can tell, no edition only gave XP for killing monsters, and the system that has the most options to earn XP outside of combat seems to be 2E. Experience awards has one whole chapter devoted to it, with a lot of different ways to earn XP that aren't reliant on killing stuff.

 

[Hussar]

Die as in outright -Con or -10 or whatever system "die"? In a combat heavy campaign (meaning more than 50% of all experience was earned from fights to the death), probably 1 every level between 1 and 3. Dropped to negative hit points and at death's door requiring the use of magical healing? Roughly every combat at level 1, every other at level 2, and every three or four combats at level 3.

Remember, that's a rough estimate, and it's also in a combat heavy campaign, which is not usually what I want to run. Sometimes player actions change my intent (it frequently did when I had the time and group for F2F gaming, in fact). In the average campaign I ran, which was probably less than 50% active combat, death came less often from combat (because combat was less frequent) and had accordingly fewer deaths.

That's what I meant about combat being dangerous and surviving combat an accomplishment. Combat was something that was dangerous to engage in, and thus not engaged in nearly as frequently.

As I now play most of my games via PBP (for various reasons), I'm far more forgiving when it comes to combat, especially since combat encounters take up exponentially longer amounts of time than non-combat exploration and encounters. That said, however, in my current game, I've actually moved my rolls from behind the curtain to in the open in order to make combat a little more lethal, because it's just been too easy so far. PCs are in the last encounter before they're going to rest (I think, anyway) and are about to level up, but none of the previous fights had enough sting, and I think the lack of the fear of death translated into a growing sense of apathy for the game.

Again, this is my playstyle, so nothing about playing right or wrong, but I find that when combat has a high potential for lethality, it happens less frequently, and I think that's a good thing. When combat has a low potential for lethality, it happens more frequently, and that's generally not to my preference.

But, 1/level is not a very high death rate at all. That's 3 PC deaths in 30 sessions for me. That's a pretty low death rate IMO. Dropped below zero? Who cares? That's par for the course in D&D combat. By the math, your 3e combats should be WAY more lethal than that.

Or, to put it another way, we differ greatly on "high potential for lethality". As I said, when I played 3e, we ganked a PC every 3 SESSIONS, which is considerably more than 1/level.

/snip
ETA: Also, it sounds to me like Hussar would hate to be in your campaigns.

Meh, I've played these high lethality campaigns. They can be fun. But, not to my taste anymore. And, let's be honest, not to yours either.

If the assumption is that straight-up combat is unavoidable, and is required to gain experience then yes, you have a super high turnover rate and meatgrinder games.

These are the assumptions that come parceled with the game. Has nothing whatsoever to do with "straight up" combat. I'm talking about after combat has been entered. In any edition of D&D, it's pretty hard to gain XP without entering combat. 2e only gave you xp for killing stuff, although there were some very minor xp bonuses by class. 1e gave you most of your xp for treasure, which you got by killing stuff. 3e does have some vague rules for gaining xp for killing stuff, but, again, looking at published modules, it's pretty clear that the presumption is that you're going to kill stuff. 4e's no different from any other edition here.

I mean, come on, playing D&D and not killing stuff? That's the outlier, not the norm.

 

[Hussar]

I lost a post because I hit backspace, dammit, but my personal experience with RAW in 2E, 3E, and 4E turned out differing levels of swinginess, with 2E hitting the preferred niche of both players I had and myself (both as DM and as player) better than the others. 4E just took too much work to challenge the parties, but that's because I only played a year and wasn't about to give more money to a system that I wasn't enjoying. And by the time MM3 came out and fixed the math to make the system more challenging, it was just too late. Suffice to say my personal experience doesn't mirror your own at all.

If you couldn't make pre-MM3 4e fairly lethal, that's on you, not the system. It was still ridiculously easy to gank PC's in early 4e. And, it's not about overloading encounters. It's about actually using the tactics that the monsters afford you.

As for the XP for combat thing - you're just flat wrong. 2E had a huge list of things that DMs should keep in mind for awarding XP, including traps, diplomatic encounters, story/quest awards, individual experience awards, group awards, individual class based awards, and even an optional rule to use XP = gp. 3E's list is slightly shorter, but it too includes traps, story awards, and the XP there is not for engaging NPCs in combat. That's only one of the ways to beat an NPC, and the DMG even goes so far as to encourage beating encounters specifically outside of combat. And to go even further back, BD&D gave XP for a list of things other than combat just like 2E. The smallest list of ways to gain xp rests in OD&D and 1E. They pretty much only gave xp for gold, with minor bits for beating monsters.

Huge list in 2e? Not really. It was a fairly short list and the xp values were minor compared to the xp you gained for killing stuff. The individual xp awards were also very limited. Answer me this: What did a fighter have to do to earn XP bonuses?

What those previous systems don't have are uniform tables of exact XP to grant. But it's completely disingenuous to pretend that previous editions only granted XP for killing stuff. As far as I can tell, no edition only gave XP for killing monsters, and the system that has the most options to earn XP outside of combat seems to be 2E. Experience awards has one whole chapter devoted to it, with a lot of different ways to earn XP that aren't reliant on killing stuff.

