D&D General Lethality, AD&D, and 5e: Looking Back at the Deadliest Edition

[Mannahnin]

I take a look into the 1ed DM guide.

Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizing to the players to lose a cared-for-player character when they have played well. When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may!

The assumption of harsh and blind lethality of 1ed was not coming from Gygax.

Gygax here is saying it's ok to fudge occasionally. His first advice is to let the death stand; it will even out in the end. His middle advice is that it's within your authority to make an exception if you really think it's necessary and in the best interest of the table, but that it's best to still levy a lasting penalty in trade for your mercy. And he closes by saying no mercy if the PC did something dumb or incompetent (even out of ignorance, is the implication; newbies gotta learn!).

The shift happened early, if anything I think TSR tried to resist it: a lot of people looked at DnD not as a way to expand their wargame or as a game about dungeon-crawling, but as a way to play out their favorite fantasy stories (novels, comics, etc.)

A highly lethal game is not good for telling epic stories, so people made houserules to de-lethalize the game. This had the beneficial side effect of making epic actions (like diving into a mob of orcs and slaying them all) more likely.

5e especially embraces this style of play over the OSR sensibilities, and I think that's a key part of the edition's success in the market. Traditional is more popular than Old-School. While I can't prove it, I'd guess it always has been.

As period documentation in fanzines show us, and books like The Elusive Shift make more accessible, there were two major strands of players going back at least as early as 1975. Wargamers and sci-fi/fantasy fiction fans. And the latter crew were more focused on making it story-focused. But even the wargamers had some of that and were inspired by the fantasy fiction. Gygax proudly touts that in the very first 1974 rules. And those rules included the "sweep" rule for Fighters getting 1 attack per level against enemies of 1HD or less.

I think there is some conflation going on between the rules and designers pushing deadly play and DM's pushing deadly play.
Any version can be deadly if the DM decides to make it so.
But to argue that dnd 5e the dnd that literally has short rest and long rest to let the characters recover is more deadly than any version of DND is like arguing that Oranges are more sour than lemons. It's just not true.

The rules were more lethal by default and required more house ruling if you wanted a less-lethal game. Some did, and some didn't. The MIT megadungeons were famously lethal in the 1970s, while on the opposite coast CalTech's Dungeons & Beavers version saw dungeons 100+ levels deep and PCs advancing to levels just as high. Over time the actual game rules have incorporated more and more death mitigation rules other than just Raise Dead and Wishes.

I would say this is a fair assessment. Video games certainly provide a good example of a 'checkpoint' or 'try again (with proscribed setback)' methodology (also a notion of 'artificial difficulty' where something pads the playthrough by making you play through the first 8 levels for another chance at level 9, simply because you missed a jump). Beyond that, the actual benefit of loss=starting over was never well communicated. I know plenty of early groups that also quickly switched to death meaning you brought in a new character only a few levels behind the one that died, in which case what difference does it make (except having/getting to create a new personality)? I've played it all sorts of ways (no res, res often unavailable, res usually available... heck, non-D&D games where death isn't a serious likelihood) and tend to enjoy them all (with whichever I haven't played recently being the one I want to play next, as opposed to having a static favorite).

And yes, I do think there's quite a lot of... subtle associations people impute onto these things (deadlier is more challenging, challenging is a virtue onto itself, miserable makes better stories, etc.). At the end of the day, the best games are the ones where the player feels their decisions contribute to the outcomes and the challenge of the game rises to the level against which they are challenging themselves. All the rest is details.

Loving your posts in this thread. Great insights.

My groups didn't always have Raise Dead available. At different times we had new PCs start at 1st (though not often) or one level lower than the current lowest living PC.

 

[TerraDave]

In practice my games are no more lethal than 30+ years ago. They remain as heavy on “ challenge the player”. I may have made some adjustments one way then, and others ways now. But the pain remains about the same.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, 100% this. The baseline was far more lethal, but in practice it totally varied from campaign to campaign, even with the same DM. I've ran plenty of very lethal games, but my longest AD&D campaing, wasn't lethal at all

Though as I've noted before, at the bottom couple of levels in OD&D, it was hard for it not to be on the lethal side, at least after Greyhawk came out; too many characters had too little hit points relative to even fairly basic attacks. A second level MU or thief expected to have 5 hit points; a D6 arrow would kill one of them one time in three, and that wasn't exactly a high end damage value.

Short of specific dying house rules, it was going to be very difficult for that not to be a significant risk no matter how non-killer the DM's orientation was going to be, simply if there was things doing damage at all, including any combat where the GM wasn't going out of his way to only target fighting-men (and even with them, first level could be questionable). And its easy to forget how long the first couple levels could last in terms of game time.

 

[nevin]

In practice my games are no more lethal than 30+ years ago. They remain as heavy on “ challenge the player”. I may have made some adjustments one way then, and others ways now. But the pain remains about the same.

as it will when the same dm plays through multiple editions. As you get more experienced at running a table you glance at things in new editions and either use them or not use them but you keep your game going as it always did.

 

[Voadam]

And he closes by saying no mercy if the PC did something dumb or incompetent (even out of ignorance, is the implication; newbies gotta learn!).

"When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may!"

