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

[dave2008]

Not everyone has purchased and is using the 5.5 rules (which at the time of writing are still incomplete).

Not really relevant IMO. If you haven't heard about the change by now, IDK, it feels like that is on you* to me.

*When I say "you" I don't mean literal you @Micah Sweet

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't have a "desire of lethality". I don't go, "Hey, wait, nobody's died in 3 gaming sessions, so this game sucks!" or anything like that.

Lethality is, for me, a proxy measure for perceived danger. It isn't a great proxy, though. The best tabletop games I have played in have had very high perceived danger, but no actual character deaths.

See, to me if that goes on long enough the perceived danger goes away, as the trigger on it never gets pulled.

 

[Oofta]

Indeed. How can we legitimately talk about anything else?

I was a bit confused by the post I was responding to myself. Maybe I could have clarified that I never use modules except as inspiration but... eh.

 

[KYRON45]

Why is conjecture bad? Why would you expect there to be a "right" answer? Do questions like this add anything to the conversation?

Who implied conjecture was bad?
Are you the person who decides which parts of the conversation are valuable?

 

[Baron Opal II]

Is death supposed to be part of difficulty -- a result of skill, a penalty for the DM thinking you did something stupid regardless of what you thought, or just blind chaos with no rhyme or reason because, dice?

Well... see below for a serious attempt at an answer.

I said once per campaign, but really I want to say as often as the fates make it happen. It's not the quantity of deaths that I think about, it's just that it be a present risk that, if we are foolish AND our luck is poor, we will die.

This, mostly.
If the party can't roll higher than a 5 and my dice are hot, falling back to regroup might be a good idea. If they just defeated 8 jub-jub birds and their tamed witherwhat, are at 40-50% of their health and resources, and find a similar group around the bend in the river, falling back to regroup might be a good idea. Pressing on with low resources when the dice are cold is a poor plan.

I am currently running The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, an adventure perhaps best known for the possibility of getting through without a single combat, much less character death. However, the PCs have been terrified of the prospect of starting a fight with the adventure's main antagonists.
...
I think noting the difference between death and defeat is important here. For many players, threat of defeat is just as motivating as threat of character death.

I concur. Since there is "easy" returning from the dead, character death tends to be only slightly worse than defeat. Sometimes, particularly with younger players (< 18-20 yrs), the desire to avoid defeat by risking death trying to get that "Hail Mary" play leads to more deaths than defeats.

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.

Yes, I'll never* have a "chosen one" character in a game again. While character death is relatively rare in my games, it can happen. Just because raise dead exists doesn't mean it is feasible or successful. The party/team always carries the A-plot, everyone always has their own B-plot. If the team decides they want a different A-plot, well and good. But that's a team decision. The B-plots follow the individual characters, and are disposable if the character leaves/dies. Which happens sometimes because the player moves away, quits the game, is too busy, &c.

See that's the thing.... There's all this talk of real possibility of death... but what does that actually mean? A more lethal game...but what does that actually mean? I get the impression many want the illusion of these things as opposed to the reality... but don't want to state it outright.

Not the illusion but the feeling. And that's tricky.

The thing about RPGs that I love whole-heartedly is the blend of intention, logic, and passion that they allow. You can have "easy" encounters (the 7th level fighter, ranger, and paladin gleefully leaping into the fray against a platoon of orcs) that let the players feel like badasses. "Medium" encounters requiring some forethought and planning but are otherwise straightforward (crossing the rickety rope bridge by sending the rogue out first, the fighter holding a rope tied to their waist, and the rest of the party looking our for flyers or other surprises) where there is obvious risk but yield a sense of accomplishment at the end. "Hard" encounters, however, promote that "heart in your throat" feeling that yields to excitement and accomplishment when the team has worked together to win. "Win" being defined as achieving the objective and not losing the stakes of the game. These stakes being character death, social standing, wealth, or whatever it is.

This isn't an illusion. The end is not fore-ordained. There is real risk (gamewise), and this risk is mitigated by various means of preparation, forethought, learning means of adaption to the unforeseen, and hot dice. The risk has to be real to have the drama, the excitement, and the ultimate rush of victory or catharsis of failure. How often are or should the stakes be lost? In actuality, I think "rarely" is the best answer for most campaigns. It could happen, but if it does it should a memorable occasion. Even if it is a "random" death, the banality of it could be cathartic or philosophic, depending on the table.

