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

[dave2008]

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!).

Limb loss has been a thing in 5e since the 2014 DMG:

 

[Lanefan]

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

And then out come the bigger hammers:

Wish
Direct divine intervention
Quest to retrieve the spirit from the land of the dead.

 

[Lanefan]

It's not about implausible, it's about what's happening in-universe an in-narrative.

In-universe, just to many people reach the same level of power and make the choice to bring people back to life. Maybe they're just as in love with the concept of death and insistent on going against 50,000 years of human history to insist we just have toa accept it to the point of propagandizing death as we are and PCs are just the only sane people.

In-narrative (and if everyone can just assume I know they don't like narratives in this game of collaborative storytelling and not waste thread space telling me for the thousandth time, I'd appreciate it), resurrection is only available as needed for the story being told.

Resurrection is available to thems as can afford it, whether PC or not. Adventuring PC types are almost always among that elite group once they've been doing it for any real length of time.

I don't think the rules state this but it's always seemed logical to me: the one thing revival of any kind won't help with is if the death was due to sheer old age, as the revivee will die of old age again in fairly short order.

 

[Lanefan]

If something destroy [...] the soul, it is not free to return (a requirement even for true resurrection, I believe). In my settings, that's beyond what even wish can mend,

I have a similar effect in my game: very powerful psionic creatures and very high-level Necromancers (a homebrew class) have access to a spell/ability called Spirit Blast - kind of like Disintegrate for the soul.

If one is very careful how one words a Wish and uses it to jump the victim forward in time from just before the Spirit Blast occured to the time when the Wish is cast, a Spirit Blast can be undone. But wishes are very hard to obtain in my game, thus Spirit Blast usually means perma-death as - by the same rationale you use - there's nothing left to otherwise revive.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

This still only really works if you assume 'survive or die' is the only actual challenge available.

I know for a fact (because I did it Saturday) that you can have engaging and exciting combats that require tactics without death on the table.

And though it's been walked back to better fit an argument, this is the point I'm making about how the characters don't know they can't die.

The players know their characters can't die unless they want them to because we don't need the stress of threatening to take away a character someone has worked hard on developing and who has many connections and story arcs in the campaign.

The characters, however don't know this. And we are roleplaying those characters. So the characters still act with proper-in character motivations and understanding.

Again, that's the value of accepting the game being a game and the presence of a narrative: we can separate these things out from each other and reap the benefits of both out out of character understanding, the roles we are playing, and the story we are telling, rather than having the incongruity inherent to playing a roleplaying game and there being a meta ruin things for use because we can't square them in the same space--because they don't occupy the same space and we acknowledge that.

I am of course capable of roleplaying a character in such way, but at least to me, some excitement is still lost.

Like imagine if we are playing a mystery game, and there is surprising revelation. Now if you as player knew the twist beforehand, you can still roleplay your character being surprised, but it just doesn't feel the same than if it was a genuine surprise to the player as well. Same thing.

 

[Vaalingrade]

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?

In character and in-universe, never from the DM trying to 'teach' or the system being poorly balanced

 

[tetrasodium]

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).

Yea pretty much agreed. It wasn't mentioned as a slight, pretty much said it to explain why I was skipping over a lot of the stuff you wrote in the post I quoted. More than a little of it was solid points, it just did seem useful going over "this is why I think we are talking about different things on this specific bit" a bunch of times, figured it would be more useful to just get towards a common understanding

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.

The style of gameplay I noted really only works well at lower levels when the PCs are still nobodies unless you do a wuxia/xianxia/cultivation type shift to a higher plane where the powerful PCs are nobody again§. Generally somewhere in tier2 or early tier3 of play the leveling pace picks up and straps on rocket boots when 5e PCs can't really be switched over to having their connections grown through a need for better magical gear.


§calculating cultivation is a good (and easily accessible) example of doing that because it happens so many times and within a story mainly about funding the journey to super powers it does a nice job of also looping in the relevant financial aspects far better than d&d tends to do.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I am of course capable of roleplaying a character in such way, but at least to me, some excitement is still lost.

Like imagine if we are playing a mystery game, and there is surprising revelation. Now if you as player knew the twist beforehand, you can still roleplay your character being surprised, but it just doesn't feel the same than if it was a genuine surprise to the player as well. Same thing.

You are talking to the wrong guy for that. Spoilers never effect my enjoyment of a work.

Also, I end up guessing endings pretty often. I can enjoy how we get there while knowing the destination. Same for an RPG: I can enjoy how we get there without having a possibility that I will be disappointed or annoyed being held over my head.

 

[Vaalingrade]

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.

Wasting time spiting someone to death is time you're not running away from threats ro disabling another threat. Double tapping as 'intelligent' action is a catspaw.

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.

Not really. I just fixed the terrible no good very bad healing and encounter systems.

A lot of issue people talk about with 5e is a symptom obfuscated by previous edition expectations and traditions. 'Pop-up' healing is a result of healing not being enough to justify using for anything but getting someone up, but people try to 'fix' it by making healing worse, making the dying mechanics worse, and other things that will exacerbate the situation and make the play experience more arduous because they're looking at it as a problem of not enough death when people go down as opposed to the fact that the healer should be stopping people from going down but mechanically can't.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

You are talking to the wrong guy for that. Spoilers never effect my enjoyment of a work.

Also, I end up guessing endings pretty often. I can enjoy how we get there while knowing the destination. Same for an RPG: I can enjoy how we get there without having a possibility that I will be disappointed or annoyed being held over my head.

Then we feel very differently about this, which explains our differing preferences. One of the biggest selling points of RPGs to me is the certain level of unpredictability that is often lacking from formulaic fiction.