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

[CTurbo]

How hard is it to kill PCs??? Very easy if you want them dead.
How hard is it to kill PCs on accident? Yeah fairly hard with healing and death saving throws.

Also depends on the party composition too. A Life Cleric will make life difficult for you if you're trying to KO a PC or two. A Paladin can be downright infuriating if he's giving off +3 to +5 bonuses on death saving throws. Throw in a combination of the two and a Bard or two and it does become REALLY hard to kill TPK a group.

But the DM is god, and if the DM wants one or all of the character to die, they will.

 

[CubicsRube]

What more do you want me to do??
*I'm well known for killing characters
*THIS mini:
View attachment 94130
sits on its own little stand right in front of my DMs screen (or at least in front of where a screen would be if I used a screen). I refer to it as my co-DM....

Our PC Kill Count:
current PF campaign = 8
Current 5e campaign = 2 (but it's early yet & they aren't anywhere near the actual ToA )

I love it! I could imagine placing it over a prone characters mini, hovering there while the pc makes death saves

 

[CubicsRube]

How hard is it to kill PCs??? Very easy if you want them dead.
How hard is it to kill PCs on accident? Yeah fairly hard with healing and death saving throws.

Also depends on the party composition too. A Life Cleric will make life difficult for you if you're trying to KO a PC or two. A Paladin can be downright infuriating if he's giving off +3 to +5 bonuses on death saving throws. Throw in a combination of the two and a Bard or two and it does become REALLY hard to kill TPK a group.

But the DM is god, and if the DM wants one or all of the character to die, they will.

I don't think you read my post at all.

Of course you can "rocks fall, everyone dies" the party.

The point is without traps and building to the raw for a "moderate" difficulty, can you tpk a party just using tactics and smart play?

It's perhaps interesting to make "underpowered" enemies as a dm and then play hard to win.

It does require a bit of policing yourself though!

 

[jasper]

I occasionally use this rule of thumb.
Int < 9 next target
Int 9-12 depends but generally next target
INT > 12 generally yes

 

[GameOgre]

Often I will use terrain to increase the difficulty or decrease it.

A few simple foes out of melee range like up in a tree or firing from a balcony can greatly increase the chance. A partially collapsed wall makes a awesome battlefield trap that can be used by either party with the right flavor added.

A bridge over a chasm, a large glass candelabra, even something like a huge pot of boiling stew in the middle of the battlefield can make a huge difference.

just make sure to use them neutrally, both sides can activate or do things that bring them into play.

A text book medium encounter can turn deadly with the right terrain and a Deadly encounter can turn easy. Just get out of the Final fantasy mindset of two sides Hacking away at each other on a featureless landscape.

 

[redrick]

In 95% of instances, the difference between tracking death saves and not tracking death saves is negligible, because the enemy side doesn't have healing. It's just a matter of whether you have to go over there and finish them off after they stabilize into unconsciousness.

Yes, the other half of the hypothetical experiment was that PCs routinely faced opponents with access to comparable healing options to player characters. The point is simply to see what kind of tactics the players would use against PCs if they weren't bound by the restrictions the DM is bound by. Not because I believe we should play D&D that way, but just because I believe "monsters don't attack unconscious PCs" is a metagame construct. I also think fun is a metagame construct and I'm into fun, so I have nothing against metagame constructs. On the other hand, TPKs are even less "fun" than character death, so if you are playing your monsters to go for the TPK but not playing them to kill characters when killing characters would make sense (and it makes sense in more situations than it doesn't) you are playing your monsters very stupid.

Depending on the prevalence of healing magic in the setting, there's no reason to believe that the enemies would think to finish off a downed target, unless they have personally witnessed you bringing someone back up. After all, if healing magic is rare, then 95% of everyone who drops in combat is out of the fight for good, so wasting an attack to finish someone off is putting spite ahead of personal survival. The smart move, if you don't know about healing magic, is to prioritize targets who are still up.

When you're talking about bestial foes that operate on instinct, healing magic would have had to be so prevalent in the distant past that attacking a downed target would confer a fitness advantage over attacking an active target, in order for that behavior to be selected for.

If magic only came into use within the last few millenia, then monsters would end up in a situation similar to moths, whose trait of navigating by extremely distant light sources ended up with them immolating themselves when artificial lighting came about.

Most foes possess some degree of language, which means they possess the ability to share information and basic tactics. Even beasts adapt to people much faster than evolution. Bears in the adirondacks have learned to pull down from bear bags. Healing magic is also definitely a known thing, even if it's not something every farmer would possess. It's a 1st level spell available to divine and nature casters, and healing potions are available for purchase in most towns. And even if the foes in question have never met an adventurer before, the dungeon has met The PCs, so unless they leave no survivors and allow no monsters or witnesses to flee, word will get out to all but lowest of intelligence monsters. Even faster if healing magic is a truly novel thing in the setting.

Again, I don't play my monsters to 2-tap PCs in most campaigns. Just like I usually have my monsters choose targets randomly instead of focus firing. It engages more players and tends to be more fun at the table.

 

[Uller]

I can think of two instances where I had monsters attack a downed PC.

1) In Ravenloft the monk was knocked off a 50' high bridge along with two vampire spawn. All of them survived the fall. The rest of the party was still on the bridge fighting against 3 other vampire spawn and a bunch of animated halbers. One vs downed the monk. The other finished her off. It didn't make sense for the second one to not attack. It made for an epic moment...the only way to bring her back was the paladin's revivify spell and he was almost down too. So the wizard polymorphed him into a giant ape...king kong on the side of a tower fighting vampires and animated halberds...pure D&D.

2) A willowisp was tailing the party and would attack anytime they got in a fight. A PC went down so the wisp attacked him...forcing two death save failures. The party knew they had one round to save their ally.

Both cases made RP sense and added to the tension.

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[The Crimson Binome]

Healing magic is also definitely a known thing, even if it's not something every farmer would possess. It's a 1st level spell available to divine and nature casters, and healing potions are available for purchase in most towns.

Our real world also has stories of magical healing and potions. To a standard peasant, whether you live in a world where those stories are true (the game world) or false (our world), this observation would look identical. Unless that magic is sufficiently common, they have no way of knowing that the stories are true; so while most people in Faerun can be reasonably certain about it, it's still not necessarily the case in any other setting.

so unless they leave no survivors and allow no monsters or witnesses to flee,

That sounds like standard operating procedure to me.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I found it took a TPK really to get a death after L5-6, and that was with me having enemies delivery the killing blow to a downed PC. I think the only thing that got deaths after that point were foolish attacks on Demon Princes, though they came so close to pulling it off I didn't blame them for trying again. Of course it was easier to "kill" them, than it was to keep them dead. Revivify was used a lot.

Someone recommended having the DM roll a players death saves in secret so the rest of the party had no idea that Frank over there 50 yards away still had 2 rounds before he may die. I would do that if I ran another 5e game.

 

[FrogReaver]

The goblin that downed the PC believes the PC is dead. (You see it's hard to tell the difference between death and unconsciousness in a brief amount of time without inspecting the body). So the Goblin believes he killed an enemy and goes on attacking the other remaining enemies. He sees some magic come from the cleric and the ally regains consciousness. (He knows enough about magic to realize this was healing and that means the PC that he thought was dead was not actually dead). The goblin attacks and downs the PC again. This time he believes the job is finished and the PC is really dead. Etc.

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.