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

[EzekielRaiden]

Death saves with healing word
Revivify
Reincarnate
Raise dead
Resurrection
True Resurrection

1. Doesn't prevent what I described. It at best acts as a maybe-useful mitigator. I've still seen character deaths. We almost had three in just the Phandelver game I played in!
2. Only helps if the party actually has it and is at least level 5, and less than a minute has passed since the death. Guess how all the groups I've seen (near-)TPKs fared on that front! Barring DM intervention, of course.
3. Only helps if the party actually has it (it's Druid only, so it's relatively rare) and reaches at least character level 9 and still has part of the body. So, endgame-only spell for most campaigns! Barring DM intervention, of course.
4. More widely available, but still a level 5 spell, so endgame-only, barring DM intervention, of course. (Noticing a trend here?) Further, worse than reincarnate, you need to have the whole body. Any missing pieces don't revive.
5. Level 7 spell, so better hope your campaign breaks past the typical max level barrier and actually reaches level 13. Or....well, I'm probably sounding like a broken record now. It does work with only a part of the original body though.
6. 17th level, baby! As in, the one 9th level spell a character gets to cast each day. But it has the fewest restrictions.

Oh, and I completely ignored the 300 GP worth of diamonds (revivify), 1000+ GP worth of rare oils (reincarnate), 500 GP worth of diamonds (raise dead), 1000+ GP worth of diamonds (resurrection), and 25,000+ GP worth of diamonds (true resurrection) that would be required here.

These things aren't impossible by any means...once a party has actually gotten started and done an adventure or two. But there's plenty of reasons why #1 would do absolutely nothing to save a character's life (been there, done that, had at least two TPKs where I was the player trying to save the party with healing spells and abilities), and party comp + not being high enough level are MORE than enough to completely nix the rest of the list. Especially with 5e, where DMs spool out the earliest levels for ridiculously long amounts of time, directly against what the rules and advice suggest.

So. Again. What actions can the characters take which ensure that there will be no deaths that are simultaneously random and permanent and irrevocable?

Your entire premise is a call to reason that completely rejects the realities of the ruleset in making its case. That is the first problem.

No. My premise is that players are more engaged when they feel they can confidently take risks without being shuffled back to square 1. That is, by all evidence I have ever seen, demonstrably true. Hence,

The things you cited above? Yes! Those absolutely are things players can do to deal with this....if the game context permits it. Many game contexts don't. Hence, I take steps. What happens, for example, if it is the party healer who dies? Few groups have two or more characters that can cast the spells mentioned (especially since only two classes can cast the vast majority of them, Bard and Cleric). What happens if the Cleric bites the dust when nobody else can save them?

I speak of what I can do as GM because I don't know what each individual player will have. I work in advance to address the possible gaps, so that any precautions they take are over and above that. It never hurts to have backups, right?

There is no rejecting of realities here.

The second is that these discussions go from that rejection of the ruleset's basic realities to dismiss the problems others see as being caused by the removal of a motivating factor that they find important by telling them to do more work and not even acknowledging how it would need to change player responsibilities.

....have you not noticed how I have said, over and over and over and over again, that this is FOR ME and FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME? It isn't for everyone. I've explicitly said that. I've said it at least half a dozen time JUST in this thread. I've already had a previous person act like I was making pronouncements for all of gamer-kind and emphasized to them that this is for SOME folks, not ALL folks.

So maybe instead of casting aspersions and accusing me of trying to pass judgment on everyone else, maybe just maybe, look at what you've said vs what I've said and ask, "Who is actually making pronouncements for all gamers here?" Because I can assure you, it isn't me. I'll dig up the quotes if you really want them. It'll take forever, but I'm happy to oblige.

Since you clearly are not talking about d&d I would need to pick a random game and hope it might be the game system that you are discussing.

Firstly: Again, totally unnecessary hostility and jabs. Why? What do you gain by doing this?

Second: Nope! I'm talking about BOTH my DW game, AND how I would run D&D if I ran D&D!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Regarding narrative and mechanical defeat conditions. Narrative defeat conditions are great, and I think important battles and struggles obviously should have such, regardless of whether mechanical defeat conditions are present or not. However, they also rely much more on the GM's skill to craft situations in which these narrative defeat conditions are present, so I don't think they're a suitable replacement for mechanical defeat conditions for mass-market game aimed also at kids and teenagers, and played by people of varying preferences and skill levels. Whilst I think the game is much more compelling if the fights are about something more than just whether you can survive and loot the dungeon successfully, the game should nevertheless work if played in such simple way.

Has anyone said they should be a total replacement for absolutely all people?

