D&D General If not death, then what?

[Helldritch]

But what if you don't use NPC's, Henchmen, and Hirelings, because you find combat has enough moving parts with just the PC's and your own NPC opponents?

I don't play henchmen or hireling or side kick. Players do.
Combats can be long, yes we play 5ed. Average length of combat is about 7 rounds. Our top length combat, with a single opponent without any support, has been 24 rounds a few months ago. Henchmen and hirelings are pretty much essential in my/our games.

 

[Helldritch]

Well, hopefully never?

I've been using the A5e Strife rules for mental stress/ trauma and it works fine as the effects aren't permanent.

Then consequences are... inconsequential? Without permanent effect, I fear the danger level is not appropriate to our table. Sad, as I was starting to get interested in that system.

 

[James Gasik]

I don't play henchmen or hireling or side kick. Players do.
Combats can be long, yes we play 5ed. Average length of combat is about 7 rounds. Our top length combat, with a single opponent without any support, has been 24 rounds a few months ago. Henchmen and hirelings are pretty much essential in my/our games.

So then I have to figure out encounter design for 4-5 PC's plus their NPC sidekicks? Yeah, no thanks, I've done that in 3e and PF1e when players had Leadership and for me, it was a huge hassle.

 

[Helldritch]

So then I have to figure out encounter design for 4-5 PC's plus their NPC sidekicks? Yeah, no thanks, I've done that in 3e and PF1e when players had Leadership and for me, it was a huge hassle.

No not really. I have 6 players in each group. The group counts as 1.5 group and each hirelings/sidekicks or henchmen count as 0.25 of a group. With two of these we get the equivalent of two groups in encounter designs. Just multiply the number of monsters/foes by two if less than the total party equivalent or 1.75 if higher than the total party equivalent. Easy and fast. No hassle to build and it works out fine.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I never kill a PC without good reasons and their tacit approval. And guess what? They gave me this approval at character's creation.

This sounds disingenuous at best and outright deceptive at worst. "Tacit approval" given to you "at character's creation"? Seriously?

You might as well say the players tacitly approve rewriting their character sheets simply by leaving them at your house so they can't be lost.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No not really. I have 6 players in each group. The group counts as 1.5 group and each hirelings/sidekicks or henchmen count as 0.25 of a group. With two of these we get the equivalent of two groups in encounter designs. Just multiply the number of monsters/foes by two if less than the total party equivalent or 1.75 if higher than the total party equivalent. Easy and fast. No hassle to build and it works out fine.

Yeah, it...frankly just seems like we play completely different games which happen to both be called "D&D." Because that sounds absolutely unacceptable to me as an encounter creation method.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Yep, it is called having a discussion.


Well, they said that was the case, challenging my view that most of the time it isn't just back luck. They were nice enough to provide details.


Right, I wasn't there, which is why I wrote, "Now, if I had been there....".

I understand you are having a discussion, and I apologize if I'm coming across as hostile, but this is something that I feel needs to be at least partially addressed. Because the narrative of "it is almost always the player's decision that led to their death" then doesn't understand the reasoning many of us remove or mitigate death in our games. This is what leads to ridiculous statements like what Micah Sweet declared of "if I know I can't die, nothing matters, because my choices don't matter". Because the death is always seen as "well, because you as the player did X" with seeming little regard to other factors.

Well, I didn't say "it actually could have been back luck" in that the high damage roll was solely responsible for the druid's death. As I pointed out, an average 10th-level druid would have more HP (especially with any CON bonus) than the damage done. If they went into a BBEG fight with less than full hp, it was a tactical error unless they literally felt they had no choice (which I've acknowledged could be the case).

Take this for example. You have determined that the Druid should have more health. Do you know their Con score? No. Do you know if they roll for hp and are therefore below average? No.

You then state that since they should have more health, they must have entered the fight injured which is a "tactical error" unless they had no choice. Well, do you know how many fights they had that day? No. Do you know what healing options that they had available to them? No. You may assume the druid had spell slots left and could have maybe healed them... but you don't know if the druid has healing spells prepared. You may say that was a tactical error, but maybe they had a stock of healing potions and simply burnt through them before the fight.

You don't acknowledge that maybe before the druid cast Heat Metal and hid, that they may have been injured by an earlier spell or attack. That would also account for their hp, and in which case they didn't make a tactical error, they went in to the fight fully prepared.

