D&D 5E Why penalize returning from death?

[BookBarbarian]

Oh yeah, totally. I played AD&D from 1981 to 2012 before 5e came out. Players (even the same players over the years) play both games completely differently. 5e is much more rush in Leeroy Jenkins than 1e ever was.

To be fair, a Leeroy Jenkins game can be great fun. I very much look forward to playing a Zealot when I get the chance.

 

[RangerWickett]

So why even have hit points? Or roll for damage? 1 hp is the same as max hp, mechanically. So if no one ever is at the risk of dying, what's the point in having those things? Why have combat at all? Why not just have everyone roll one die, to see just how heroically they emerged from the battle?

I think you're being excessively reductive.

When you play Halo, you can get beaten, but then you try again and keep playing until you win. If you're playing Dark Souls and you die (and you will), you try again. The damage you take tracks how well you're playing, and having multiple moving parts in the game mechanics gives you more options to meaningfully respond to the challenges you face. "Have everyone roll one die"?! That's not at all what I'm calling for.

What I'm saying is, if you run a normal game of D&D, and the party loses a fight, usually that means the whole campaign comes to an end. If this were any other narrative genre, they'd be captured, or left for dead, or there'd be some dramatic intervention that kept the bad guys from executing them, but in a good story the failure still has narrative consequences.

We're playing a game, so we want victory to be earned, not presumed, and we want failure to sting, but if you were playing Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild, and the moment Link died you had to return the game to the store and never play it again, that'd be kinda stupid.

I'm not saying death shouldn't be possible. I'm saying death shouldn't be the most common failure state. When you fail in an RPG, the assumed consequence should be a setback that you can recover from. Actually having a character die should be much rarer. And actually having the whole party die should basically never happen unless it's intentional. Like, there could be mechanics so a player gets knocked to 0 HP, and you say, "Okay, you're beaten and will be rendered incapable to keep fighting, unless you choose to Risk Your Life. Do you want to accept defeat, or do you want to Risk Your Life for a chance to still win?"

Something like that.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Really? My experience was totally the opposite to that. 1e & 2e were meat grinders - you threw 'characters' at the game until some survived. 3e and beyond, you don't do that, because character creation actually takes time, involves choices and creates more than a bag of numbers.

IME, players are a lot more cautious in 1e. It's not because character creation takes less time, it's because it's actually an accomplishment to make it to 4th or 5th level. And with so many save or die, traps, and whatnot, the players are a lot more cautious in 1e. Also, a mid to high level PC like a MU or thief could die in one round from "regular' monsters like an owlbear or ogre since HP were much less. You don't see very many groups with 10ft pole in 5e describing in great detail how they are approaching that chest, where that's pretty much the default in 1e.

 

[RangerWickett]

In the Star Wars RPG that FFG publishes, you basically don't die from dice. Like, you just don't. You're in combat in space and your ship takes enough damage to destroy it? Okay, you drift in the wreckage and eventually the group figures out how to get you back in the action. You get hit by an AT-ST's lasers and should be blown to smithereens? Well, it hurls you through the air, and you're knocked out and buried in dirt, and you might suffer a critical wound, but unless you've gotten four previous critical wounds, it's not going to kill you.

The game is fun and reckless. (There are other game design complaints I have with it, like how you can pile on tons of gear and traits to get huge unwieldy dice pools, and how tactical decisions don't often determine whether you win or lose, but rather how many dice you can pool. But the game's death mechanic works great for telling ongoing stories.)

 

[iserith]

I think you're being excessively reductive.

When you play Halo, you can get beaten, but then you try again and keep playing until you win. If you're playing Dark Souls and you die (and you will), you try again. The damage you take tracks how well you're playing, and having multiple moving parts in the game mechanics gives you more options to meaningfully respond to the challenges you face. "Have everyone roll one die"?! That's not at all what I'm calling for.

