D&D 5E Do PCs at your table have script immunity?

[Bolares]

Comming back to the topic, I have a saying:
“I don’t kill players, the dice and stupidity kills players”

 

[TwoSix]

Find better DMs or run the game you want to run yourself.

The games I've been playing in are great. Perfection is unobtainable and honestly not worth chasing.

Do you not have a list of 10 perfect movies floating around in your head? I do. Most people I mention that to have said similar. Maybe not 10, but five at least. Note here that simply because I think they're perfect I'm making no claim that they're objectively perfect, only that they're perfect in my eyes.

Nope. In general, I don't really rank things. I have some movies I like more than others, but that's about it.

Again, it's a DM's market. When I have to choose between not playing anything or playing something I'm not that interested in, I might change my tune. So far, there's no shortage of players interested in the game I'm running, so it's not an issue. I'll burn that bridge when I come to it. (Yes, that's intentional.)

And again, for a lot of us, there's no "market" to speak of. The compromises required in a sustained committed relationship are very different then the compromises required to swipe right on Tinder, to extend the metaphor a bit.

 

[TwoSix]

Not really. I've ran a pretty lengthy M&M campaign myself and death just isn't a thing in that game (damage is non-lethal by default). I'm just really amused how the "killer DM" has become a stigma in the D&D community as o late.

Honestly, I don't really think the division exists solely between killer DMs and entitled players. I know plenty of players (myself included) who beg the DM to not pull punches when it comes to lethality, and plenty of DMs who are extremely reluctant to kill PCs.

 

[Campbell]

And these are all much lower prep than D&D with much lighter rulesets and I'm not surprised the ratios are vastly higher.

Of the games I listed only Apocalypse Keys really fits that bill. Vampire and Infinity are about on par with 5e complexity wise. Lancer, Exalted and Scion are higher in complexity.

Our games are also not light on prep by any stretch. We run narrative sandboxes with some pretty complex character relationships. Most characters will have around 3-5 associated NPCs at character creation. There around 50 NPCs on the Vampire relationship map I'm keeping track of (as a player). That's just the characters we know about.

That's pretty typical. A lot of our players will check up on NPCs we meet over the course of play. "I wonder what X is up to" is a pretty common refrain.

 

[Dausuul]

Honestly, I don't really think the division exists solely between killer DMs and entitled players. I know plenty of players (myself included) who beg the DM to not pull punches when it comes to lethality, and plenty of DMs who are extremely reluctant to kill PCs.

Yeah, honestly, I find PC death to be much more of a hassle as DM than as a player. I always have more ideas for PCs than I have time to actually play, so if my character bites it, no problem, I'll whip up a new one. But as DM, if I've been crafting adventure plots around that PC, that all just went out the window.

One of many reasons I'm going to adopt a less planned-out, more episodic approach next time I DM.

 

[Older Beholder]

I'm happy with either death or no death setting, (both as player or DM) Both are fine options.

As a DM, I've had one TPK in the first campaign I ran in 5E. One of my players said he liked D&D over video games because death felt real, etc... So I upped the difficultly as it was coming to the final battle of a long story arc. It was a pretty deadly fight to begin with, and then the players did everything wrong, didn't use any of their abilities etc...
The player that had said he wanted a deadly game was the one that then complained and refused to play again.

Other than that I've had two other character deaths as a DM, but I've never had a PC die while I've been a player.

There are times when we haven't played for a month due to scheduling conflicts where I wouldn't think of throwing a deadly fight at the players as I know the group just want to have some fun and get back into the game. I don't really have things set in stone, things can change from group to group, campaign to campaign, even session to session.

 

[Lanefan]

Okay, so that's a discussion for you and your players. That shouldn't stop me and mine from playing the way we like or force new players into the older system when that's one thing that got a lot of people to leave the game and hobby.

I disagree that high lethality got "a lot of people" to leave the hobby. A few, perhaps.

One of the best ways to find out how a new player is going to do is see how said player reacts to their first character's death. If it's "Bugger this, I'm out" to me that's a red flag that you've probably just dodged a player who'd have been a problem in other ways. If it's "Dammit - I'm gonna do better with my next one!" then you likely have a keeper, and IME those are far more common.

And it doesn't justify mischaracterizing it as having the players reject 'losing'.

I'm not sure it's a mischaracterization, though.

IME the players who squawk the most over character death are the same players who squawk when anything else goes big-time wrong e.g. loss of levels, loss of possessions, and so forth; and almost invariably only when it happens to their own characters. Some people just can't or won't take the bad with the good, and while you're welcome to take those people in at your table I sure don't want 'em at mine.

 

[Lanefan]

Just musing on the idea of how the group decides what is happening, I think a lot of the problem here is that many people in the West, especially in the US, are just not familiar with the concept of consensus as a way of making decisions, partly because it's so rarely modelled here.

People are very familiar with strict hierarchies and dictatorial models, with limited decision-makers or just one, and there's a temptation to see things that way. People are very familiar with democracies (whether one-person one-vote or otherwise), and if you reject dictatorship there's a further temptation to see that as the model, and then of course some people reject it as "unfair" or whatever.

Consensus is an alternative to voting or having a single leader, where you work together to agree a mutually acceptable outcome. It's used by some organisations. There are versions where people can be overruled, but there are also versions where they cannot. I think, informally, as I said, most groups do work this way, but if you wanted to understand a formal structure that could be used, there's some details here and lots on the internet:

Consensus decision-making - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'd particularly say the Quaker method is worth looking at (not for religious reasons obviously, just they have a pretty good way of working it - so long as you're not looking for snap decisions, but deciding what/how to run absolutely doesn't need to be snap).

I've been in some non-gaming organizations that in theory operated using this model. I say in theory because the in-practice quickly turned into a morass of passive-aggressiveness and backbiting, leading to the organizations shedding members as fast as they acquired them, and eventually imploding.

Consensus only works if nobody is stubborn. It only takes one stubborn person to blow up the consensus model, and IME everybody is stubborn at least to some extent.

 

[Lanefan]

Is the power fantasy gamer who never wants there to be any risk of any kind of loss a player type that actually exists?

From personal experience, yes.

If they do, do they stay engaged in the hobby?

IME they do until the campaign ends or they are asked to leave, whichever comes first; unless they leave sooner in a hissy fit when bad things do happen to their PCs. Whether they stay engaged in the hobby after that I've no idea.

 

[Lanefan]

What if someone is playing a character you personally find really annoying?

If I'm a fellow player, I can grin and bear it or I can do something about it, depending on the character I'm playing at the time.

If I'm the DM and the party is low level the odds are I won't have to put up with it for long anyway given the lethality of low levels. If the group is higher level such that the annoying character is more likely to last, then so be it; part of being a neutral-arbiter DM.