Umm, 2e had a uniform table of exact xp to grant and it didn't even scale by level. A great idea was worth X XP regardless of level. A cleric gained (IIRC) 50 xp/level of spell he cast, same as wizards. ((Might have been 100xp for clerics, been a while)) But, the xp bonuses were dictated by the rules.

Also note that all of those extra xp awards in 2e were optional rules IIRC. The only thing you were guaranteed to get xp for was killing stuff. And, as far as a "lot of different ways to earn xp that aren't reliant on killing stuff" goes, you might want to go back and reread your 2e DMG. Many of the ways to gain xp were for killing stuff.

 

[Mercutio01]

But, 1/level is not a very high death rate at all. That's 3 PC deaths in 30 sessions for me. ... As I said, when I played 3e, we ganked a PC every 3 SESSIONS, which is considerably more than 1/level.

Ten sessions per level at low levels? How long do you play per session? Does it really take you 30 weeks to go from level 1 to level 3? Because, yeah, that would be a very low death rate. In my games, that would have been 3 PC deaths in about a six weeks, which is 1 PC death every other session.

And, let's be honest, not to yours either.

Only for PBP games, really. Frankly, the fact that no one has died in my every other week VTT PF game (I'm a player, not a DM) has me scratching my head.

 

[Mercutio01]

If you couldn't make pre-MM3 4e fairly lethal, that's on you, not the system. It was still ridiculously easy to gank PC's in early 4e. And, it's not about overloading encounters. It's about actually using the tactics that the monsters afford you.

Did that. No one died in a year of gaming with monsters at prescribed levels. Not on me at all. I ran the creatures extremely effectively, but they just didn't do enough damage to make a difference, and healing was so available and usable that there wasn't really any way to challenge the players over any length of time longer than 1 day.

Huge list in 2e? Not really. It was a fairly short list and the xp values were minor compared to the xp you gained for killing stuff. The individual xp awards were also very limited. Answer me this: What did a fighter have to do to earn XP bonuses?

What fighters are best at--fighting. That's not really a fair comparison. But here's the list again - Noncombat encounters, fun survival, character improvement (as in the player becoming a better player), group cohesiveness, adventure completion, story award, individual experience award, individual class award, and XP per GP. The XP for individual experience can be up to about the same as the XP awarded per monster up to 7 HD. So, not minor at all compared to killing stuff.

Also note that all of those extra xp awards in 2e were optional rules IIRC.

Some of them were, sure, but Neonchameleon wasn't saying that. He was saying they didn't exist. As you did in the post before this one.

The only thing you were guaranteed to get xp for was killing stuff. And, as far as a "lot of different ways to earn xp that aren't reliant on killing stuff" goes, you might want to go back and reread your 2e DMG. Many of the ways to gain xp were for killing stuff.

No, Fun, Survival, and Improvement were all core, and the other stuff was optional. But under survival is also noncombat encounters, just as 3E and 4E had XP for noncombat encounters.

You're right that 2E has a few tables, but many of the entries in those tables also have variable ranges, and the advice in the text blocks implies a lot of DM control, just like the rest of 2E.

Once again, your feelings on 4E being more expansive to give XP outside of combat is simply not true. You're suffering from a case of recentism, and when presented with evidence that you're wrong, you then seek to say, "Yeah, but it was optional." Its status as optional or not (and there are three "Constant Goals" that reward XP, with five "Variable Goals" that reward XP--including killing monsters, incidentally) has no bearing on whether or not rules existed to provide XP for things other than combat.

Hell, you can go all the way back to OD&D and XP for combat was ridiculously minimal. XP was granted specifically per GP of nonmagical treasure found, and it didn't really matter how you gained that gold. So, no, 4E is not the only system to reward noncombat encounters. It's definitely not the first to do so, and it's not even the most expansive. It does have the benefits of being the most hard-coded and standardized. Anyway, the way XP is awarded in 4E is not one of the things I have problems with. I think 4E does an admirable job of rewarding experience for things other than combat. Where I break down is with the idea that it is somehow better at that than previous editions, which is simply not the case.

Again, at least not in my experience. Especially since I generally have fewer combat encounters because combat is so deadly, and thus as much as, if not more, experience is awarded outside of combat as it is during combat, especially if you take into account "beating" a monster to gain its XP award without resorting to combat.


EDIT:

I mean, come on, playing D&D and not killing stuff? That's the outlier, not the norm.

You're right, but I don't think anyone was implying "not killing stuff" as the way they play, but rather that killing stuff wasn't the only method of earning XP. It is the most codified rule (now), but DMGs since BD&D have provided rules for XP awards based on things other than killing stuff.

EDIT2: There's this link I found after posting earlier - http://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-550348.html - which seems to imply that 2E and 4E are nearly equal with noncombat awards, and I think I'd probably agree with that.