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

[adrianthebard]

No.

Because I do not agree with any of that.

a) You can't force people to develop a skill just to play a character. We don't make anyone go pump iron to play a character with athletics, so it's unreasonable to make someone read How to Make Friends and Influence people to play a diplomancer bard.

b) Characters have skills. They are literally what those capabilities are called in the rules and that's what the rules represent. The entire reason for this is to allow a player to play a character with skills different from thier.

c) Or it can be avoided for anyone who wants to paly a character different from

No.

Because I do not agree with any of that.

a) You can't force people to develop a skill just to play a character. We don't make anyone go pump iron to play a character with athletics, so it's unreasonable to make someone read How to Make Friends and Influence people to play a diplomancer bard.

b) Characters have skills. They are literally what those capabilities are called in the rules and that's what the rules represent. The entire reason for this is to allow a player to play a character with skills different from thier.

c) Or it can be avoided for anyone who wants to paly a character different from themselves.

we can surely agree to disagree. other than that, allow me reciprocate on these 3 points a while longer:

a) nobody is forced under this approach. it just opens an alternative path to success. you can still roll, and roll well, but having the initial argument affect the outcome even partially allows for verisimiltude, and that's often what's needed the most. you clearly care less about it than i do (which is fine btw). keep in mind that one under such paradigm could craft the most inane argument to ask the dragon to donate his treasure (which is foolish by itself) and roll and achieve such result. i would disallow that, dragons don't abandon their hoards no matter what you say to them, no matter you rolled 50+ on diplomacy.
unless, you told the dragon there was a bigger hoard to get, you're just guarding their hoard till they come back to retrieve it, and have the skull of dragon 2 to demonstrate their lair is, in fact, vacant. then i would allow a roll, why not? the context could very well call for one, it isn't impossible dragon 1 would fall for it, just higly unlikely. my task is to make it so. so that your victory is earned.

b) i'm talking game design, you're talking game rules. of course chars have skills, but exercising them requires no effort whatsoever on the player, how can you play any game and win without effort, and be satisfied about it? most TTG (barring monopoly) require cognitive skills to be employed in play, most by logical thinking, others by strategic thinking, most often both. other are games of (LOW AND BEHOLD) social deduction and table talk. you can't have a player do pushups to determine STR ofc. but if not that, what are rpgs demanding of their players, on what tasks hinges success when playing them? could you articulate that?

c) it definitely can, inclusion and setting comfortable environments for your players is also very important. as long as the game is still fun. also don't forget that some players won't come to your table just to live a fantasy or escapism. some will want challenge from you. and there is no challenge in rolling a dice, save from remembering the page on the handbook and some basic summation and subtraction.

 

[Maxperson]

I think lots of people actually do do this

In my experience a lot of younger folks do this. I can't tell you how many times I've overheard two young people talking and one was like, "I'm not sure if I should do X or not. I'm torn." and the other was like, "This is your story. How do you want your story to play out?"

 

[Lanefan]

Not wanting one specific outcome is not the same as denying other outcomes.

There's a difference between not wanting a specific outcome (with rare exceptions nobody really wants their character to die) and not allowing that outcome to ever occur.

In any game - as in life in general - you can't always get what you want.

People who don't understand the position of not wanting character death always seem to either completely ignore or pay lip service to push aside the fact the death needs not be on the table to have other outcomes, failure states, etc.

All the other significant failure states have been excised from the game, where "significant failure state" means something that renders a character a) long-term or permanently unplayable (e.g. feebleminded, severely aged, permanently petrified) or b) severely compromised in its mechanics (e.g. level-drained, permanently stat-drained, lost an arm or leg).

There's two types of failure states: in-story and game-mechanical. To me, the only ones that matter are the game-mechanical failure states, as in-story failures merely turn the story in a different direction while otherwise leaving the character mechanically unaffected and fully playable. There's no actual penalty for failure there.

[...] wasting two hours of character creation [...]

Side note: if character creation is taking two hours you really need to find a less-complex system.

 

[Lanefan]

let us imagine for a moment, in any other media where a character looses a fight, how interesting it would realistically be if at that first loss, the character died, the end, that's all she wrote.

imagine a LotR where frodo is just straight up murdered at weathertop rather than receiving the morgul(?) blade's wound that he has to carry through the rest of his journey and life, no tension of if he's going to survive, no race to rivendell, just replace his character with the next one who joins the party at the council of the ring and forget about the one guy who the whole thing started around by having the quest macguffin by next tuesday.

One could argue that LotR might have been a better story if Frodo had died at Weathertop and someone else then had to take up the ring quest. At least then the threat of protagonist death would have been followed through on, putting much greater tension into the rest of the story as the reader really doesn't know whether the protagonist(s) will survive or not.

