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

[Lanefan]

Yeah. us old timers tried good hits and bad misses and another half a dozen crit tables meant to make the game better and scarier. We went through wild magic and probably dozens of other things that I don't remember that were all supposed to make the game deadlier and therefore better. They all eventually flopped.

In our case it's quite the opposite: those things have generally succeeded, become popular (hugely so in the case of wild magic), and stuck around.

That said, I'm not familiar with the specific "good hits and bad misses" table you're referring to. Homebrew? Or something I missed in Drag-Mag?

I think the biggest thing is we play the game to escape reality. I don't need sucking chest wounds, rot grubs that low level characters either avoid or die from or a bunch of other things that just don't make thier way into the game anymore because we want our game to continue just like we want our favorite movie franchises to continue.

I bolded the key word there; a word that where you use it you probably instead mean "character".

And it's a very big difference. The game itself can and does quite happily roll on despite the loss of any number of characters along the way, with the exception being if-when all the characters are lost at once, i.e a TPK. Put another way: the game is bigger than any one character.

And if adventuring is to in fact be the dangerous life-threatening activity that the advertising says it is, then Bad Things* have to be able to happen to PCs. Further, every now and then some of them should actually happen even if just by bad luck. Otherwise, the "danger" to the PCs is all fake, more like a great big Halloween haunted house display than actual danger.

* - death, level loss, limb loss, wealth loss, and so forth.

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Tangentially related to the above, I ran the numbers a few years back as to what was the cause of death for each of the very many character deaths we've seen in our 40+ years of games. Needless to say there was a huge variety, mostly because I broke "creature" down into creature type. I also looked at source in order to distinguish e.g. poison from a trap vs poison from a creature. The data's not perfect; some of our early game logs aren't all that specific sometimes, but the general trends become obvious.

The number one source of deaths: the characters' own party. This includes mis-aimed spells, intentional PvP actions, fumbles, party-caused wild surges, self-inflicted deaths (intentional or otherwise), and so forth.

The number two source: other adventurers. This includes any kindred-species opponent with a class and levels - the evil wizard, the black knight, the highway bandits, the third guard to the left, and so forth.

Number three: Giants (all types, batched). Then a large drop to...

Number four: Dragons (all colours, batched). Then a large drop to...

Number five: Demons (any and all). Then another large drop to Golems at six, after which it become a long-tail list of many dozen other other creatures and sources e.g. traps.

As for the cause of death, number one is melee combat and it's not even close; melee causes more character deaths than everything else combined.

Number two is spells and spell-like effects from devices, at about 1/4 the melee rate. Then there's another big drop to...

Number three: Traps, though we're into minor stuff here: there's about 12 melee deaths for each trap death.

Close behind is Wild Magic, followed in order by Breath Weapon, Petrification, Missile Fire (including Giant-thrown boulders), and Curse.

To my great surprise, Falling and Poison were way down this list.

 

[Voadam]

If AD&D is much more deadly then what people wanted, why was it written that way?

Isn't it a good thing the game reflects how people want to play it?

Partly as an evolution from where it started, as an adaptation of a squad level fatnasy miniatures game with men at arms, stronger mythic heroes, artillery magic users, and monsters of a large variety. In a skirmish miniatures game you lose people as part of the combat of the game. Death is pretty cheap and common.

Take that squad where each die result on a hit kills that number of members of the squad and now play them as individuals with roleplaying and first person perspectives.

OD&D took the combat from the Chainmail miniatures rules and adapted it for individuals.

Level 1 D&D you are basically a man at arms from the squad. Mid level D&D you are a hero who can take multiple hits but still has to worry about cloudkill (reskinned mustard gas) and big monsters.

 

[Lanefan]

I think the point I agree with @Snarf with the most is that it is INCREDIBLY dependent on the table. For example, he talks about adventures being full of deadly traps. Thing is, the modules generally actually weren't. Yup, there were a few. But, by and large, they really weren't.

Additionally, just as a point of order, I don't think anyone would argue that 5e is more lethal than 1e. Certainly not me. For my money, 3e was by far the deadliest edition. It was just so easy to kill PC's. When you have orcs that can quite possibly do 25-35 points of damage in a single hit (Greataxe was a x3 crit weapon, dealt d12 and orcs in 3e have an 18 Str - max damage of 36 points with a lucky hit - enough to straight up kill 3rd level PC's.

We generally found 3e's lethality to be more or less on par with 1e, at least the way we played/ran both.

Add to that the impact of Unearthed Arcana - which absolutely did change how the game worked - as well as things like Dragonlance, which also played a pretty formative role in my gaming experience, and no, I don't think AD&D combat is all that lethal. Most of the lethality came from stuff that bypassed the combat rules like poisons and the like.

Unearthed Arcana changed the game, no argument there. Whether those changes were for the better or the worse - now there's the argument.

 

[Oofta]

If AD&D is much more deadly then what people wanted, why was it written that way?

Isn't it a good thing the game reflects how people want to play it?

For some people it's easier to make a game less lethal than to make it more lethal. In addition, it's not like they did mass market surveys or wide-spread playtests for AD&D. The ideas probably came from a relatively small subset of people they actually played with at the time and my not have been particularly representative of the wider audience.

Some people did play high lethality games. Some people still do.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

This, Very much this.

