D&D 5E My New Players Have Quit 5th Edition

[keterys]

There's really not a lot of wiggle room. If you have PCs with as few as 6hps, they can be instantly killed by a monster doing a mere 1d6+1 damage - either on a crit, or when hit for max damage while at 1hp. You'd have to find or make up some /very/ week monsters, indeed, to be confident of not accidentally ganking some 1st level PC if you're intent on playing 'RAW' (though, really, why should you be, in a game that proclaims 'Rulings not Rules?').

Yep, this.

I have to kinda continually play stupidly when DMing D&D to avoid killing people. I'd not mind if the system took care of that for me.

It might also be odd for some people that their hit points double from playing a session of D&D. Odd in a breaks verisimilitude kinda way, since that's often the argument used for keeping single-hit-kills and low hp.

But, again, it's very D&D all right

 

[Blackwarder]

There's really not a lot of wiggle room. If you have PCs with as few as 6hps, they can be instantly killed by a monster doing a mere 1d6+1 damage - either on a crit, or when hit for max damage while at 1hp. You'd have to find or make up some /very/ week monsters, indeed, to be confident of not accidentally ganking some 1st level PC if you're intent on playing 'RAW' (though, really, why should you be, in a game that proclaims 'Rulings not Rules?').

It'd be easier and more sensible to either start at level 3, which is perfectly appropriate, as it's the first level a tier, or get a DM screen and fudge the occasional damage roll (and keep on top of how many hps PCs have - fudging after the fact can be a little too obvious).

Thats sounds more like armchair design rather than actual in game observations.
Essentialy you are taking an extreme situation and treat it as the average.

I've read this thread before my first game, so I knew what to expect in the first encounter, just to see what would happen I played as the most ignorant and carefree person in the realms and actually pulled the folk hero and the wizard with me away from the rest of the party and then we split again, I actually courted a TPK, just to see if it might happen.

None of the characters spotted the goblins and the entire party was cought by surprise, the wizard was focused fired by three goblins, two from the other side of the road with bows and the third jumped from the bushes trying to gut her (she and the folk hero were right up the bushes on the left side of the road) all of them missed due to a quick shield spell, then we set forth on killing the goblins, I obliterated two, the folk hero and the wizard quickly dispatched a third and the last one managed to escape and lead us to the lair.

On the way over our folk hero droped to 0 hp due to a deadly pit trap and we decided to take a long rest before venturing forth. At the cragmaw hideout we had a series of incursions into the cave (we got flooded twice ) and where ambushed again when the wizard decided to casta ritual version of detect magic right at the entrance of the cave.

The bugbear again wasn't that hard, by the time we reached him both the wizard and the rogue were at 1 hp but both fighters had full health and the cleric, though without any spells left, was still an efficient killing machine.

All of our decisions where based on what the characters thoughs and our experience in game rather than "meta knowledge" and the entire thing took us two sessions of two hours each (with 30 minutes pizza break).

On a normal 4 hours session it would have been a breeze and I'm sure that in my group regular 7 hours weekend sessions we would have been on 3rd by the end of the session.

That my experience of the game.

Warder

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Well I don't think anyone would argue that Star Wars isn't heroic space-fantasy... but early Luke gets beat down in the dessert by sand people mooks before he can act. He also spends a large chunk of the 1st movie running, hiding, sneaking about and being cautious...

Fortunately he has Plot Armor. I'm not expecting even extremely cautious 3rd-level heroes to survive such an adventure. They have a DM who can at least act reactively, and maybe proactively, instead of letting the script save them.

 

[drjones]

When I ran this scene (with 2 added goblins, one of whom was in the road butchering the horses, because we had 6 players) the PCs were split up right away. The archer got quite beat up because he was scouting a ways up from the wagon but the PCs otherwise kicked the goblins butts. The rogue was very successful sneaking in the underbrush, spotting them easily and not being spotted himself he sneak one shotted several of them and the fighters took care of the rest. Some heavy damage was taken but everyone survived, and I did roll a few crits.

In the cave they had to retreat once the cleric was dry and several folks at 1 hp (one fighter was carried out unconscious). I let them camp without trouble back at the road but when they returned to the cave the remaining goblins and bug bear were ready on the bridge and made a stand on the ledge in the goblins room. The fighters followed the boss down the crumbly side passage when he tried to run and the unprotected wizard got hit with killing damage. The rest made it out wounded but victorious (and found the loot the wizard had not told them about in his pack). All in all, the only death was something of a tactical mistake combined with bad luck. Just what I would expect from 1st level D&D. And no, no one quit. In fact they were all very positive.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Thats sounds more like armchair design rather than actual in game observations.

