D&D 5E [+] Questions for zero character death players and DMs…

[Oofta]

So my big question: since no elf I play in any edition survives to see 3rd level*, if I got into a "no death" campaign, would the campaign just end? Would the DM give up on trying to keep my PC alive and have them just die already?

Just a thought to ponder.

*not for lack of trying.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Again, losing an RPG character is in no way comparable to losing a pawn at chess and I think that disconnect in philosophy is the primary issue.

Absolutely. I keep seeing this sort of thing happening: the analogies being used never actually consider the investment of the player into the character.

A novel or film character can be interesting, but isn't a personal creation of a player; that's a critical difference which is specifically relevant to the situation at hand. A pawn, or indeed literally any piece on the chessboard, has no narrative component to it at all; that's a critical difference which is specifically relevant to the situation at hand. By comparison, the fact that regular human lives are not as likely to include lethal danger as a character's life really isn't a critical difference for the argument I was making above, namely, that life is full of meaningful choices which are totally orthogonal to the question of survival, and thus any claim that there cannot be meaning unless survival is on the line is suspect at best. The fact that survival is more likely to be in question is really not very relevant to whether it is exclusively relevant. (This is also my response to your most recent reply to me @Micah Sweet.)

It’s absolutely comparable. It’s not the same - a pawn in chess doesn’t have the time, effort, or creative energy put into it than a D&D character often does. But it’s absolutely comparable, as both are perfectly normal (albeit undesirable) outcomes of play in their respective games.

It is not comparable in key senses, exactly as you laid out here. The fact that you aren't invested is, in fact, the most relevant point possible, since both sides here are specifically talking about what gets, or keeps, them invested into the game, as noted in some of the stuff below.

I could just as easily have said to you that a game piece is what your D&D character is, and by recognizing and leveraging it, we can do cool things. I chose to express my own perspective rather than trying to undermine yours, out of recognition and respect of the fact that we have different priorities and goals.

I mean...that's not exactly what I've been getting from this conversation, but okay. And no, I don't, at all, think that we can "leverage" the fact that it's a game with game pieces. That doesn't have any intersection with narrative, investment, and questions of the worth thereof, except in the extremely narrow and specific OOTS or Erfworld type "game-rules literally as world-physics" narrative. (Not intending to disparage that approach at all, it can be very fun, but it's a pretty small niche in the much broader space of narrative-via-gaming.)

No, I understand that there can be other consequences than death. But the fact that death is not a possible consequence unless I want it to be indicates a priority towards fantasy and narrative over challenge (referring here to the MDA aesthetics).

Well, that's an incorrect assumption on your part. I in fact prioritize challenging my players. I just challenge their moral-ethical decision-making as the primary goal, or in-battle tactical decision-making as a secondary goal, rather than their strategic-logistical decisions. A character that dies in a given combat is going to stay dead for that combat (unless they really impress me with a clever way to change that fact), but that death isn't going to end the overall saga, because the dead cannot participate in the types of decision-making I'm interested in challenging.

You’re focused on narrative consequences here. I’m talking about gameplay consequences.

Sure. Those occur within the context of a given fight, generally speaking. I have little need for extensive rules outside of combat; that's where the fiction is undisputed king. Within combat, the rules tend to take primacy because we want to avoid the stereotypical schoolyard squabble. Outside combat, where the pressures are different and usually broader-scope, negotiating a consensus result is much more feasible. And I find detail-oriented logistical rules to be, quite frankly, incredibly dull in most games--I get how they could be interesting, I just find almost all mechanics proposed for them to be really poor ideas, because one engages with them only to avoid the bad, not to seek the good, as it were. So there's little reason for me to consider out-of-combat rules other than something like 4e's Skill Challenges, which are just a fairly loose and adaptable framework.

I invest time, effort, and creative energy into my characters. That absolutely has meaning to me, and part of the game is staking that investment on my gameplay decisions and risk evaluation.

Sure, though again, nothing prevents that from occurring in specific areas (like individual combats) and not others (like the over-arching narrative.) These things can (and IMO should) interact, such as retreating from a combat resulting in deleterious consequences for the narrative, a character dying in a combat derailing current plans or prompting strange and disturbing revelations,

Staking your investment on those gameplay decisions and risk evaluations, again, does not require that your character poof out of existence forever when certain mechanical conditions occur. Instead, it requires that there be at least the possibility of realized loss: that the things you wanted to happen didn't, and that that either cannot be reversed at all, or can only be reversed by paying some other price instead. Hence why I and others have emphasized these over-arching narrative consequences. A dead character never coming back is, certainly, one of the ways to put an irreversible mark on things. But a dead character requiring the sacrifice of their beloved signature magic item in order to be revived is a similarly irreversible mark, one that plausibly invites a great deal more exploration. Or, a dead character spurring another character to do something atrocious or blameworthy in order to bring the dead character back. Etc.

