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

[Micah Sweet]

I don't think getting them on criticals is a good idea. That's really not a defeat, it is just random. Getting such when you go to dying would work better, though IIRC, the effects were not very good. And I assume this is again one optional system that 5.5 just jettisoned instead of improving it?

So much easier to do that.

 

[dave2008]

I don't think getting them on criticals is a good idea. That's really not a defeat, it is just random.

True, and technically we did it 0 hp too, but it was the critical hits that were the real issue

Getting such when you go to dying would work better, though IIRC, the effects were not very good. And I assume this is again one optional system that 5.5 just jettisoned instead of improving it?

No, you can still use it the lingering injuries in 2024.

 

[prabe]

In principle, I allow players to take a lingering injury for a character instead of having them permadie. In practice, it hasn't mattered: The player whose character permadied left the table.

 

[tetrasodium]

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.

Game of thrones countless
Babylon Kosh and a few others
Battlestar Galactica Starbuck
and a couple others turned likely skin job
The matrix neo trinity Morpheus
Lord of the rings gandalf the grey∆
Doctor who... The first Many doctors, a few companions captain jack harness
Like every soap opera in existence


Death is fairly common in "other media". What is less common is permanent irreversible death, and that remains even more true in d&d where death has been an almost soap opera level revolving door in so many editions. It's weird to ignore the fact that returning a PC from death is a matter of spending some gold on casting a spell or having it cast then build a case for purity of & commitment to story that is the height of roleplaying based on a case that presents death as some permanent irrevocable thing in d&d where rules and most setting make it a temp inconvenience. Doing that while pinning on the gm for filling the gap left by the removal of a core component of risk from play that is normally also a notable component of the setting itself.

∆then returned as gandalf the white thanks to Ilúvatar?

But there is no such thing as "death" on the sports field (or, at least, there shouldn't be.)

The sports ttrpg comment was about losing for that reason... But sure ...
Dale Earnhardt fatal crash @Datona

There's also a reason why boxing deaths went down drastically after the Marquess of Queensberry established rules in the 1800s &why us style football banned appearing and a few other styles of tackle that resulted in quite a few broken necks

 

[prabe]

The sports ttrpg comment was about losing for that reason... But sure ...
Dale Earnhardt fatal crash @Datona

There was someone in the Indy Racing League who just died a few years ago, I think, and there was also someone this year who was trying to climb Devil's Tower in Wyoming and instead fell to his death. The latter admittedly wasn't (probably) a competitive sport thing; my point is that people die competing, and doing recreation (the parks in the American Desert Southwest have people die in them every year, and for a while so did the Great Falls of the Potomac) with some regularity. I don't think any of those were exactly a result of losing. (So, death wouldn't be a likely consequence in a Sports TRPG, is my point, here.)

 

[tetrasodium]

There was someone in the Indy Racing League who just died a few years ago, I think, and there was also someone this year who was trying to climb Devil's Tower in Wyoming and instead fell to his death. The latter admittedly wasn't (probably) a competitive sport thing; my point is that people die competing, and doing recreation (the parks in the American Desert Southwest have people die in them every year, and for a while so did the Great Falls of the Potomac) with some regularity. I don't think any of those were exactly a result of losing. (So, death wouldn't be a likely consequence in a Sports TRPG, is my point, here.)

Yea, fairly common as you move beyond the big ball sports with leaggues. I feel like it's probably just going to keep gpong further away from why I mentioned & linked to some sports ttrpgs earlier than it already is since first quoted. The original comment I made back in 588 was "An example of sports came up earlier, and apparently sports ttrpgs are a thing, but it would certainly be odd to describe that sports gameplay minus the chance of actually losing as a focus on anything other than guaranteed victory. " I was using it as a comparison to how removing death impacts the game in ways that keep being swept behind the curtain. Career ending injuries are also incredibly common in sports

 

[prabe]

Yea, fairly common as you move beyond the big ball sports with leaggues. I feel like it's probably just going to keep gpong further away from why I mentioned & linked to some sports ttrpgs earlier than it already is since first quoted. The original comment I made back in 588 was "An example of sports came up earlier, and apparently sports ttrpgs are a thing, but it would certainly be odd to describe that sports gameplay minus the chance of actually losing as a focus on anything other than guaranteed victory. " I was using it as a comparison to how removing death impacts the game in ways that keep being swept behind the curtain. Career ending injuries are also incredibly common in sports

I think the people who don't think death needs to always be on the table in a game like D&D might say that neither death nor a career-ending injury is likely to be the primary consequence in a TRPG about ... some competitive league sport with a ball involved. The focus in such a TRPG seems likely to be about winning and losing the individual games/matches, maybe roster management over the course of a season, eh? You absolutely can lose a game of baseball (or tank a whole season) without any of your ace pitchers blowing a UCL; the PCs in a D&D game at least should be able to irrevocably botch a situation without any of them dying. (Most games of D&D plausibly aren't run with that in mind, but I think that's a different thing: It doesn't at all seem to me to say more D&D games couldn't be run with non-death consequences in mind.)

 

[Lanefan]

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

Which points us right back toward the idea of players simply declaring success without adversity, which I seem to recall you've already said is not the point. It's pretty binary: you either can always get what you want or you cannot.

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?

Absent the idea of tie or stalemates, games have winners and losers. In many games and almost all sports this winner-loser status is decided just once, at the game's end; while in D&D that status is defined and redefined constantly during play of the same game over months or years or even decades.

Winners get rewarded in numerous ways in D&D: they gain xp, they gain treasure, and they get to keep playing the same character(s). That's a series of strong incentives to win, and to keep on winning.

If losers also get to claim these same rewards, however, the incentive to succeed (a.k.a. win) goes away and any threats or adversity quickly and obviously become fake. A threat is not a threat unless the threatener (in this case, the DM as bound by the game rules) is ready willing and able to follow up on that threat.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Per level? How about per session?

[grognard] In my day, we showed up for the session with four characters per player and a dozen hirelings, and sometimes had to roll up more before the end of the session! [/grognard]

 

[Lanefan]

In principle, I allow players to take a lingering injury for a character instead of having them permadie. In practice, it hasn't mattered: The player whose character permadied left the table.

IMO someone who leaves a game just because their character dies is a) taking it all way too seriously and b) is probably doing the whole group a favour by departing.