What I'm saying is, if you run a normal game of D&D, and the party loses a fight, usually that means the whole campaign comes to an end. If this were any other narrative genre, they'd be captured, or left for dead, or there'd be some dramatic intervention that kept the bad guys from executing them, but in a good story the failure still has narrative consequences.

We're playing a game, so we want victory to be earned, not presumed, and we want failure to sting, but if you were playing Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild, and the moment Link died you had to return the game to the store and never play it again, that'd be kinda stupid.

I'm not saying death shouldn't be possible. I'm saying death shouldn't be the most common failure state. When you fail in an RPG, the assumed consequence should be a setback that you can recover from. Actually having a character die should be much rarer. And actually having the whole party die should basically never happen unless it's intentional. Like, there could be mechanics so a player gets knocked to 0 HP, and you say, "Okay, you're beaten and will be rendered incapable to keep fighting, unless you choose to Risk Your Life. Do you want to accept defeat, or do you want to Risk Your Life for a chance to still win?"

Something like that.

The objection you're going to get is not that you prefer a particular way of doing things but that your preference is the way it should or shouldn't be.

 

[ad_hoc]

By dying you potentially lose a lot of game time spent building up that character also adventure hooks etc.

You either never lose game time or you lose all game time regardless of what happens, depending on how you look at it.

The time is gone. It is never coming back. You either had fun or you didn't.

If you are playing so that there are higher numbers on your sheet there are much quicker ways to make that happen.

 

[ad_hoc]

Also, side note:

90% of the memorable stories in my gaming group involve 1 or more characters dying. There are other cool moments, but over time they are eventually forgotten.

A character death though? Those are memorable and game changing. If the character was easily revived though they wouldn't be. It wouldn't really be death, it is really just being wounded or knocked out.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I'm not saying death shouldn't be possible. I'm saying death shouldn't be the most common failure state. When you fail in an RPG, the assumed consequence should be a setback that you can recover from. Actually having a character die should be much rarer. And actually having the whole party die should basically never happen unless it's intentional.

This basically describes how 5E plays, in practice. The entire party dying is not something that happens very often, and it happens even less frequently as you reach higher levels. The most common "failure" state is that a PC dies temporarily, and then is immediately revived with only a token monetary cost. If resurrection was any easier, then it would raise serious questions about how the world is supposed to work.

Like, there could be mechanics so a player gets knocked to 0 HP, and you say, "Okay, you're beaten and will be rendered incapable to keep fighting, unless you choose to Risk Your Life. Do you want to accept defeat, or do you want to Risk Your Life for a chance to still win?"

That question doesn't make sense from the perspective of the character. Remember, in a role-playing game, the player plays their character and the GM controls everything else. The player has already decided that the character wants to risk their life, at the moment they chose to enter combat with swords.

What would a world even look like, if nobody was allowed to die without their consent? Certainly nothing like a typical fantasy world. That orcish horde is going to be much scarier if you're not allowed to kill them; or maybe not, since they aren't allowed to kill anyone else either.

 

[Schmoe]

When my unscrupulous rogue ganks the uppity cleric and takes all his stuff, I don't want the cleric to just come take it all back again. That's why.






Edited to add:
And I'm only partly joking. The very premise of the question is based on so many presumptions about the way the game should be played that it should be obvious why things are the way the are. They just are.

 

[Saeviomagy]

You don't see very many groups with 10ft pole in 5e describing in great detail how they are approaching that chest, where that's pretty much the default in 1e.

Sure... I remember that from 1e, but mostly it was the case because the thief had a sub 10% chance to successfully find and then remove a trap, so you tried to avoid relying on that skill at all, whereas the current crop of designers seem to think that traps should be more or less automatically detected before they have an effect, and have somewhat blatant methods to disable or avoid them.

I also remember a fair bit if "we do the standard bunch of stuff with this chest/door/hallway", so I'm not sure that the old-school stuff was actually any good.