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

[Chaosmancer]

Sometimes, sure. But my point was to note how there are plenty of people like me, who find games through ads on websites or in their FLGS or on forums or via Discord. There's no way those people know almost everyone at almost every game they join, that's just not feasible. To suggest that nearly everyone who plays D&D does so almost exclusively with people they know very well before any dice hit the table is...I mean I can't imagine how anyone could believe that that is true. FLGS game tables would be nearly empty if that were so. Websites like Roll20 and Myth-Weavers would be ghost towns. GITP wouldn't even have a forum for LFG/LFDM stuff.

Still catching up, wanted to latch onto this really quick.

Your experience matches my own. Barring a single online group (to whom I might consider friends, but realistically we are text on a screen to each other, we've never even heard each others voices) the VAST majority of my groups collapse within 3 years.

People move out of state. People have kids. People get in car accidents. People were taking classes but now the semester ends. People get a new job.

I think one thing that a significant portion of ENworlders might forget is that they are old and established and their friends are old and established. My most recent IRL group was gathered at a place I was employed. I was fired from that job (bad culture match up) and while we planned on weekly sessions... we more often ended up with monthly sessions, because emergencies, illness, job changes, other friends who needed support. And now we are down from the original 8 people who were starting to meet to three who are likely to still be meeting by February next year.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Am I the only one who has had the hellish experience of trying to rehabilitate players who are absolutely terrified to do things they think would be fun because they've had characters killed for not being 'careful' enough for the DM's liking?

I have had that experience. Not specifically with DnD exclusively, but I have been thanked multiple times for how I run games, because the person's experience has often been "if I do even the smallest thing wrong everything will be ruined forever and the game will be over".

 

[Chaosmancer]

Though under the old guidelines it would have been 2875 XP encounter (due the multiplier for several monsters,) well above deadly (2000 XP) for the group. Removal of the difficulty multiplier for numerous foes will make horde encounter in 5.5 way harder than they were in 5.0, and at least on low levels this might be too much. (I have said that the game is way too easy under the old guidelines, but this applies only to medium to high levels.)

Really? A horde encounter?

It was 7 to 5. The party won the initiative. One monster didn't act the first turn. Another was immediately incapped for the majority of the fight. Another was stabbed to death turn one. Another landed only a single successful attack the entire fight.

So... where is the horde?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Really? A horde encounter?

It was 7 to 5. The party won the initiative. One monster didn't act the first turn. Another was immediately incapped for the majority of the fight. Another was stabbed to death turn one. Another landed only a single successful attack the entire fight.

So... where is the horde?

The semantics is what you want to focus on? Nomenclature aside, it would have had a multiplier under the old rules but didn't under the new ones, thus the encounter that would have counted way above deadly previously being mere moderate... and then proving to be tougher than expected.

 

[Oofta]

Still catching up, wanted to latch onto this really quick.

Your experience matches my own. Barring a single online group (to whom I might consider friends, but realistically we are text on a screen to each other, we've never even heard each others voices) the VAST majority of my groups collapse within 3 years.

People move out of state. People have kids. People get in car accidents. People were taking classes but now the semester ends. People get a new job.

I think one thing that a significant portion of ENworlders might forget is that they are old and established and their friends are old and established. My most recent IRL group was gathered at a place I was employed. I was fired from that job (bad culture match up) and while we planned on weekly sessions... we more often ended up with monthly sessions, because emergencies, illness, job changes, other friends who needed support. And now we are down from the original 8 people who were starting to meet to three who are likely to still be meeting by February next year.

I've had to restart groups from scratch because of moving too often and most of the people have been either people I met while doing public games such as AL. But while some people move or otherwise drop out (one left because I don't allow evil PCs) my experience is that once you get a decent group we've stuck together for years. My last group it was for 10ish years before we moved yet again, current group I've had most of the same core group for 5 (took a few months to get solid group, 1 has been with us from the beginning) and we're still going strong. A couple of people even left town and we're still playing together.

So it doesn't require old and established friends. I play D&D in order to meet people, socialize, and make friends. Certainly playing in person likely changes things. Is that common? Uncommon? Have you just had terrible luck? I don't know. All I know is that once we (my wife and I) get a core group most of us stick together.

 

[Vaalingrade]

The semantics is what you want to focus on?

This is Enworld.

 

[Oofta]

The semantics is what you want to focus on? Nomenclature aside, it would have had a multiplier under the old rules but didn't under the new ones, thus the encounter that would have counted way above deadly previously being mere moderate... and then proving to be tougher than expected.

I've ignored the multiplier (as do the new rules) for a long time. It still depends on luck and tactics. Just ran a game last weekend where the fight was a lot tougher than it should have been because nobody was focusing fire. On the other hand I've had some fights I expected to be medium difficulty that turned out to come close to a TPK because of a combination of setup, tactics and die rolls. It happens.

