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

[Micah Sweet]

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 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.

I don't make assumptions that the party is "advancing through a plot" at all.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I play the game to collaboratively tell a story. So a game is a structure for storytelling for me.

I play the game to explore an independently-created world as I see fit. So a game is very much not a structure for storytelling, at least by intent. You need to look at what actually happened after the fact if you want to make a story out of it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There is no trigger. There is only beating the odds, or not.

If you always beat the odds, it just doesn't feel that dangerous to me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Or a dead one.

There are versions of D&D more deadly than 5e. That doesn't make them a "dead" game. If this is a joke, I don't get it.

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

There are versions of D&D more deadly than 5e. That doesn't make them a "dead" game. If this is a joke, I don't get it.

Sometimes we think the Wizards of the Coast are trying to kill the game. It's a joke.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Like Huitzilopochtli, as a DM I demand blood or the metaphorical sun will go out. So I've gotten a cartoonishly large hourglass (like the one the Wicked Witch of the West has in the Wizard of Oz), and, if a PC hasn't died by the time the last sand grains fall through, it's "rocks fall; everyone dies". It amuses me to see exactly how the increasingly desperate players arrange the obligatory PC deaths to keep the campaign going.

Spoiler

Just kidding, of course. Or am I?

 

[Chaltab]

I don't make assumptions that the party is "advancing through a plot" at all.

if they're not advancing then what are they doing? Even if a character dies the story continues until the campaign ends. The issue is when you try to force a specific outcome.

 

[Micah Sweet]

if they're not advancing then what are they doing? Even if a character dies the story continues until the campaign ends. The issue is when you try to force a specific outcome.

It's a sandbox. The party is exploring the world and seeing what's out there picking up (or ignoring) hooks and interacting with the setting as they see fit.

 

[Chaltab]

It's a sandbox. The party is exploring the world and seeing what's out there picking up (or ignoring) hooks and interacting with the setting as they see fit.

I mean sure in a sandbox campaign;. Some campaigns have matters too urgent to explore at leisure. either way it is not like Minecraft where everything is totally random. NPCs have goals & motives and the world continues to move forward regardless of how often PCs die.

 

[Lanefan]

The other variables not mentioned in the OP and poll are what speed of levelling you're using and-or length of campaign you're trying to run.

5e has options for slower or faster levelling, and any (non-AL) DM is free to change the advancement speed/rate as best seen fit for that table or campaign.

Campaign length is relevant because a permanent character death in a short campaign leaves no time for a replacement to catch up while a permanent death in a very long campaign means the replacement has all kinds of time to make its own mark.