This is hard. This is why premade adventures exist, and why there are so few "great ones". Especially since not every table has the same level of risk tolerance, identical stakes, or level of satisfaction for different types of victories or successes. Or, even loss tolerance for that matter.

Depending on how many beers are drank during session.
Like IRL, people take dumb actions with their PCs with more beer

Remind me to tell you sometime about the gathering of heroes at the storm giant's castle, and the... altered/drunk... spellcaster. That wasn't tragic or dramatic, but wholly comedic.


* If there's one thing I've learned in health care, "always" and "never" aren't.

 

[ezo]

Not really relevant IMO. If you haven't heard about the change by now, IDK, it feels like that is on you* to me.

*When I say "you" I don't mean literal you @Micah Sweet

Considering the tag is D&D General and the title just says 5E (not 5.5E or 5E 2024), I don't know why you would think it is more about the rules pertaining to 2024 than 2014?

So, I see it the other way around... feeling like that is on you (or anyone who makes a similar assumption) to me.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

My players have explicitly told me that if people don't make death saves at least once per session, they feel the game has been too easy.

That said, I don't recall anyone dying in any of my 5E games (as opposed to Shadowdark and Pirate Borg, where death is relatively common).

 

[ezo]

Just throwing out some estimations, I would say a PC has about a 20-25% to make it from 1-20 without dying.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I've found that one character dying can start a vicious circle/death spiral. I agree this is at least not great.

Yep. I've lost a couple of characters in D&D 2024 games and more in earlier D&D. The options to retreat often aren't amazing, with attacks of opportunity and opponents often having superior movement. Furthermore characters that are willing to just abandon their comrades early in the fight are relatively rare IME.
The first character death of mine was a near-TPK (one party member survived). Assuming that the DM hadn't overtuned the encounter, the monsters just got lucky and dealt out more damage than the party could sustain. We were guarding a refugee caravan at the time and none of the group was playing the sort of poltroon who would just run and let them get massacred.

The second was where the party were raising a temple to disrupt a ritual and rescue a prisoner/sacrifice. We got in with a certain amount of stealth, but when a fight kicked off we stayed together rather than scattering in a manner that might have allowed an individual to desert the fight and escape. While were were able to support each other better, when people started to go down, it created a fairly rapid death spiral.

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

This statement I feel really makes assumptions about the playstyle everyone should be using.

I was careful to avoid absolutes, so what are the playstyles where TPKs are advantageous that you believe I was excluding?
Even a high-mortality game runs better when there is continuity throughout the party as it advances through the plot, even if it is in a "ship of Theseus" fashion.
In contrast, after a TPK, assuming the group doesn't just abandon the as-yet-unplayed plot that the DM has created, the new party will need to have their characters ignorant of all the information that their predecessors had discovered and investigate the same things that their previous characters already had. The DM will also have to recreate the motivation that the previous party had already built up to actually follow and resolve the plot.

 

[Theory of Games]

Are we talking just "death" or actual "character is gone permanently from the campaign" effect? Because those are two very different things.

Well, yes. That is why we had to bully at least one of the group into playing a cleric: even a low-level one massively increased our recovery speed.


Characters can make bad decisions or suffer runs of bad luck that will get them killed, and if the group does not have the capability or the DM blocks it, not be brought back.

Yep.

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.

For at least the last decade or so, I've been exclusively designing adventures that focus on what both the PCs and the players want. I love Player Agency and Emergent Story more than anything. Real creative freedom, right? BUT, I disagree about how TPKs happen.

Bad dice rolls + bad Player decisions IME doom the PCs. If you let the game play out. These are GAMES and sometimes you lose the game. I'm not going to railroad the players into whatever ending I want. I let the players and the dice decide.

Some groups lean more towards Story™ and that's cool as long as they're having fun.

There is generally no permanent character death that is a good thing: just a thing that sometimes happens. TPKs however are almost always a bad thing: they either derail or completely shut down the campaign that we're trying to run.

TPKs can be terrible, I agree. But IME some of the greatest, most enjoyable moments can be found in a TPK. Guess it depends.