 

[tetrasodium]

In the 5e campaigns I've DMed, how the PCs have been and are treated is mostly a direct result of their behavior--in most cases, there's a certain amount of rushing in where those with wiser heads would fear to tread--and in the most recent one they were established locals with pasts and connections and suchlike; I haven't ever felt a need to make the players feel their characters were nobodies, or even really out of their depth, and I've never had the PCs in any of those campaigns attempt to run so roughshod over the setting and its inhabitants as you describe, even when they've been doing stuff well into Tier Four; I think (it's hard to know exactly how they're understanding things) they grasp that there are things in the world that they really really don't want to mess with, but I've never even had to imply the existence of that particular carrot.

Not fisking, I hope but thanks for this (and the video links I snipped).

It was well phrased earlier, PC's aren't some kind of "unique mutant" chosen one with powers nobody else could attain & they definitely aren't considered the strongest individuals in the world to me (both as a player and a GM).... Changing that creates problems with worldbuilding & requires the plausibility of death to function. The PCs being treated as a result of their behavior is a big part of my games, but that goes both ways for me★, they just don't get an auto pass granted by virtue of being the chosen hero or the most powerful individuals. Take FR as an example of how it works, folks like drizzt eleminster & so on could trivially handle basically anything that most parties of PCs go off to handle... but they are busy doing other stuff the PCs have no involvement with & would never get anything done if they had to be the one true chosen hero of Toril.

There may be (and often are) times where the PCs might very well be the most powerful individuals in an area (that they know of)... But that comes with an awful lot of power. Both as a player and a GM I feel that it hurts the immersion & believability of the world to know without doubt that no NPC is capable of stomping an unruly PC making threats even if it's done at a cost or by proxy. Someone brought up Buffy in another thread & that provided a perfect example in warren kicking off the dark willow thing by killing tara totally by mistake while acting like an almost stereotypical murderhobo

Spoiler: tara dark willow warren chain

Sometimes it's important for players to know that they don't have plot armor just because they didn't split the party & said please to an angry NPC pushed to the point of saying "bored now". Other times it means that the every member of the proverbial city guard doesn't need to be able to summon npc guard powers to ensure that players don't act like conquering bandits after a bad low stakes persuade/deception check, the players just need to believe that such guards exist or that the guard as a whole can hire someone to keep the peace even if that involves finding someone to stop the PCs.

★ fold to my demands or else (direct or implied) is such a common threat for players to make to what they think are commoner & other low CR statblock NPCs that it doesn't even raise eyebrows a lot of the time. That only needs to be swatted down once or twice before authority equals asskicking isn't needed to make threats from NPCs plausibly credible

 

[prabe]

It was well phrased earlier, PC's aren't some kind of "unique mutant" chosen one with powers nobody else could attain & they definitely aren't considered the strongest individuals in the world to me (both as a player and a GM).... Changing that creates problems with worldbuilding & requires the plausibility of death to function. The PCs being treated as a result of their behavior is a big part of my games, but that goes both ways for me★, they just don't get an auto pass granted by virtue of being the chosen hero or the most powerful individuals. Take FR as an example of how it works, folks like drizzt eleminster & so on could trivially handle basically anything that most parties of PCs go off to handle... but they are busy doing other stuff the PCs have no involvement with & would never get anything done if they had to be the one true chosen hero of Toril.

I think this might be the first time I've seen anyone non-sarcastically say that Drizzt and Elminster were positive features of the Realms. In the 5e games I DM, I've had good success with entities that think of adventurers as something like investments, because there are all sort of non-aggression pacts binding the most-potent things in my primary setting world; those most-potent entities have a tendency to treat low-level PCs as useful people and high-level PCs as effectively equals, I haven't had to use them to enforce any sort of compliance, ever.

★ fold to my demands or else (direct or implied) is such a common threat for players to make to what they think are commoner & other low CR statblock NPCs that it doesn't even raise eyebrows a lot of the time. That only needs to be swatted down once or twice before authority equals asskicking isn't needed to make threats from NPCs plausibly credible

It's possible my experiences are atypical (I hear that all the time) but I don't think I've never seen PCs behave as you describe, in any D&D-like TRPG I've played or run, ever, going back go the mid-1980s. If you exclude attempts to intimidate people the PCs thought were bad, you can broaden that to just about all the TRPGs I've been involved in, even when we weren't playing extraordinarily heroic PCs.

 

[DarkCrisis]

I find it odd that some players would want their characters to be immune from death yet 5E has the most death friendly Ress spells of any edition.

Revivify is a 3rd level cleric spells and by the time heroes are that level 300GP is fairly trivial. Plus if your DM is so set on keeping them alive, scrolls etc of Revivify can be sold or found.