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

[prabe]

There's a few bits in that quoted post that are baseline disagreements significant enough to undermine other bits to the degree that they aren't really talking about the same thing. Going to touch on those without everything getting lost in a long pointless back & forth fisking.

My understanding is that "fisking" is taking a post apart more granularly than is useful, destroying context to make rebuttal easier. I don't think I've been doing that (apologies if I have) and I know you haven't (thank you).

"Trivial" doesn't mean trivial to these PCs and that it will remain trivial forever. Take the kill rats in the tavern basement trope as an example.. it could be incredibly trivial to almost everyone in the tavern, except for the PCs, but it's level appropriate for this band of PCs being hired (and the example isn't finished). Maybe the PCs deal with the rats and they find some potentially concerning stuff they don't quite understand (because they are some flavor of new & inexperienced nobodies).... They could tell the quest giver and wipe their hands of the whole thing sure... but these n00bs want to be somebody important known for getting things done! Maybe they have an idea of what they could do to understand or unravel the found thing but they are newbies who can't afford it... Luckily someone else is willing to front them on the tools/equipment/training/services needed if the party is willing to go do this other level appropriate thing that they just can't be bothered to do themselves. Low and behold the PCs take care of the basement rats, deal with why there are displaced winter wolf cubs eyeing local livestock find the leaking stash of contraband used in evil rituals that made the rat problem a problem and OMG it's all related to that band of mercenaries secretly holed up in that broken down abandoned keep out in the forest. Toss in an adventure or three for the PCs to pass out their basic starting gear with fewer gaps or slight upgrades and you can really have quite a few low level adventures per level while doing a bunch of world building. None of that world building relies on mining PC back stories for contrived hooks everyone will forget in a few weeks & the PCs established ties along with a reputation fitting of a proven second and third level party of adventurers without even breaking up & mining the Red Brand hideout adventure to create multiple adventures.

I guess in my campaigns, things have tended to escalate such that the PCs mostly don't end up opposed by things well below their level (much--sometimes that fits the narrative and/or lets the players see how much more potent their characters are) or so far above it as to be guaranteed-lethal. Even the "inexperienced nobodies" have tended to ... be in the splatter zone when smelly brown stuff hit a local fan: I instigate hard to kick off a campaign, or if I have to bring a situation to the players (instead of the players going to it). They've pretty quickly established a reputation as people willing and able to handle stuff, and many if not all of my instigations have put (mostly) unnamed NPCs at risk.

I'm also pretty sure that 29 sessions in, in my most-recent campaign, the players haven't forgotten their backstories, or their backgrounds, or any established NPCs (whoever established them) that are still at least plausibly relevant. It helps that there's someone at the table who takes extensive notes and shares them with the table, so there's at least a reference for us all to use; and it helps that they're still (soonish) going to be returning to the starting city, so most of what they created before the campaign will still be present, if not necessarily super-relevant.

 

[Umbran]

Realism. Realism is the reason or at the very least one of the reasons.

Realism isn't all or nothing. It's not formless unknowable void or absolute mirrors reality exactly. It's a spectrum. And our preferences can fall at different points on that spectrum depending on what we are discussing.

With respect, there is so much that is unrealistic about the fantasy genre that just invoking "realism" does not strike me as a coherent argument. This one item is picked out to stand alone among so much other realism that has been tossed aside, "realism" just doesn't communicate enough to edify others why death remains.

Especially when the game allows coming back from the dead, which is pretty arguably less realistic than having absurd luck to not die in the first place.

So, I'm going to push back on this. "Realism" is at best so oversimplified as to not communicate what is important about it.

 

[Umbran]

Why did you feel the need to insult me, repeatedly,

Mod Note:
1) If you feel you are being personally insulted, report the issue, and disengage.

2) He wasn't responding to you. The comments were not specifically directed at you. So, you'd have to justify how his responses to other people are insults to you, personally.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Maybe not immediately but by the end of combat.

We don't use 5e's anemic healing and don't pidgeonhole it into cleric or bard. 3/4 characters in most parties have some kind of healing, enough to bring someone back up. and because the healing is actually worth casting before someone goes down, people go down less.

So there's that.

Also, I don't try to do attrition and random encounters. Combats only happen if they matter, if they're a set piece or if the players seek one out, so there's not intent to wear them down to make characters go down either.

Finally, I have enemies fight actually intelligently, not possessed with the intent to kill a PC. They attack active threats instead of double-tapping, animals drop prey to flee rather than waste energy and increase the chances they get chased down and die instead of dragging prey off or standing there getting hit to chew and swallow.

Fair enough, so you change the rules to suit your style of play. Good for you; so do I, albeit to greatly different effect.

Fighting intelligently, however, doesn't always involve avoiding finishing off enemies, especially if given any indication that a downed opponent will be very quickly restored by a comrade. Seems to me "double-tapping" is the intelligent move in some circumstances.

So what what you're really saying is that you engineer the situation to avoid any but the briefest of moments when the PC might not be playable.