You don't know, and cannot know, so many factors of this fight. But at every turn in your responses you have put forth theory after theory of how Sabathius misplayed his druid and that led to the death.

For example, the wizard choose to hide, so apparently with either out of range or out of line of sight to counterspell the sunburst. They might have failed even if they tried, but they never tried. Now, if they were out of line of sight due to being behind cover, the sunburst spell shouldn't have affected them IMO. Not knowing precisely, I can't say, I can only speculate.

And here is another factor I've never seen you even touch. There is one more tactical decision that could have saved the Druid's life.

What if the DM didn't cast Sunburst? What if the DM had cut the Giant Zombie's hp by half? What if the DM had drawn the map differently? All of these decisions could also have saved the player's character. We can only speculate, but it is awfully strange that "your decisions as the player led to your death" is such a common refrain, while unless the DM is egregiously out of line like in Oofta's example, they aren't even part of the discussion.

I don't mean this as blaming DMs, I don't want to blame anyone, because I know that there are so many factors involved that it is frankly impossible to decide why it happened. But that's why this idea that it happened because the player made the wrong decision drives me nuts.

But in a game I recently played in, a player pressed against a powerful foe and died from a critical hit. If they had chosen to dodge instead, serving their goal of being the target, they would likely have survived because it wouldn't have been a critical hit (just 1 in 400 it still would have been).

From what I know of their encounter, I understand their tactics but as a player would never have gone with it. Wolfpacking one target or the other, being close enough to support each other, etc., probably would have been sounder.

So, they should have known that their plan would fail, because 95% of the time their plan would succeed. Do you bring an umbrella with you on days with a 5% chance of rain?

 

[Chaosmancer]

When people talk about ranged weapon builds there are mechanical reasons why dex based longbow barbarian builds are rarely of note.

Right, so you have no information except theorycrafting. Which is my entire point. You have declared it a terrible plan, while holding no information on why that plan was enacted.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

1st bolded part
Nah... you got it wrong.
I never kill a PC without good reasons and their tacit approval. And guess what? They gave me this approval at character's creation. They know that death is a real possibility. It is not some far remote possibility. It can happen at level one, session 1, even session 0.5 if we started in session zero! And when a campaign is over and the players look at what they have accomplished, they know that they did it. They did not rely on some shenanigans I made to save their arses. They succeeded because they bested everything I have thrown at them. Nothing more, nothing less.

Who said "shenanigans"? Who said I "made" them? You keep projecting all these nasty things onto my position. Please stop. I don't do that. Everything I do as an adjudicator of the rules is above-board. I play with my cards face up. I do preserve in-world information as mysteries (e.g. NPCs can deceive the players, players can draw mistaken conclusions and I won't correct them, etc.)

And, as I said, players can still succeed or fail. Failure or success just doesn't consider "will you be able to keep playing the game as this specific character?"

2nd bolded part.
This is one of the baddest analogy I have ever seen. And yet...

How so? Calling the analogy bad doesn't tell me anything. You have to say why it's fails to be an analogy in the relevant way. I have demonstrated that it has relevant similarities.

You get booted out of poker when you lost all your money you brought at the table with you. Better luck next time. In D&D therms, character died. See you not the next game, but the next campaign! That is way much harsher than simply having a set back and "roll" a new character.

But that's not what happens when someone loses a character, is it? People don't leave the campaign entirely. Folks in this thread have been adamant that a dead character doesn't mean you're booted out, never to return. It means you write up a new character. Which is exactly what I was saying

Did you ever played chess tournaments? I did. Guess what, when you're out, you're out. No 2nd chances. There are no "Ho, let's go back to this move and see what you will do from there". You're out! I showed many people how to play chess and I never ever let them win without fighting for that win. We would analyze their game(s) together and we would look at what could have been done better. But I never, ever let them win. When one of my friend finally beat me at chess in college, he yelled "YES" so loud and so many times while jumping around that people were wondering if he had went mad. It was just a game of chess, but for him, he had finally beaten me. Fair and square. He had finally done it! (And it would not be the last time either. )

Again: your analogy fails because you, yourself, have said that players are NOT booted from the campaign if their character dies. Thus, clearly, we cannot analogize losing a character to losing a game of chess in a chess tournament, nor to losing all of your betting money in a poker tournament, because losing your character doesn't force you to stop playing. Instead, it forces you to wait until the next hand is drawn, doesn't it? Which is exactly what I said. You have to wait until you can draw again, and then you continue participating.

