D&D 5E Where does the punitive approach to pc death come from?

[Celebrim]

I think that the premise that the player's themselves didn't want it this way is the most flawed assumption.

Remember that the early RPGs were almost entirely drawn from the ranks of wargamers, who played games competitively. They derived the majority of their satisfaction by 'winning', and so to receive a leveled character without effort, without having faced risks and challenges would have been antithetical to their aesthetics of play. It would have been the equivalent of sitting down to play chess and then having the opponent say, "I resign. You win.", even before the first move of the game. What's the fun in that?

Over time, we've evolved some very different motivations for play and very different ways to have fun RPing. But there isn't anything particularly strange or bad about the older motivations. They are just different motivations and shape different sort of games. In the context of other sorts of games, there is far more satisfaction to beating Nethack 'hardcore' without cheating, than there would be if you could (or arranged to) start over at the same place any time you died. Yes it is frustrating at times to have to start over, especially when you die to some sort of stupid bad luck, but for many people the simple competition of play is the primary or at least a very important source of the joy of play. They are playing for the NOW, it's just that to maximize their present enjoyment requires at times letting go of the current progress they've made.

 

[Celebrim]

Just Fiction 101: if something happens in a story, it has a meaning and a purpose for the story as a whole. Life and death aren't exceptions to that. If a death isn't meaningful in the context of the story, then it shouldn't happen...in D&D that's pointless, that makes it less like a story.

This has the unstated assumption that the normal and primary reason to play D&D is to tell a literary story.

 

[Fanaelialae]

The trick is not to view death as a punishment after the fact but as a warning before the fact - if you're gonna do something stupid, consequences will happen. If death has no consequences at all then like it or not playstyle will almost certainly drift toward gonzo pretty quickly...which can be fine, but probably doesn't suit the story-driven type of game where this issue seems to arise.

That's all well and good when death occurs as a result of poor choices, but in my experience it can often come about a plain bad luck.

A streak of good rolls on the DM's part can put a character down before the player has much of a chance to make any kind of choice. When that happens, I'm inclined to be lenient.

Last session, the party was trying to rescue a NPC friend who'd been taken by enemies who were looking for revenge against the PCs. The NPC was very ill, so they couldn't retreat if they wanted any chance of saving her. The party was playing well but they were losing because my dice were on a hot streak and theirs were cold. Based on her AC and the monsters' attack bonus, I should have been hitting the rogue maybe 50% of the time, but it was closer to 90% with above average damage rolls on top of it. She went down and because the creature she was fighting had an attack left and couldn't reach anyone else, it hit her again leaving her one death save away from death. Since the party had performed a service for a deity in their prior adventure, I decided to roll for deity intervention, and the dice came up favorably. The deity appeared to the rogue in a vision and offered to give her a second chance, in exchange for a major service to be named at a later date. The rogue awoke with half her hit points restored, and the party managed a win by a narrow margin (they were all running on fumes by the end). Of course, now the rogue owes this deity a big favor, which will cause complications for her at a later date.

That's not to say I disagree with most of what you said. As long as it's not crippling, bringing in a new character at a lower level and having them earn their stripes can certainly add something to the game. If the divine intervention roll had failed, the rogue would almost certainly have died and there would have been a high probability of a TPK. Sometimes you just have to let the dice fall as they may.

My group got away from level loss due to death a while ago, but I've been thinking for a while now that I'd like to bring it back. 5e seems to handle level disparity very well (a while ago I had three 3rd level characters adventuring alongside two characters who were 5th or 6th level, and things went surprisingly smoothly). Since we entered this campaign with the unspoken assumption that there would be no level loss, I'll probably let the first death be a freebie and start dropping them to the bottom of their tier beginning with the second death.

 

[transtemporal]

It feels to me like newer players are more likely to play in the first style and older players in the second style; but that's just an impression, and it could well be that both playstyles have coexisted since the beginning. Anyway, if you're the second type of player, starting at level 1 isn't necessarily punitive. You may not want to start your character at a higher level--that would be cutting out a huge part of the character's story.

Interesting reply and you're probably right. Previously, I filled out everything to the nth degree but that ended up limiting the character a bit. So now I sketch out a few of his attitudes towards things, indicate vaguely what he was doing beforehand and leave it at that. Everything else I fill in as I go.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

It's fun to feel like you earned your level. Having levels given to you is not fun and feels lame.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

TL;DR is that the DM agrees to normally not to kill you, but reserves the right to mess with you if you "die." You can tell the DM that you're willing to risk death, putting the normal rules back in force, and get advantage for dramatically risking your life.

For me that would be about as dull as playing a shooter in god mode. Doesn't matter if I get hit, doesn't matter if I screw up, I'm still going to finish the level.

 

[Sunseeker]

That's all well and good when death occurs as a result of poor choices, but in my experience it can often come about a plain bad luck.

*good post*

To keep it short, I agree. Death is not always the result of stupidity or carelessness. Therefore it need neither be a 'punishment' in the form of a rather insulting 'learn 2 play!' attack on the player's skills, nor a warning against the player engaging in foolish behavior when none was present. All that aside, no adventure is complete with out a few foolhardy mistakes or careless actions. If only the most tactical choices are taken, only the safest and most tried-and-true methods used I think the game loses something.

