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

[Chaosmancer]

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.

If it is so trivially easy to overcome, then it is a terrible thing to base the tension of an adventure on. So why get upset when people find other ways to have tension in their games?

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't have deities in my setting, for reasons. I drop PCs all the time, all the way through Tier Four, and I've killed at least one PC at high levels (she got better ...) without invoking that sort of thing to keep the PCs "in line." There were jokes throughout the one campaign about the PCs killing at least one major NPC, but those were entirely jokes; had the PCs tried to follow through on them seriously, I'd have dropped into the fight, which would have taken as long as it would have taken, and whatever the outcome would have been, would have been. (It probably would not have gone well for the PCs.)

deific ranks were a power thing & don't necessarily require one to be a deity (especially in eberron). Once again in this thread, the plausible threat of death doesn't require a player to FAFO by calling what may or may not be a bluff. I find it bizarre how many people just posted that they don't sometimes see PC's try to use might & a willingness to use force in place of an untrained intimidation check with poor charisma as if it's some weird lying unthinkable alien thing for players to do.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Why not just sit around and tell each other a story that each gets to add to without dice?

"An Ogre leaps out and attacks the group!"
"My Ranger fires an arrow at it and hits in the eye!"
"It screams and become enraged."
"My Wizard casts a Fire Bolt and burns his bottom!"
"You guys are doing great! The Ogre hops around patting his singed butt!"
"My Fighter runs over and gives an overhand chop with my axe!"
"The Ogre takes the blow and sags to his knees!"
"My cleric says a blessing before ending the evil Ogres rampage."
"That was great guys and very scary! Now, you are still in the dungeon room!"
"I look for any hidden items!"
"You find a magic potion! It can cure wounds!"
"Lucky, good thing I said I looked for hidden items."
"I look for a hidden door!"
"You don't one, but the window does open onto a terrace."

I mean that would move so much faster and you can all tell a great story together. Why let random dice get in the way?

The adventure I posted with the Gnolls revolves around a dungeon. Per the request of the player who wanted me to run the adventure, death is completely off the table. Not even the monsters will die. If defeated the party is captured, and will get a chance to escape. If they fail in the escape attempt, that character is permanently lost to the Dungeon.

After the fight I'm talking about, I revealed part of what that means in this section of the dungeon they are in. One of the players felt the appropriate response from their character was to vomit in horror.

Character Death is not the Holy Grail of all story telling. It is not the Ultimate Silver Bullet, without which all stories fail. Character Death is a tool, and one of the least interesting ones to leverage. In fact, it is such a tool that its OVERUSE is often cited as the downfall of a story.

 

[Chaosmancer]

One related aspect that hasn't yet been brought up (I don't think) is that there's a subset of players out there who actively like turning over their characters now and then*; who enjoy the ongoing campaign-setting-backplot-etc. but get bored playing the same character (and-or with watching other people play the same characters) for any great length of time. They want the change that a new character brings to the group dynamic and the party's tactics etc., when or before the existing group gets stale.

I'm one of those players.

* - doesn't always have to be death-caused; cycling characters in and out of parties works just as well. Pleasant side effect: cycling characters in and out also tends to slow down the overall level-advance rate, meaning the campaign can last longer before getting beyond what the system can handle.

That can be accomodated without killing the PCs of the players who don't want to replace their PCs at that time.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The adventure I posted with the Gnolls revolves around a dungeon. Per the request of the player who wanted me to run the adventure, death is completely off the table. Not even the monsters will die. If defeated the party is captured, and will get a chance to escape. If they fail in the escape attempt, that character is permanently lost to the Dungeon.

After the fight I'm talking about, I revealed part of what that means in this section of the dungeon they are in. One of the players felt the appropriate response from their character was to vomit in horror.

Character Death is not the Holy Grail of all story telling. It is not the Ultimate Silver Bullet, without which all stories fail. Character Death is a tool, and one of the least interesting ones to leverage. In fact, it is such a tool that its OVERUSE is often cited as the downfall of a story.