If the time, effort, and creative energy you've invested are worth it, then having that creative energy bled away does not seem as effective nor as productive as having it collide against opposed creative energy from others. Which is, more or less, my point; people act as though no-death (or, in my case, low-death) games necessarily cannot have any creative energy in them at all, solely because that creative energy isn't under threat of being casually discarded. I see it as exactly the opposite: I don't really understand the point of putting creative energy into something that has a rather high chance of eventually being casually discarded (and, all too often, replaced with something nigh-equivalent), when I could instead create stakes by holding that creative energy hostage, or giving the player the personal choice between allowing it to be lost but keeping some other thing they might value more, or keeping it at the cost of that other valued thing.

Again: no shade on anyone who wants their ability to participate in play to be the core stake. My shade is being cast on those who have--repeatedly, in both this thread and past threads--explicitly told me that I must want a dull and boring game where nothing happens and nothing is ever lost, without even the possibility of stakes. Because yes, I have been straight-up told that. Repeatedly, and rather insultingly, so I tend to take a defensive posture about this stuff.

You’re the one who started with the hyperbole saying the possibility of unexpected character death makes the character ONLY a game piece and NOTHING more. I was mirroring your language, though I avoided the dramatic use of caps.

Again, I don't see the two things as even remotely comparable. Because both you and I explicitly care about investment and creative energy and the like. One of these things is literally actually necessary for having investment and employing creative energy: you have to have an entity (avatar) to be invested into, and it must take part in an imagined context (quite literally, a fantasy) in order for you to do creative work with it. That's very literally what you actually need. You do not need a spreadsheet and a game piece to do that. Those are potentially useful tools, to be sure, but they are not required for getting-invested-in and creative-energy-expenditure. Sure, calling excessive attention to the nitty-gritty can be grating. But you cannot design a game where people are meant to invest their creative energy but they never, ever have anything that is plausibly an avatar (even if that avatar could be rather different from what we would normally consider a D&D-like character to be) nor anything like an imagined fictional context for that avatar to take part in (ditto.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So my big question: since no elf I play in any edition survives to see 3rd level*, if I got into a "no death" campaign, would the campaign just end? Would the DM give up on trying to keep my PC alive and have them just die already?

Just a thought to ponder.

*not for lack of trying.

Well, as I said, I don't technically run a truly "no death" campaign. If you want your character dead, awesome, it'll happen sooner or later, I don't even need to do anything special as DM. You as a player will find a way.

More importantly, there are two sets of criteria I have for character deaths, which I've mentioned before, though kind of in passing. One is that I don't do random, permanent, irrevocable death--if any of the three conditions doesn't apply, then that's a cool story opportunity and I'll run with it. If you want your character dead, that's not random, that's intentional, so that's not random, short and sweet. Or, perhaps your character does die to Random Kobold #6, but then wakes up an hour later, with a splitting headache and a strange word in a language you don't know spilling, unbidden, from your lips. Spoopy! ...and more importantly, going somewhere. (I've no idea where, I don't even know what the word is, we'll have to find out!) Or, you're dead and you're going to stay that way, but your friends can save you. Maybe you'll have to help them from the Other Side, adventuring through the lands of the dead to earn the right to escape just as they are adventuring to give you the chance to escape.

The other, as I mentioned more recently, is that I do this as a gesture of goodwill toward my players. I don't like being exploited. Players who rely upon this, who treat it as an excuse to do stupid, nonsensical things with the paper-thin excuse "but but but you said you wouldn't kill my character!!!!" are going to find that I am not nearly so welcoming for that type of shenanigans. You do something that should get your character killed, relying on the fact that I "won't actually kill" your character? We will have a Conversation. If that conversation goes well, and this sort of behavior doesn't resurface, awesome, we've come to an understanding and I can let bygones be bygones. If it does not go well, or this sort of behavior recurs, then I will likely ask you to depart. Exploitative behavior is not welcome at my table, though I strive very hard to have an extremely open mind about what players can attempt (as the saying goes, "open but not vacant.")

