D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

[Reynard]

Its not asking you to calculate how often a PC should die...

If you have a preference for the game's lethality its asking you to express that in PC deaths per levels gained by the party.

Out of curiosity, why did you choose to do it by level, rather than another metric (real world time, game time, adventures run, etc...)?

 

[Imaro]

For me personally, I don't care. I can play and enjoy any type of game. However, I like to DM a very deadly game where in my players rarely or never die.

Can you run a very deadly game where PC's. Rarely or never die... seems like it wouldn't be a deadly game at all. Maybe a better question to ask is how are you defining deadly?

 

[prabe]

Of course it might not. But that wasn't the situation I was positing when I was making a simple "this is more inconvenient than that for the GM" statement. I made no statement whatsover about what games should be like in any capacity. I was speaking from personal experience about how singular deaths versus TPKs impact the GM. That's all.

I also was speaking from personal experience. The more connected to the main narrative of the campaign a given character is, the harder it can be to continue that narrative if they die; the more characters die, the more connections to the main narrative you lose; if all the characters die, you lose all the connections to the main narrative. A suitably motivated table might be able to keep going with that campaign by fashioning characters with (for example) connections to the old characters but that's an inconvenience for the whole table, not just the GM.

 

[cranberry]

However a TPK is almost always our fault as DMs. We misjudged the capabilities of our party. What in our head seemed to be clear warning signals weren't expressed as such and so weren't received. We didn't consider the character and motivations of the PCs.

I disagree. As long as the party has the ability/option to retreat, it's not the GM's fault.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I'm not sure how you get there. All I said was that if the characters have deep stories, it can be hard for the Gm to find resolutions to those stories when the PC disappears. Ostensibly there are NPCs, factions and whole chunks of the world under the auspices of the GM that must be dealt with.

Or, I guess you could just completely break any sense of verisimilitude and ignore it all.

All I was saying was that a clean slate, where a new party picks up the main quest of the campaign (if such a think even exists) is easier ON THE GM than dealing with the death of a singular PC in a heavily PC focused campaign. Is this controversial?

Yes! Character focused game thrives on character drama, and death of one character heightens it. Similarly need to introduce one new character probably isn't an insurmountable challenge. However, if all the characters die, even if the game was nominally about some plot external to the characters, it is a major disruption. The characters were pursuing the plot because it was important to them. Bringing a new set of character, even if they would have the same goal might feel much more like a completely new campaign rather than an continuation of the same story.

 

[TwoSix]

I also was speaking from personal experience. The more connected to the main narrative of the campaign a given character is, the harder it can be to continue that narrative if they die; the more characters die, the more connections to the main narrative you lose; if all the characters die, you lose all the connections to the main narrative. A suitably motivated table might be able to keep going with that campaign by fashioning characters with (for example) connections to the old characters but that's an inconvenience for the whole table, not just the GM.

Tough to say, for me. Some players have plots with serious "main character" energy, and losing them can be a major blow to campaign continuity. Other players are often oriented around more of a "side plot", and their loss isn't as much of a distraction. (Often, integrating a new PC is more of a challenge than losing the original.)

 

[Imaro]

What is the difference between schedule and frequency? They’re both referring to a time based metric on the basis of the DMs preference and that’s just so not how I DM.

One implies, as was stated earlier...the DM creating a situation to force an outcome (a schedule). The other is assuming it is happening without direct force from the DM (frequency).

 

[Reynard]

I also was speaking from personal experience. The more connected to the main narrative of the campaign a given character is, the harder it can be to continue that narrative if they die; the more characters die, the more connections to the main narrative you lose; if all the characters die, you lose all the connections to the main narrative. A suitably motivated table might be able to keep going with that campaign by fashioning characters with (for example) connections to the old characters but that's an inconvenience for the whole table, not just the GM.

Lots of campaign worlds are independent of any given PC or group of PCs. There are things happening, locations present and factions moving all the time. A "campaign" is when a group of players creates characters that interact with that stuff. When the "campaign" ends (successfully or otherwise) the world continues on.

Or, more modern: just because there is a TPK for one party, Elturel is STILL in Avernus and someone has to save it (or not).

 

[prabe]

Tough to say, for me. Some players have plots with serious "main character" energy, and losing them can be a major blow to campaign continuity. Other players are often oriented around more of a "side plot", and their loss isn't as much of a distraction. (Often, integrating a new PC is more of a challenge than losing the original.)

Yeah, if the PCs are pursuing one PC's revenge, and that character dies, there may well be continuity problems. That's what I was getting at, talking about a given character being more connected to the narrative. As you say, it will vary and depend.

 

[Oofta]

For games where there are lots of deep individual character stories, a TPK is almost easier to deal with than a single character death (at least fort he GM). You can pick of the A plot with a new group of heroes more easily than you can figure out what to do with all that unresolved B plot, IMO.

As others have said, there is no "Plot A" [EDIT: in my home game]. There are just locations, events, NPCs and the goals the NPCs are pursuing that the players may choose to oppose or support. So if there's a TPK I'll figure out what the logical consequences are, the plans that fail or succeed based on their death and so on. But then it's entirely up to the players during our session 0 whether or not they want to even start the next campaign in the same region and what timeframe because decades in-world regularly pass between campaigns. The group may choose to pursue some of the same goals as the old group, but that's completely up to them.

It's one of the main reasons I'll never have a goal of an NPC being a world ending cataclysm. I have no guarantee the PCs will thwart the BBEG's plan.

If an individual PC dies, that's the end of that PC's story but in general that won't affect the plans of the group as a whole.