Because if not, you are arguing against something nobody actually supports.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Indeed. In RAW 5e, it is pretty much impossible for anyone to "permanently and irrevocably" die.

Absolutely not. I've seen it happen in literally the most recent 5e campaign I ran. If I hadn't been playing a Celestial Warlock (or an equivalent effective healer), it would've happened two further times as well.

Instant death is absolutely still a thing in 5e. It's rare, to be sure, but it's there. We fought several different creatures that cause instant death if they drop you to 0 hit points.

Which I find ludicrous, drama destroying, and if assumed to be the common way the reality in the setting works, would totally change how people in the world view death.

So, just to get this clear.

Absolutely everyone in your world has access to all of the same resources, spells, and wealth that a high-level PC party would have?

That is what I find "ludicrous, drama destroying."

You've already made it ridiculous by somehow thinking that a sliver of a remnant of an edge case is somehow representative of the lives of typical people. Adventurers are, and have always been, weird. That much dates all the way back to Gygax and Arneson. Adventurers do crazy, stupid things. In Gygax's day, they were get-rich-quick schemers defying the odds to pull money out of a murder-hole before it murdered them. Nowadays, they're larger-than-life heroes who take on threats ordinary people have no shot defeating.

Baldur's Gate 3 perfectly encapsulates how characters are weird. Every single one of its protagonists is, in some way, very weird. Even Wyll, who was openly designed to be Painfully Basic for a variety of reasons (perhaps to leave room for his...changes), is the son of an archduke, and blander-than-milquetoast Gale literally dated a goddess. The kinds of things these people get up to have little to nothing to do with what ordinary people living ordinary lives would experience.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Has anyone said they should be a total replacement for absolutely all people?

Because if not, you are arguing against something nobody actually supports.

Maybe @Vaalingrade? But I was no so much arguing against anyone, just musing about things and why the game is written like it is.

 

[FrogReaver]

The answer. It depends on the campaign.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Absolutely not. I've seen it happen in literally the most recent 5e campaign I ran. If I hadn't been playing a Celestial Warlock (or an equivalent effective healer), it would've happened two further times as well.

Instant death is absolutely still a thing in 5e. It's rare, to be sure, but it's there. We fought several different creatures that cause instant death if they drop you to 0 hit points.

And in theory at least, those death characters could be revived. So it is not "permanent and irrevocable."

So, just to get this clear.

Absolutely everyone in your world has access to all of the same resources, spells, and wealth that a high-level PC party would have?

No. But some people do. PCs are not some unique mutants that exist free of context.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Anyway, how do people feel about this optional rule from the new DMG?

Defeated, Not Dead

If you and your players agree to avoid character death in your game, you might consider an alternative: a character who would otherwise die is instead "defeated." The following rules apply to a defeated character.

Comatose. The character has 1 Hit Point and the Unconscious condition. The character can regain Hit Points as normal, but the character remains Unconscious until they are targeted by a Greater Restoration spell or experience a sudden awakening (see below).

Sudden Awakening. After finishing a Long Rest, the character makes a DC 20 Constitution saving throw. On a successful save, the Unconscious condition ends on the character. On a failed save, the condition persists.

Maybe it was discussed before... It has been a long thread...

I think it would work fine in some situations, but there seems to be no advice how to deal with situations where the defeated character would logically surely die. Like a while ago in my game the PCs faced a hungry giant tyrant bird (basically a tyrannosaurus) that grappled one character and was munching him. The other characters managed to kill the bird and save they dying chew toy, but if they could have not, and would have had to flee, it would seem extremely contrived for that character to survive regardless of whether the normal rules for death saves were in place or not.

Intelligent foes might capture defeated characters alive (and would do so under the normal rules as well, as stabilising is trivial,) but many foes in D&D are various sort of ravenous beasts and monsters that would logically just kill and possibly eat the downed characters if given an opportunity to do so.

 

[AlViking]

I don't think so. This has always been handled terribly in D&D.

More terrifying to have monsters take a body away to eat once a character is knocked out or dead. Hard to raise someone when they've been digested.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

More terrifying to have monsters take a body away to eat once a character is knocked out or dead. Hard to raise someone when they've been digested.

Yet not impossible. True resurrection still works.

 

[tetrasodium]

Has that changed? Without the GM changing things, we've always had raise dead and usually able to find a helpful cleric in town when needed.

Don't think it changed. If anything 5e makes it easier than any prior edition for a PC to return from death & do so at a lower cost than ever before by removing all of the mechanical needs for gold than reviving bob's dead PC would previously have eaten into.