 

[Lanefan]

Your claimed analogy between sports TTRPGs and D&D-alike TTRPGs fails for the very specific reason that "losing" in a sport DOES NOT CAUSE DEATH. Like....that's literally where the analogy fails! Yes, I completely agree that IF you removed the possibility of losing a game, that would make a sports TTRPG quite boring. BUT I WOULD NEVER DO THAT. I would never do that specifically BECAUSE there's no need to! It's not like D&D-alike games where the consequence of failure in combat is permanent. A sports team that loses even every single game in an entire season is extremely unlikely to be under threat of ceasing to exist, of ceasing to be able to continue games in the next season. The Cleveland Browns had a perfectly winless season in 2017, going nineteen total games (16 actually on-season) with an unbroken losing streak. Hell, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers lost their first 26 games, all 14 in 1976 and a further 12 in 1977, and yet that team is still in existence now.

Your analogy to sports games is simply, fundamentally broken, because sports TTRPGs just do. not. have. a consequence that is comparable to what death is in D&D-alike games. They just don't, and it would be extremely weird to try to add such a consequence. Sports TTRPGs have already "removed" death as a consequence, and yet you seem to think they are still games that can be played and that have consequences!

And yet the analogy in another way fits perfectly.

The 1976-1977 Tampa Bay team, as a team, lost 26 games in a row. During most of that time the locker room probably had a revolving door on it as players came in, didn't get it done, and were replaced with other players who management hoped would do better.

This maps almost perfectly to an adventuring party who go out into the field and (somehow!) fail to complete 26 missions or adventures in a row; and who during that run of futility are turning over their membership for a series of reasons (character deaths, character retirements, useless or disruptive characters getting punted from the party, etc.) in hopes of finding a more successful combination. The only difference is that there's no "upper management" or team owner making those lineup decisions; instead the characters in the party at any given time (analagous to the players on the football field) are doing their own hiring and - in some cases - firing.

The consequence in football of not succeeding is that players, coaches, and management end up unemployed; which is a fairly big deal no matter how you look at it.

 

[Lanefan]

but you can choose not to get what you don't want without always getting what you want.

Not sure how this works given that if you want something there's only two possible outcomes: you get it, or you do not.

Who wins or loses Minecraft, or the telephone game or many other social collaboration games?

Not all games have winners or losers and in fact a very common refrain is that you can't 'win' D&D. There can always be more quests, new things to do. So if you can't win, what's even the point of losing?

I've never really bought into the "you can't win D&D" thought stream; as while it maybe can't be won in an overall sense there can certainly be any number of smaller wins - and losses - along the way.

That, and sometimes simply not losing is itself a win. A survival-first game is the obvious example here: you win if you survive.

What if you're just playing to have fun and don't need an incentive to succeed or a disincentive to fail?

What if you don't want or need threats at all?

My group seems to do just fine with multiple DMs who don't use threats and don't follow through on threats they don't make.

Where, then, does the adversity faced by the PCs come from? Any adversity represents a threat to something, somehow; otherwise it wouldn't be adversity, would it?

 

[Lanefan]

Bro is that for real? My Spelljammer game started in 2018 and it just hit level 12.

I overstated the situation to go with the joke, but there was a poll here not so long ago along the lines of "How many sessions should it take to level up" in which I seem to recall the highest numer of answers were in the 2 to 4 range. Given that all the WotC editions expect you to go from 1-20 (in 4e it was 1-30) in two years or less, that sessions-per-level range fits...and to me who prefers a 2e-like advancement rate of a level or two a year, that's lightning fast.

 

[overgeeked]

Whenever the dice decide and the players make bad choices.

 

[Lanefan]

That's a helluva presumption on your part. He happened to own the game store we were playing in, and his life was full enough that he needed to do some pruning. Apparently his character's dying was an opportunity for him to prune playing in that campaign, and there were no hard feelings.

OK, that's fair. Putting it as just "the player left the game because his character died" without further explanation, however, implies a much worse attitude on the player's part; and it was to that I was reacting.

Were it the DM tossing the player because her character died a la what happens to Black Leaf's player in the Chick tract, I'd be barking at the DM instead.

 

[Lanefan]

Except that I do want lasting, rules-relevant (from the game perspective) effects that happen and you can't decide not to have happen.

I just don't want the one specific thing of "random, permanent, irrevocable death." I'm VERY okay with all sorts of other things, things that can have permanent impact, even mechanically. Generally, I prefer those to be the result of a PC having to make a terrible choice (e.g. sacrificing a limb, which would prevent them from using a shield or 2H weapon, OR not sacrificing the arm, and thus having a creeping corruption inside them that will slowly try to take over their whole body) rather than being just a one-and-done "because your number wasn't big enough, now you've lost an arm."

Thing is, as far as I know the mechanics for a) causing and b) adjudicating PC limb loss don't exist any more (I'd be happy to learn I'm wrong on this!).

Ditto item loss or destruction. Ditto level loss. Ditto permanent stat loss, though I believe temporary stat draining is still around. And so on, until all that remains as a rules-relevant loss condition is character death unless you kitbash the system to add these other things back in.