If you mean it sounds more like a simple mathematical analysis given the rules as they actually exist than an unsupported, unverifiable anecdote, you're right, that's exactly what it is.

But, hey, if you like anecdotes, I did run the playtest through three encounters seasons, and had a number of character deaths at low levels.

The first was on the second initiative count of the first round of the first combat, when a character (under the then-current packet) failed a save to avoid taking 1 hp of damage and was reduced to negative max hps and died, before anyone could stabilize her. The scenario was simple, a combat started, we rolled initiative, the mind-controlled NPC went first, the rogue - whose player has spent hours putting together a character with the noble background and coming up with backstory for her - second. The NPC critically hit the rogue, knocked her to within one of death, and the rogue died on her turn. Two rolls went against the player (statistically, a ~1:40 event) and the character died. More, though less sudden, deaths followed.

MiBG really was murder. A cleric and rogue both succumbed to the phenomenon of a moderate damage roll knocking to very low hps, followed by a high damage roll killing. A second cleric was 'assassinated' - the enemy was specifically out to kill her because she'd openly betrayed one of the major players in the de-facto thieves' guild, and hit her while she was down, killing her by inflicting failed death saves. The replacement for the first cleric who died also died, again, in much the same way, and player opted to finish out the season at a 4e table. Oh, and there was a TPK.

OTOH, the season I ran that started at 6th level had no characters killed, nor even dropped.


I'll be running 5e next season, so I'll have more anecdotes for you late next month.

Essentialy you are taking an extreme situation and treat it as the average.

My intent was to present it as a 'worst case' scenario on the PC side (1d6+1 is hardly over the top for 1st-level monster damage). I'm sorry if I didn't make ' hp character' clear enough. That's a 1st level, 10 CON wizard. Most characters are going to have more hps than that - but a character /can/ have that few hps, could even have 5. The 'instant death' rule quickly goes from unlikely to virtually impossible as you add levels. By 3rd (when most 'heroic' games should start), it shouldn't happen short of some kind of fluke like a /very/-high-damage attack on very badly wounded character.

 

[Joe Liker]

Here's how the first encounter went with my group.

(I had next to no influence over strategy, by the way, as I was keeping my mouth shut about the few spoilers I had seen online.)

We spotted the

Spoiler

dead horses

and sent our rogue to scout, so we were not completely surprised. The wizard and cleric hung back a ways and waited for the two fighters to deal with the

Spoiler

horse corpses

. When the fight broke out, the rogue was adjacent to

Spoiler

a goblin with a scimitar and one of the bowmen

, so there was little danger of a wizard death due to focused fire.

One of the fighters charged

Spoiler

the other bowman

, so the wizard and cleric felt confident enough to approach and provide ranged support.

Spoiler

The other melee goblin charged our second fighter

, so he stayed in the road to fight.

The rogue did go down eventually due to being outnumbered on his side, but by that point the enemies were on the ropes and we just had to mop up. The cleric ran over and stabilized him before he had to worry about a second death save, so it was all good.

It all seemed pretty straightforward and not terribly prone to level-one death syndrome. The enemies were scary, but not too deadly. I think you'd have to be pretty unlucky to suffer a party wipe. Or possibly just inexperienced with RPGs, in which case the DM should be cutting you a lot of slack.

 

[ren1999]

Why should the DM be cutting you a lot of slack?
I received some advice on another forum.
I should have players roll up the minimum stats needed to run 3 NPCs. The survivors who gain enough experience points to reach 2nd level can then be detailed by the players after the first game session.
I'm going to keep the hit points at 1st level to the maximum hit dice+constitution modifier and ask my players to roll up 3 NPCs each for our next game.
This is what I used to do for 1st edition. It had been so long ago that I forgot.
I shall open the game by reading this text. "You see a wide expanse of jungle before you. The native villagers call this place Viet Nam. You look on your Kara-Tur map in anticipation."

 

[D'karr]

<snip>
I think you'd have to be pretty unlucky to suffer a party wipe. Or possibly just inexperienced with RPGs, in which case the DM should be cutting you a lot of slack.

Unless the DM himself is also inexperienced, I would think. The games system should really account for this and provide appropriate advice. Specially in a product geared towards newbies.

 

[pemerton]

A cleric and rogue both succumbed to the phenomenon of a moderate damage roll knocking to very low hps, followed by a high damage roll killing.

I had noticed this until you pointed it out - that in a system with no negative hit points, the sequence in which damage is inflicted matters (a bit like in 4e, with all healing taking you to zero, it can matter whether the healing is applied before or after a PC drops).

 

[SkidAce]

[MENTION=85179]ren1999[/MENTION], have the new players stayed "quit" since the OP?