D&D General Do players even like the risk of death?

[Xetheral]

How exciting is a battle if you know you can't lose?

An unlosable battle can still be very exciting if it's possible to fail at one's goals despite winning the fight. An unlosable battle can also be exciting when it's unknown whether the cost of victory will be affordable.

 

[Umbran]

Because the other two long-term consequences that players really care about IME - those being 1) permanent level drain and 2) item meltdowns due to AoE damage - are no longer available by RAW.

Do you folks actually stick by RAW? Really?

 

[Vaalingrade]

I certainly don't.

Thing is, I'm a child of the 90's and got to witness the death of stakes first hand in comics, novels, television, etc. I've detailed elsewhere on the forum how producers pushed writers to go for maximum reaction from the audience by killing characters and then hyping it as 'tonight, someone dies!' until the next generation of writers thought death was the only meaningful stake and so followed audiences.

So for one, I'm just... so tired and bored of death and annoyed by how often it's ended the stories of interesting characters.

So when it pokes its nether brain into my gaming, that doesn't change besides being more annoying. It doesn't thrill me to know the DM is out to kill my character or doesn't care if they live or die--they're god in this world, so it's a foregone conclusion and anxiety-inducing to boot. And then I get to throw away the work I put into persona and backstory and start all over again? Hurray? Oh, and then it gums up the story of the game just like it does in any other ongoing serial when we have to shove this new guy down everyone's throat and force relationships.

Basically, there's no way to get me to stop caring faster than putting death on the line.

'Challenge' also isn't a motivator to me. I game to screw around, tell or enjoy a story and relax. I don't do Dark Souls in vdeogames and I don't want to do it at the table either.

 

[Lanefan]

IE that one also makes such a scary risk that being anywhere near "this thing could drop me with one good hit & probably would with a crit" hitpoint ranges. Sure bob might be confident the party can kill the monster first, but getting hit for 12 with only 5 hp will drop him to -7 so the healer would need to use a big heal & hope they don't roll bad to keep from healing bob to -1 but still down & 9 points from death. Everyone knows the stakes & treats them accordingly.

IME this kind of thing really needs healing spells or scaling to them that supports the needs better than 5e has to avoid feeling like a losing slog

Huh?

I'm really missing something here, I think.

First off, I think it was RAW in 2e (which used death at -10) that any curing on someone below 0 would at least stabilize the recipient for a while before they started to bleed out again, even if the roll failed to bring the character up to or above 0. What this means is you bang in the emergency cure now while the battle's still on, then worry about the rest of the patchings-up later.

Second, being dropped to -7 and unconscious strikes me as providing a hella better (even if still not spectacular) survival chance than being dropped to -7 and dead.

 

[Lanefan]

Do you folks actually stick by RAW? Really?

How many 5e DMs do you know who have even tried, never mind succeeded, to put either permanent level drain or item desctruction via AoE damage into their games? Or 4e DMs, for that matter?

I'll hazard a guess that the answer is zero and will be happy to be proven wrong.

 

[Lanefan]

I game to screw around, tell or enjoy a story and relax.

So do I; and if my character happens to die in the process or lose all his stuff or whatever: in the grand scheme of things, so what?

Yeah it's a bummer in the moment, but those bummer moments are cancelled out by great things happening at other times.

 

[tetrasodium]

Do you folks actually stick by RAW? Really?

It's not that simple. Look at lanefan's post here. Perception plays a big role in what the GM can change & how it's received. as a perfect example of this in action, I've tried to push for a low power array of 9 10 11 12 12 13 in a couple games I ran as part of character creation more than once & got huge pushback with players uncertain if they were even interested. When The survivors stuff in VGM was put out, those same players said "sounds cool" when I suggested using them to start the next campaign/

Spoiler: Note the arrays

@Lanefan I might not have been as clear as I hoped. yea it stabilized but bob was still on ice where he fell till he was at positive hp & praying the whole time not to get caught in an AoE. stock ]5e could give a 1 point heal & bob could disengage to move where AoEs weren't a risk or just keep doing his best deadpool impression soaking a healing word each round to keep on trucking. Needing to heal back up from that without the excess damage just going away took a lot before someone got back into the safe zone hp buffer. That scary zone changes the math of acceptable risk in a lot of ways from 5e style

 

[Imaculata]

Lose and die are rather different beasts.

They are, but they are not that different. Sure, a battle could have other lose conditions than death. An important resource may be lost, or the players may fail to stop the villains from achieving their goal. These are all valid lose conditions.

But when I go to fight a dragon, the lose condition that is on my mind the most, is if me and my party will survive. Sure, if the dragon succeeds at burning down the town, that is a huge loss. But if there is no risk of being killed by the dragon, the fight doesn't quite have the same punch to me. I feel some monsters need to be scary. Scary that they can kill the pc's.

I never want to feel like the DM is trying to shield me and my fellow players from harm. I have been in that situation, and it is the lamest experience I've ever had in D&D; the knowledge that no matter how badly things go sideways, the DM won't let anyone die.

 

[Charlaquin]

I don't like the old school fantasy Vietnam style where characters keep dropping like flies, but I definitely want the death to be a possibility in D&D, and other similar combat heavy action adventure games. I want the character death to be rare, but possible. Oh, and I greatly dislike resurrection magic* and tend to delete it from games I run. Death should be a big deal, and actually stick. Having resurrection as possibility is a total drama killer.

* Revivify is an exception, as that's more like intensive CPR.

I agree, though I have a soft spot for the idea of dragging a dead companion’s corpse to a church and paying the priest a bunch of money to revive them. Makes me all nostalgic for the old Dragon Quest games, back when they were still called Dragon Warrior (at least here in the US they were).

Recently I’ve been playing around with the idea of a dead character having the option to pass on to the afterlife willingly (in which case they can’t be resurrected) or try to cling to life. In the latter case they’d have to make some kind of check to see if they can find their way back to their body (in which case they can be resurrected) or lose their way and become a ghost (in which case they can’t.)

 

[Neonchameleon]

I don't think this really addresses the point. I effectively asked why folks have games structured so that the only consequence the players care about is death.

And the answer is that that's what D&D does and that's what D&D uses. I don't only play D&D; sometimes I play grittier games like Fate or Marvel Heroic Roleplaying where there are more consequences on the table.

Your answer amounts to, "because that's the only lasting mechanical consequence provided in the official rules"? The rules do not give us any other structure, so this is the one we use?

The rules set the tone and style of the game. D&D is a game where a character on 1hp is fully as capable as a character on full hp and what injuries there are are ephemeral. So the consequences I work into the games tend to be custom crafted.