Hence why I said above, you have to actually show why the analogy is bad, if the person giving the analogy has already shown that it has relevant characteristics. Which I have.

And this is the sense of accomplishment you get in D&D when the DM is not handling you "victories" without earning them in earnest. They have known success despite the traps, monsters, foes, events and what not that were thrown at them! They earned their victories by struggling, convincing or fighting for every inches/encounters they did. The more dramatic these were, the longer they remember. Hell, I have old players retelling me their exploits from over 30 years ago when we meet. And you know what? Even after hundreds of players, I remember these events as well. Because they had earned it and earned it in memorable ways. This is the kind of stories that arise from a game where there is a real possibility that the characters die.

Okay, Helldritch, I'm going to say something very, very clearly here. I hope that this tells you what I'm trying to say as succinctly and explicitly as possible.

Stop insulting me by saying I hand my players their victories. It is extremely rude, and is exactly the opposite of what I'm doing.

I do not--EVER--"hand" victories to my players. I do not--EVER--make it so that, if my players suffer a loss, that loss is somehow wished away. I would not--EVER--manipulate the dice, fudge rolls, rewrite the story, railroad, or any of those other tricks, because I consider them completely inappropriate (to an extent that others, some in this thread, have found problematic, e.g. I consider these techniques to be lying and cheating.)

Absolutely none of that, not one single thing, means that "loss" MUST EQUAL DEATH. You keep doing this! You and almost everyone else here! You keep mocking me and what I do by straight-up telling me that my players must win at everything forever simply because their characters cannot permanently, irrevocably, randomly die. That is WRONG. My players suffer setbacks FREQUENTLY. They have usually had the wit and wherewithal to fix their mistakes and recover from those problems, but it absolutely could and has gone the other way in tense moments. It is ABSOLUTELY NOT the case that I just "hand" them victories.

I just don't permanently kill their characters, with no chance of resurrection or restoration, unless the player is okay with that. That is the one and only thing I will guarantee won't happen. EVERYTHING else is on the table. Everything. And I absolutely WILL exploit that if they screw up badly enough. They've taken some massive gambles in the past, and gotten through by the skin of their teeth sometimes. They've also absolutely done things that, without realizing it, have empowered or assisted their enemies. Whether they discover those errors of judgment is an open question, and they won't be happy about it when they find out....particularly because it will have permanent consequences they won't be able to undo.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Or fled. Never forget that fleeing is a possibility. To live to fight another day. And why would the order of words or causalities matters? They are all equal in the end result.

I brought up the order of words because it made it seem like it was an after-thought. "It is because you didn't do this, or do that, or consider this, or build like that, or I guess maybe it could have been luck" doesn't make them all seem equal. Now, again, I wasn't calling out you specifically for the order of your words, just noting the trend since it always seems to be "here's what you did wrong" followed at the end with "or it was luck". When people defend this position, it is never that luck is first, always that it is an after thought.

And fleeing may be a possibility. But sometimes it isn't a possibility. There are numerous reasons for both.

WHAT????????? What the ***** How can you bring toxicity in that?
When a character dies or a group TPK it is a game. A simple game. And guess what? I have yet to see a player disagree with the death of his/her character and putting the blame on me. Almost four decades of DMing, never have I been described as toxic.

Okay, you seem to have misunderstood. I'm saying that the idea that character death is almost always the fault of the player, is a toxic idea. It ignores the DM's role, it ignores the massive role of the dice, it ignores potential flaws in the system.

Not everything in DnD is perfectly balanced and made, not every system is clearly laid out, not every plan works. Ignoring that and saying "really, the vast majority of the time it is the player's decisions that resulted in their character's death" shunts aside every other possible explanation.

Having a responsibility is not the same as being blamed. No one is blaming anyone. (at least in my games). We all have fun and we see a story emerge from play.

... You do realize the literal definition of blame is "to hold someone responsible for something negative" right? The death of a character is something negative, holding the player responsible for it is blame. That's just... how words work.

Now, maybe you don't see character death as a negative. That's fine, but you have to then acknowledge that other people DO see it as a negative. And their responses are coming from that position.