Also, to be clear, I know this post was satirical. But it was also an opportunity to say something, hopefully a useful something.

 

[Tutara]

Death past the level you get revive dead spells in D&D is pretty pointless as a consequence, so no-death only really affects levels 1-5 unless the DM goes out of their way to disintegrate you or prevent a fairly routine restoration to life by a cleric.

As a contrast, Heart is a dungeon crawler where your character is expected to die and go mad. Your most powerful ability, gained only by completing your life's mission, either kills you or ends your existance as a playable character. It's 'harder' than D&D in the sense that you cannot win. You won't win. You just hope to die more gloriously than someone else.

However, your character only dies when you choose. A DM can suggest Critical Fallout (essentially a fatal repercussion of 'losing your hit points') but it needs the player to say 'yes, this is where I die'. That super powerful ability is earned when a player says 'I want to fulfill my destiny and it will kill me.' When you're dead, you're dead though. No resurrection spells.

Characters can die at any time, but only when it means something. You could decide that, yes, a random mutant killed you and that shows the miserable futility of being an adventurer. You could instead be maimed horribly but keep going, or maybe your friend throws themself in the way at the last minute and dies in your place leaving you with guilt, or maybe you're rattled but in the grand scheme of things you don't want to die like a chump at this stage - because you like this character and because RPGs aren't a competitive sport - so you take your licks and carry on. Mechanically there is a price, but it is only 'death' when it is agreed by all involved.

I like it because character death becomes important, and a choice, and something that adds to the story rather than crushing it due to a bad roll. A player who wants to die to a bad roll can do so - a player who does not, does not need to but will still lose something of importance. Either way, the story ends when the story makes sense to end, not when a monster rolls really well or you roll really poorly. So in D&D characters can suffer horrible fallout, but they only die when it makes sense for them to die.

 

[Charlaquin]

Absolutely. I keep seeing this sort of thing happening: the analogies being used never actually consider the investment of the player into the character.

It isn’t true that they’re “in no way comparable” as @Vaalingrade said they were. They’re not comparable in player investment, but they are comparable in other ways, and the way in which I was specifically comparing them was that neither is a punishment for playing wrong.

A novel or film character can be interesting, but isn't a personal creation of a player; that's a critical difference which is specifically relevant to the situation at hand. A pawn, or indeed literally any piece on the chessboard, has no narrative component to it at all; that's a critical difference which is specifically relevant to the situation at hand. By comparison, the fact that regular human lives are not as likely to include lethal danger as a character's life really isn't a critical difference for the argument I was making above, namely, that life is full of meaningful choices which are totally orthogonal to the question of survival, and thus any claim that there cannot be meaning unless survival is on the line is suspect at best. The fact that survival is more likely to be in question is really not very relevant to whether it is exclusively relevant. (This is also my response to your most recent reply to me @Micah Sweet.)

Sure, personal investment in the character and narrative is one of the things that sets RPG play apart from other kinds of games, absolutely. I make no claims otherwise.

It is not comparable in key senses, exactly as you laid out here. The fact that you aren't invested is, in fact, the most relevant point possible, since both sides here are specifically talking about what gets, or keeps, them invested into the game, as noted in some of the stuff below.

I made the analogy specifically as a counter to @Vaalingrade’s claim that character death is “a punishment for playing wrong.” It is not, just as the capture of a piece or pawn in Chess is not a punishment for playing wrong. In that sense, they absolutely are comparable, which is why I made the analogy. There are many other ways in which they are different, none of which are relevant to the specific point of whether or not their loss during the course of gameplay is a punishment for playing wrong.

I mean...that's not exactly what I've been getting from this conversation, but okay. And no, I don't, at all, think that we can "leverage" the fact that it's a game with game pieces. That doesn't have any intersection with narrative, investment, and questions of the worth thereof, except in the extremely narrow and specific OOTS or Erfworld type "game-rules literally as world-physics" narrative. (Not intending to disparage that approach at all, it can be very fun, but it's a pretty small niche in the much broader space of narrative-via-gaming.)

The way it can be leveraged is in creating an emergent narrative in which characters might die unexpectedly.

Well, that's an incorrect assumption on your part. I in fact prioritize challenging my players. I just challenge their moral-ethical decision-making as the primary goal, or in-battle tactical decision-making as a secondary goal, rather than their strategic-logistical decisions. A character that dies in a given combat is going to stay dead for that combat (unless they really impress me with a clever way to change that fact), but that death isn't going to end the overall saga, because the dead cannot participate in the types of decision-making I'm interested in challenging.