 

[Lanefan]

Correct. Every single one of the (near-)TPKs I've seen has directly resulted from the GM doing whatever they felt like, rules be damned, advice be damned, player feedback be damned. Now, one might say that that means the players should play more defensively or the like. But when at least half of the people in these games have been new to TTRPGs in general, let alone D&D specifically, one would think that demanding the highest degrees of skill and forethought from the players is not the best policy. I have no intention of becoming the "boss" telling a bunch of new players how to behave with D&D, not least because that would sour both their experience and mine in most cases.

Which is fair, but brings up an obvious question: how else are the players to learn how to play more defensively?

I have never--not once--had a problem doing this, @Lanefan. I'm frankly a bit shocked that you have had such a problem getting players invested in anything other than a character's lifespan. Of course, you proceeded to accuse modern D&D of coddling players into always doing stupidly reckless things. If such a criticism is fair, then perhaps we should question whether the materialistic, ultra-lethal style of old-school play robs its players of the ability to care about anything other than survival and amassing wealth?

And you know what? That's a fair question. Good food for thought at this end.

And as a brief aside: The key difference that you so casually dismissed between the threatening of other things (friends, loved ones, respected elders, beloved leaders, precious artifacts, signature items, etc.) vs threatening the player's ability to participate is that the former allows the character's story to continue. It might continue in a brand-new (and possibly much darker) direction, but regardless, it can continue. That there may be death or destruction either way is nowhere near as relevant as the fact that killing the character ends the character's story for good, while killing or harming other things pushes that character's story in new directions. It is the difference between a dead end and an unexpected fork in the road. A dead end simply causes the journey to stop, permanently. You may start a new journey from somewhere else to somewhere else, but the original journey is terminated. An unexpected fork in the road forces you to make choices, [...]

See my response to Vaalingrade just upthread re the difference between in-story failure and game-mechanical failure, as I could type the same thing here.

There's no mechanical cost or penalty for in-story failure, which means the only "heft" is carries is emotional; which while noteworthy for some players (of whom you would certainly seem to be one) is IMO and IME not that big a deal for most.

 

[Vaalingrade]

how can you play any game and win without effort, and be satisfied about it?

This sentence?

This sentence is the virulent poison that continues to plague this discussion. The accusation that playing without death, or playing using skills or any other 'bad' way to play means the player is putting in no effort, is instantly willing or some other condescending pejorative.

Until we can agree not to fall back on this pointless canard, there can be no honest discussion.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What is the value in a discussion to respond to things with 'that's just like... you're opinion, man'?

Micah, I know. You can stop telling me. I'm begging you to stop telling me. The electricity used to transmit these nothing responses could power Canada for ten thousand years.

My response was exactly in keeping with the post I responded to. I don't see anything more substantial in that post than in mine.

But fair enough. I'll take the first step.

 

[Vaalingrade]

There's a difference between not wanting a specific outcome (with rare exceptions nobody really wants their character to die) and not allowing that outcome to ever occur.

In any game - as in life in general - you can't always get what you want.

Except you can in a game of imagination. You can exclude whatever you want with your group.

All the other significant failure states have been excised from the game, where "significant failure state" means something that renders a character a) long-term or permanently unplayable (e.g. feebleminded, severely aged, permanently petrified) or b) severely compromised in its mechanics (e.g. level-drained, permanently stat-drained, lost an arm or leg).

Why is taking a character away or making it easier to take a characters away so important?

There's two types of failure states: in-story and game-mechanical. To me, the only ones that matter are the game-mechanical failure states, as in-story failures merely turn the story in a different direction while otherwise leaving the character mechanically unaffected and fully playable. There's no actual penalty for failure there.

Why does there need to be a penalty?

This is something I never understood about old school play: the need for punishment. Why do we need penalties in a spare time fun activity?

 

[CreamCloud0]

reasons? which reasons?

blocking someone, or being blocked by someone, prevents you from seeing all of that person's posts, even in quote form.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Except you can in a game of imagination. You can exclude whatever you want with your group.


Why is taking a character away or making it easier to take a characters away so important?


Why does there need to be a penalty?

This is something I never understood about old school play: the need for punishment. Why do we need penalties in a spare time fun activity?

Because life has penalties, and sometimes bad things with lasting, rules-relevant (from the game perspective) effects happen that you can't decide not to have happen. And I want a game that is more like life in that way. You clearly don't, and there's of course nothing wrong with that, but this is a preference difference that is simy not going to be bridged IMO. like you just said, above, we KNOW. We all know where we stand.