I wouldn't even classify "not taken precautions" as incompetent.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I agree with most of this. I do think playing RPG's and MMO's has conditioned the younger generations to expect to be ressurected and keep playing thier chosen character rather than roll up another. That does seem to push the buttons of some of the old timers when they sense that expectation. For some reason it seems to push the buttons of some of the younger one's when you point out that older games were more lethal. They seem to conflate those statements to mean it was better. (though to be fair there are some borderline evil bastards out there that just like painful miserable games and think you get better stories that way. )

I'd say they very much have seen too many cases of it being presented the way you'll see people in the computer game sphere use the word "casuals", i.e. with contempt for people who are not playing the old hardcore way. So even when that's not what someone is saying, it carries that baggage.

 

[Oofta]

I suspect there have always been, very broadly speaking, two camps when it comes to lethality.

On the one side you have people that enjoy skilled play. Building the best PC (or PCs) for the job then throwing them at lethal traps and puzzles. Survival of any individual PC was never guaranteed and if your PC died, well you just bring in PC #32 that you already have in the wings. Skilled play is what really mattered, not the character themselves.

On the other side you have the story tellers. People want to be the heroes of the story, they want to be Conan or Gandalf. The character is of the utmost importance, and the permanent death of a character whether the individual's or a fellow party member is not taken lightly. People may play these characters for years and become heavily invested in them, not just the game play. Dying because of a bad roll is not fun.

Of course the lines are horrendously blurry between the two, with plenty of crossover. But in the end groups make the game into what they want. I generally fall into the latter camp so therefore I don't want highly lethal campaigns so we set up the games to not be particularly lethal. For example when we rolled for HP, we kept rolling until you had average or higher because even though I could play that mid level fighter that had rolled 1 for HP every level by hiding in the back and shooting arrows, I wanted to play that fighter that charged into combat when necessary and was the hero I had envisioned.

It's not like I haven't had PCs die over the years, every elf I play has died quite early on in their career along with a few others (i.e. TK-421, my warforged fighter, that fell into lava in a 3.5 game). But that's been a trend that started in OD&D and continues through 5E. It's just that if given the option, I'll always want to be more on the less lethal side of things and we've always been able to do that. We've been able to handle both extremes in every version of the game.

 

[Mannahnin]

"When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may!"

I wouldn't even classify "not taken precautions" as incompetent.

Mm. Right. They could be either generally competent but slipped up and got lazy, or a newer player who doesn't know what precautions to take.

Of course the lines are horrendously blurry between the two, with plenty of crossover. But in the end groups make the game into what they want. I generally fall into the latter camp so therefore I don't want highly lethal campaigns so we set up the games to not be particularly lethal. For example when we rolled for HP, we kept rolling until you had average or higher because even though I could play that mid level fighter that had rolled 1 for HP every level by hiding in the back and shooting arrows, I wanted to play that fighter that charged into combat when necessary and was the hero I had envisioned.

It's not like I haven't had PCs die over the years, every elf I play has died quite early on in their career along with a few others (i.e. TK-421, my warforged fighter, that fell into lava in a 3.5 game). But that's been a trend that started in OD&D and continues through 5E. It's just that if given the option, I'll always want to be more on the less lethal side of things and we've always been able to do that. We've been able to handle both extremes in every version of the game.

Building on your point about blur/crossover, there's also the approach of seeing the campaign as more the story of the group than of any individual PC. In the 1974/1975-style OD&D Greyhawk campaign I played online during the pandemic, The Company of the White Oak was more the protagonist than any single PC, though several PCs did survive for extended periods, have interesting arcs and individual goals (often pursued in part in between-session downtime).

 

[Sacrosanct]

C. Not All AD&D Table Played the Same.

Whenever I see these arguments, it almost always comes down to this. Of course the game is as deadly as the DM wants, but that's ignoring the actual rules comparisons. So, IMO, when we have these discussions, we need to be willing to forget how we personally played, and look at the actual rules. I think that's the only way you're going to get even a hint of objectivity.

So that said, you and others mention the big points. Save or Die, low HP, etc. I think sometimes people forget two things: 1. Most games stopped after name level, which was level 9. Rarely did you see PCs in the teens or higher. 2. Even at name level, a magic user might only have 20 hit points. The fighter even with a high CON might only have 60ish.

So even if you ignore save or die (which even at name level you had roughly a 50% of failing), the save for half rule was deadly. Dragons' breath weapons did damage = to their hit points. Even with a successful save, a red dragon would wipe out all but the sturdiest 10th level PC instantly. Speaking of saves, 5e lets you attempt saves every turn. Not so in AD&D, and you didn't have concentration either.

I suppose you could look at it like this. AD&D was highly dependent on magic to keep lethality at bay. You needed magical items, and a lot of them. In a game like 5e, you don't need magic items at all. The survivability was built into the class features.

 

[Clint_L]

I think there is some conflation going on between the rules and designers pushing deadly play and DM's pushing deadly play.
Any version can be deadly if the DM decides to make it so.
But to argue that dnd 5e the dnd that literally has short rest and long rest to let the characters recover is more deadly than any version of DND is like arguing that Oranges are more sour than lemons. It's just not true.

Did someone make such an argument?