Sure. Those occur within the context of a given fight, generally speaking. I have little need for extensive rules outside of combat; that's where the fiction is undisputed king. Within combat, the rules tend to take primacy because we want to avoid the stereotypical schoolyard squabble. Outside combat, where the pressures are different and usually broader-scope, negotiating a consensus result is much more feasible. And I find detail-oriented logistical rules to be, quite frankly, incredibly dull in most games--I get how they could be interesting, I just find almost all mechanics proposed for them to be really poor ideas, because one engages with them only to avoid the bad, not to seek the good, as it were. So there's little reason for me to consider out-of-combat rules other than something like 4e's Skill Challenges, which are just a fairly loose and adaptable framework.

That’s all fine, play however you want to play. But that is not the only way to play, and unexpected character death can absolutely have a place in other ways of playing.

Sure, though again, nothing prevents that from occurring in specific areas (like individual combats) and not others (like the over-arching narrative.) These things can (and IMO should) interact, such as retreating from a combat resulting in deleterious consequences for the narrative, a character dying in a combat derailing current plans or prompting strange and disturbing revelations,

Staking your investment on those gameplay decisions and risk evaluations, again, does not require that your character poof out of existence forever when certain mechanical conditions occur. Instead, it requires that there be at least the possibility of realized loss: that the things you wanted to happen didn't, and that that either cannot be reversed at all, or can only be reversed by paying some other price instead. Hence why I and others have emphasized these over-arching narrative consequences. A dead character never coming back is, certainly, one of the ways to put an irreversible mark on things. But a dead character requiring the sacrifice of their beloved signature magic item in order to be revived is a similarly irreversible mark, one that plausibly invites a great deal more exploration. Or, a dead character spurring another character to do something atrocious or blameworthy in order to bring the dead character back. Etc.

Wait, have you been assuming resurrection is not possible in games that do allow for unexpected character death? If so we’ve been talking past each other.

If the time, effort, and creative energy you've invested are worth it, then having that creative energy bled away does not seem as effective nor as productive as having it collide against opposed creative energy from others. Which is, more or less, my point; people act as though no-death (or, in my case, low-death) games necessarily cannot have any creative energy in them at all, solely because that creative energy isn't under threat of being casually discarded.

I have made no such claims, ever. I in fact have said multiple times that I have run and played in no death (and low death) games and they absolutely can have meaningful consequences.

I see it as exactly the opposite: I don't really understand the point of putting creative energy into something that has a rather high chance of eventually being casually discarded (and, all too often, replaced with something nigh-equivalent),

Who says there has to be a high chance of it being discarded? In 5e at least, character death isn’t very common, at least not if run according to the rules and guidelines in the book. And it’s the player’s own decision if they replace their character with a nearly identical one. If that hurts your ability to invest, and investing is something you want to do, I recommend not making that decision.

when I could instead create stakes by holding that creative energy hostage, or giving the player the personal choice between allowing it to be lost but keeping some other thing they might value more, or keeping it at the cost of that other valued thing.

You could do that, and that would be fine. But there is absolutely a place for putting all of that investment at stake.

Again: no shade on anyone who wants their ability to participate in play to be the core stake.

Ability to participate in play?? I don’t kick players out of the game when their characters die…

My shade is being cast on those who have--repeatedly, in both this thread and past threads--explicitly told me that I must want a dull and boring game where nothing happens and nothing is ever lost, without even the possibility of stakes. Because yes, I have been straight-up told that. Repeatedly, and rather insultingly, so I tend to take a defensive posture about this stuff.

Well, I’m not telling you that, so I don’t know why you keep replying to me like I am.

Again, I don't see the two things as even remotely comparable. Because both you and I explicitly care about investment and creative energy and the like. One of these things is literally actually necessary for having investment and employing creative energy: you have to have an entity (avatar) to be invested into, and it must take part in an imagined context (quite literally, a fantasy) in order for you to do creative work with it. That's very literally what you actually need. You do not need a spreadsheet and a game piece to do that. Those are potentially useful tools, to be sure, but they are not required for getting-invested-in and creative-energy-expenditure. Sure, calling excessive attention to the nitty-gritty can be grating. But you cannot design a game where people are meant to invest their creative energy but they never, ever have anything that is plausibly an avatar (even if that avatar could be rather different from what we would normally consider a D&D-like character to be) nor anything like an imagined fictional context for that avatar to take part in (ditto.)