I also have an extreme distaste for adversarial GMing. It's not my job to try and kill you, in fact I don't want to kill you because if you die that just means we either end the game and never get to the cool stuff or we have to reroll. It's my job to challenge you. Sometimes that means you have to risk life and limb. Sometimes it doesn't. I'm not out to get you, in fact I'm playing the game as much as you are! Your success is not my failure. If I wanted to kill you I'd throw a couple demilich tarrasques at you and be done with it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I do think that group perspective on the matter is vitally important. That said, I definitely think the "punitive" approach comes from the gaming culture that D&D sprouted from--but, as others have said, it wasn't seen punitive at the time.

Perhaps another way of putting it: Early on, "attachment" was something a character gained after a lot of adventuring. You became attached to what you'd done with a character--what you'd survived. Character creation was the opening of a fresh book you'd never seen before, and death closed it. But the library of characters is infinite; a character you've spent enough time with to grow attached to is one you've explored pretty thoroughly, so it was often high time to move on to something else.

With time, a different idea of the nature of attachment started to spread. Attachment to the story of what a character was, what story they were already part of. Attachment, for this group, wasn't particularly "gained" through adventuring; instead, attachment was the "investment," and successful adventuring is the "payoff." For this philosophy, "senseless" deaths (esp. due to the vagaries of luck) become punitive, because then there is no "payoff." The investment is lost, and without anything you could have done differently.

Both are valid--and there may be even more ideas on the matter. However, game design and gamer culture have largely moved toward the latter and away from the former. It's not a 100% shift--much of the OSR and sympathetic groups like Fourthcore very much hew closer to the first philosophy--but it's fairly strong nonetheless.

So...I guess you could say the "punitive" approach didn't quite "come from" anywhere. The game didn't really change--we, the players, did. And then when some of the changed players became the new crop of designers, those changes became part of the game.

 

[pemerton]

If death has no consequences at all then like it or not playstyle will almost certainly drift toward gonzo pretty quickly...which can be fine, but probably doesn't suit the story-driven type of game where this issue seems to arise.

The question is - what sort of consequences?

Losing a level, or starting over at 1st level, is a mechanical consequence - your character becomes mechanically less effective relative to everyone else in the group whose character didn't die.

If earning levels is the point of play, it is also a type of loss condition: game over, start again at the start.

In my own games, there has been no significant mechanical consequence for PC death for 20-something years. (In 4e there is a minor consequence, as per the Raise Dead spell for that game: a -1 penalty to d20 rolls until 3 milestone are earned - that's normally about two sessions.)

This doesn't cause any sort of drift towards gonzo, because there are other consequences for PC death, namely, story consequences. Players don't want their characters to die because they like them being alive and part of the action!

what do you do when a character simply retires from adventuring or leaves the party due to in-character reasons

Let the player bring in another PC at the same level as the rest of the party.

It hasn't come up for several years now, but back when we had more people drifting in and out of the group as work, study and travel permitted, as well as a few players who liked experimenting with different characters to see what they were like, it was quite common.

I decided to roll for deity intervention, and the dice came up favorably.

<snip>

If the divine intervention roll had failed, the rogue would almost certainly have died and there would have been a high probability of a TPK. Sometimes you just have to let the dice fall as they may.

This stood out to me. What is the reason for rolling the dice? That is not a rhetorical question.

I understand why we have to hit and damage rolls: they randomise the outcome of the combat within pre-established parameters. But in this case, as I understand it, it was you as GM, and not the player, who made the roll for divine intervention, so it wasn't really action resolution in the standard sense.

What difference would it have made if you just decided to have the deity make the offer to the rogue, for restoration now in return for a service later? Again, not a rhetorical question.

 

[Fanaelialae]

This stood out to me. What is the reason for rolling the dice? That is not a rhetorical question.

I understand why we have to hit and damage rolls: they randomise the outcome of the combat within pre-established parameters. But in this case, as I understand it, it was you as GM, and not the player, who made the roll for divine intervention, so it wasn't really action resolution in the standard sense.

What difference would it have made if you just decided to have the deity make the offer to the rogue, for restoration now in return for a service later? Again, not a rhetorical question.

It's because the dice are impartial whereas I am not. If I'm being completely honest, while I'm willing to kill PCs I generally hate to do it (sometimes it seems like the character death is worse for me than for the player). Like favored characters from a novel, I get attached to certain PCs and I want to see what happens to them. I certainly don't want them to end up face down in the mud.

At the same time, as DM, I'm supposed to be impartial. It definitely wouldn't be fair if Joe always gets a deus ex machina 11th hour intervention because I really like where his character is going, while Dave doesn't because I don't find his character as interesting. While deus ex machina for everyone every time simply wouldn't work for this group (I've proposed Death Flag rules before, and they always respond that they'd prefer to have death as an omni-present threat).

That's where the dice come in. I set a low chance for the rogue's intervention (12%) and I happened to roll 7%. If the dice had gone the other way, as was probable, then short of making three consecutive death saves, the rogue would have died and the party probably would have TPK'd. Which would have been disappointing, but they'd have grabbed their backup characters and we'd continue the campaign (probably on a new premise). Sometimes that's the way it goes.

That isn't to say that I think someone who just has the deity show up is doing it wrong. But I do think they would be doing it wrong if they were running that same scenario for my players. Or at least they'd be doing it wrong if they consistently did so whenever my players got into trouble (this is the first time I've checked for divine intervention in this campaign). If I let the dice decide, then I have a clean conscience regardless of whether the outcome falls the way I was hoping or it ends in a TPK.