Assuming telling a story was the main point of play, can you give an example of one where as you say, the story's downfall is overuse of character death?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Adding a couple of further thoughts to @prabe's observations:

If we're going to use multiple PCs as a "solution" to the problem of character death meaning (i) that the player has to "sit tight" and (ii) that the player's new character has to be integrated in some fashion, then why not just allow the player to keep playing the same character? Perhaps there is an answer to this question, but I think it needs to be spelled out.

One possible answer to the question is that "it is more realistic" in so far as it allows for death to be the occasional result of dangerous activity, while still giving the player a character who is readily available in the shared fiction. But this happens at the expense of a different dimension of realism - namely, the game doubles down on the absurdity of all these people who have no lives, motivations, trajectories etc of their own, but who seem to exist as nothing but members of an "adventuring" hive mind. I mean, this is already an unrealistic feature of typical party play, and adding multiple PCs just amplifies this absurd feature.

That second thing isn't unrealistic. You just have to make the point of hiring or otherwise recruiting plausible henchmen or allies. Plenty of societies and cultures have a wandering or at least uncommitted portion of the population, especially in the kind of urban areas such recruiting is most likely to take place. I don't see anything unrealistic about that.

 

[DarkCrisis]

If it is so trivially easy to overcome, then it is a terrible thing to base the tension of an adventure on. So why get upset when people find other ways to have tension in their games?

If its so trivial why remove it completely? And can't you have more than one source of tension in a game?

That's like saying your character finds taking HP damage trivial. Why not just remove damage?

At what point are you no longer playing a game and just adjudicating story time?

Anywho, I'm not saying you're wrong. Play D&D or any RPG however you like. Use dice, don't use dice. Everyone is in god mode or has 1 HP. Whatever works for your table, it's your table. All I (and others) is tell you if thats a game (or story tell) they would want to play in. Knowing I will always win in D&D would take the fun out of it FOR ME. You do you.

 

[prabe]

deific ranks were a power thing & don't necessarily require one to be a deity (especially in eberron). Once again in this thread, the plausible threat of death doesn't require a player to FAFO by calling what may or may not be a bluff. I find it bizarre how many people just posted that they don't sometimes see PC's try to use might & a willingness to use force in place of an untrained intimidation check with poor charisma as if it's some weird lying unthinkable alien thing for players to do.

The metaphysics (so to speak) of my primary setting world seem as though even deific ranks would be a poor fit.

I think the "plausible threat of death" just needs things that can plausibly kill the PCs to try to kill the PCs. It helps to have players who play their characters like people who've nearly died at least once; and it probably helps to keep dropping (not necessarily killing) PCs.

A) I didn't say I don't "sometimes" see PCs try to use might and willingness to use force, to get what they want. I said I don't see them use it on things that aren't obviously enemies. B) I admitted my experiences are probably atypical. C) I'm pretty sure I didn't say it made your experiences untrue or unusual; I'll say that: I don't believe your experiences didn't happen, or that they're weird or otherwise unusual.

 

[cbaratz]

My gut feeling was PC death isn't really the vibe I go for in D&D but after considering it a little, with all the resurrection type of effects in D&D, I think it should be a more common thing. Kind of like it was in Dragon Ball. It was hugely inconvenient and people had to gather dragon balls and make a wish or go through a long ordeal in the afterlife but they could always come back.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

But, putting this aside.... isn't the problem people keep bringing up that they can't challenged their parties? That there is no challenge to DnD 5th edition?

Three gnolls, two flesh gnawer gnolls, a druid and a mushroom. against a completely fresh party of 5 who won initiative and scouted the fight beforehand. If this is too tough and too deadly... then how is it that 5e is also not hard enough?

That complaint was regarding 5.0. Like I've been telling you, they changed things significantly for 5.5, so apparently WotC felt so too. It remains to be seen whether they struck the right balance.