But a D&D character is neither just an avatar or just a game piece. I understand and respect that for you, the possibility of unexpected character death makes it feel like just a game piece. I was expressing that for me, the impossibility of unexpected character death makes it feel like just an avatar. If you understand and respect that, you’re not really showing it.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Can your character be lost instantly to fickle dice rolls though? The outcomes are the results of whole series of decisions you’ve made. Sure, random chance plays a role, but it is a secondary role to your own decisions. All of your actions are calculated risks (though I suppose maybe less calculated if your DM isn’t forthcoming with important information like DCs and potential consequences; that I could certainly see making deaths feel much more random).

I agree with this so much. Recently, the party failed their objective (no character deaths, but the failure cut the party deep).

“The dice were against us” two of the players groaned.

Nope. When the party learned about a threat to the king, and caught a member of the conspiracy, the party decided that interrogating them wasn’t a priority. Despite being aware of the threat, the party took a more reactive approach (we’ll foil it once the conspiracy strikes, rather than we’ll find the cause of the conspiracy). When provided proof that the conspirator wasn’t acting alone, they decided to split the party (not a bad decision in and of itself, but it did have repercussions). When time was of the essence, one character did nothing for two turns. When they realized the means of the assassination, they delegated foiling it to an NPC. The NPC acted on the information they were given, which was an incorrect conclusion based on the information found.

Yes, two players rolled poorly on the last ditch Perception to spot something out of the ordinary right before it all went to hell, but it was a blind roll because they had no idea what they were looking for.

It wasn’t a bad Perception roll that caused the king’s assassination, it was the party’s decisions that led them to a point where the assassination could only be foiled by a successful Perception check.

“Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan.”

 

[Charlaquin]

I agree with this so much. Recently, the party failed their objective (no character deaths, but the failure cut the party deep).

“The dice were against us” two of the players groaned.

Nope. When the party learned about a threat to the king, and caught a member of the conspiracy, the party decided that interrogating them wasn’t a priority. Despite being aware of the threat, the party took a more reactive approach (we’ll foil it once the conspiracy strikes, rather than we’ll find the cause of the conspiracy). When provided proof that the conspirator wasn’t acting alone, they decided to split the party (not a bad decision in and of itself, but it did have repercussions). When time was of the essence, one character did nothing for two turns. When they realized the means of the assassination, they delegated foiling it to an NPC. The NPC acted on the information they were given, which was an incorrect conclusion based on the information found.

Yes, two players rolled poorly on the last ditch Perception to spot something out of the ordinary right before it all went to hell, but it was a blind roll because they had no idea what they were looking for.

It wasn’t a bad Perception roll that caused the king’s assassination, it was the party’s decisions that led them to a point where the assassination could only be foiled by a successful Perception check.

“Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan.”

And, it should not be understated: absolutely none of those decisions were “playing wrong” or worthy of “punishment.” It’s not about slapping players on the wrists for making the wrong choices, it’s about playing to make decisions and find out what happens as a result. All of this strikes me as excellent gameplay that, unfortunately, ultimately resulted in failure. But important thing is not that the PCs failed, but that everyone got an exciting, memorable story out of it. And according to the DMG, that is the goal of play.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Pardon me if I still glance aside on saying 'it's not playing wrong and it's not punishment' while the narrative still has to go out of its way to go, "Just accept it's your fault this happened. Never blame the dice or the game design, because it's you. You. Keep that in mind: Y-O-U".

If it wasn't about playing wrong, we could just accept that D&D loves chaos and chaos is deadly.

 

[Charlaquin]

Pardon me if I still glance aside on saying 'it's not playing wrong and it's not punishment' while the narrative still has to go out of its way to go, "Just accept it's your fault this happened. Never blame the dice or the game design, because it's you. You. Keep that in mind: Y-O-U".

Who’s doing that? No one I’ve ever seen.

If it wasn't about playing wrong, we could just accept that D&D loves chaos and chaos is deadly.

It isn’t about chaos though, it’s about risk management. Like any push-your-luck game.

 

[Charlaquin]

Also, like… Emphasizing the role of the players’ decisions in the outcomes is about agency. In my experience, most players want to be in control of their own characters’ fates. Your victories and your losses are equally products of your decisions. That’s not punishing, that’s liberating.