The group/party/company is bigger than any one of its members at the time.

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).

And this is exactly what I want from a long-running campaign! Great stuff!

Some characters survive and become superstars, others fall by the wayside as one-hit-wonders, and many end up somewhere in between.

 

[Lanefan]

Another thing that keeps being brought up is low HP in AD&D. Again, as actually played these were not as low as you might think, particularly in front-line classes. There was a lot of variance, but I never met anyone who used the straight "roll 3 dice six times and there's your attributes" method of character generation. So in actuality, most characters had pretty good stats, especially in their prime attributes. If you played a fighter, you likely had a constitution bonus to HP, and most folks then as now awarded max HP at level 1.

I keep hearing this claim but the first time I ever encountered max h.p. at 1st was when starting our 3e campaign, in which it's a baked-in rule.

On top of that, monster damage (and HP) were also lower. So an orc, for example, had one hit dice (4.5 HP on average), an AC of 6, and did 1d8 damage - it would be routine to one-shot them even at level 1. By the mid-80s, when we had added UA rules, it was normal for a level 1 fighter with weapon specialization to easily and safely be able to take on a half dozen orc-level opponents.

Weapon spec. was broken as written unless you really beefed up the monsters to compensate, which just leads to an arms race. What we did was toned down weapon spec. some while giving monsters the benefits their stats suggested (e.g. Giants get strength bonuses) and it worked out pretty well.

As Snarf points out, most of the extra lethality (in theory) came from a great many insta-gibb effects written into the game, not from combat. But one thing we haven't touched on as much is the prevalence of having hirelings and, at higher levels, followers with the adventuring party, and these were typically used as cannon fodder, opening doors and the like. AD&D was definitely lethal for those guys! There were also various conventions like the ubiquitous (and ridiculous) 10' pole that every party carried. Most of that is gone from 5e, unless you count familiars and various summoned companions which are often used to serve a similar function.

Again, different experiences. We've rarely seen hirelings in any numbers in our games, and henches - also quite uncommon - are usually treated the same as full party members when it comes to who takes the hits. Put another way, wantonly using your hench as a trap-finder ensures you won't have a hench for long (he'll quit if he survives long enough to do so) and you'll have a hard time finding another once word spreads.

 

[Maxperson]

Good example of how we played different games. We rarely had hirelings, we were a pretty bloodthirsty lot back then and so on. The game wasn't particularly deadly because we had fun playing our PCs for a long time.

I don't know if this was a regional thing or just the groups I played with. Between only a handful of DMs or Living City (AL'S equivalent back then)different people talk like they played a different game. Which, in many ways they did.

It's not that PCs, especially any elf I played, never died. It was just not the grindhouse some people experienced.

I experienced the grindhouse with every group I played 1e with here in Los Angeles. Heck, when I made a character my goal was to hit level 4 before dying. If I hit level 5 I was ahead of the game. Those very, very rare times I hit level 6-7 I felt like I hit the lottery. The only time I ever got to play any PC higher than 7 was a premade for a module or if the DM was running a one off and we just made high level PCs.

 

[Maxperson]

Simply put, AD&D was deadly because of the Save or Suck mechanic.

Demon hordes, ancient dragons, and a gaggle of trolls? Pfffsh.

A chest with a poison needle trap?

It was even worse than that. Giant Centipedes that were commonly encountered at level 1 had a save or die poison. You got +4 to the save because it was weak, but that just mean that clerics had a 30% chance of death, fighters a 60% chance of death, wizards a 50% chance of death and thieves a 45% chance of death. They were easy to hit and kill, but they were numerous enough that there would be several bites on PCs.

That said, it was also deadly due to much lower hit points. Roll a 4 for that fighter with his 14 con and you had.............4 hit points. Even if you got lucky and had 10, it was very easy to drop to 0 or below(we usually did negative hit points) and end up dead.

 

[Lanefan]

For some people it's easier to make a game less lethal than to make it more lethal. In addition, it's not like they did mass market surveys or wide-spread playtests for AD&D. The ideas probably came from a relatively small subset of people they actually played with at the time and my not have been particularly representative of the wider audience.

The bolded is key: it's far more pleasant to be the "good-guy" DM who makes things easier than the written rules suggest than to be the "bad-guy" DM who makes things tougher.

Some people did play high lethality games. Some people still do.

And further, some define "high-lethality" differently than others.

Many would probably define my games as high-lethality, and at very low levels I'd fully agree: a death per session or two is quite normal. At higher levels it tones down considerably, to maybe a death per 5-10 sessions; and by then revival effects are certainly affordable and sometimes can be hard-cast in the field if Cleric levels allow.

 

[Maxperson]

@Snarf Zagyg, you missed something that helped contribute to the lethality of AD&D. An ability so awful, many players would have preferred to skip it and go straight to death rather than live with the consequences: Level Drain. Some monsters, usually undead, had the ability to actually drain levels when they hit a PC. So you level 6 character might fail their Save versus Bull^%$# and suddenly find himself at level 4 with fewer abilities, spells, and hitpoints needed to survive the fight.

@Snarf Zagyg had it in his post. Level drain was usually unrestorable as well, since you rarely got hit so close to town that you could get a spell in time, and even if you did, you still lost all the XP you had earned towards the next level. So you got screwed no matter what happened.