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

[EzekielRaiden]

I would definitely make the point that they shouldn't see their PCs are protagonists in a story, at least in the playstyle I prefer.

Whereas for me, they are protagonists in a story. It's just a story where nobody, not even the GM, knows exactly what the next chapter will hold, let alone the ending. We know parts of the map, but there are blanks that will be filled along the way We know some of the characters, but not what will happen to them, nor where their "true" loyalties might lie, nor...etc., and we'll meet new ones along the way. We know some of the goals, but not all of them, and we don't know whether those goals will succeed or fail or fall somewhere between.

Because that's what is most interesting: we play to find out what happens.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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

Because that isn't the experience we want to have. Simple as.

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?

They aren't getting in the way. They're an essential part of the process.

I just take away the one, single, specific thing that I don't want to see happen. Random, permanent, irrevocable death. Everything else is still on the table.

For serious here DarkCrisis: How would you feel if I reversed this argument? Because the reversal of this argument is me saying, "Why do you roleplay? If you care so little about the story, just pre-roll a thousand dice and check the numbers. If your HP drops to zero, get a new HP counter. Done. It would move so much faster and you can quickly check whether your numbers are better or worse together. Why let extensive narration get in the way?"

Because I know what your answer would be to that: the story is an essential part of the experience. Reducing it to JUST numbers and absolutely nothing else would diminish it, dramatically so.

The same logic applies in the other direction. Reducing it to narration and nothing else also diminishes the experience.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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?

I wasn't asked, but I can do something with this.

Something I have tried to do with my campaign is give each character a connection to something in the background of the campaign. Sometimes these are pretty mild things, e.g. we had a Druid to start with, and I wanted to make a faction of evil druids, so...done! No need to work further than that, that's enough of a connection to get things started.

So, let's say we've got characters who have a reason to care about the various major threats running around. Cool. Now one of those characters dies. Alright, that's fair; just because the one person died doesn't mean nobody else has motives, we can develop new stuff with time.

But now imagine a full-on TPK. Say the players are game for this, and get invested in a new crop of weirdos. Now something new and different has to connect them to the villains, otherwise the story quickly moves in a pretty dull direction of "we do it because we're paid". I imagine I could probably do this a second time, though it would probably be quite rough around the edges for a while.

Now imagine a second full-on TPK. Okay...now we need a third crop of weirdos, and all of them need new and different connections to the campaign. Now imagine a third, a fourth, a fifth TPK.

By the time you've lost the whole party three times, it becomes really, really difficult to tell a satisfying, long-term story. You just don't have the time to play out character development, to see relationships or rivalries form between various PCs (or between one PC and other NPCs), unless you use really canned, prewritten stuff (e.g. "I'm Roberta, sister to the late Robert, and I will avenge the death of my brother!") Constantly losing the whole party really does lead to an inability to meaningfully tell a story outside of something really basic. Basic is good as a sometimes food, or as the day-to-day stuff between major events, but making it the whole of your narrative diet really does drag the experience down.

That's a thing where "overuse of character death" is an issue, in an actual gaming space. (Of course, the same problem occurs for the same reasons in a narrative setting, if you kill off all the main characters in a book even once, you are GOING to lose most of your audience--the only difference is that the line between character and audience is removed with TTRPGing.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

I don't see how this addresses @pemerton's complaint. The deaths are not going to occur in those urban areas, generally. They're going to occur, most of the time, in dungeons--often deep inside said dungeons. Hirelings that have no motivations or life other than sitting there in a previous dungeon room, so you can just immediately switch to playing them when a character dies, are pretty dramatically unrealistic. Hireling NPCs that stay back in town or guarding the horses at the entrance are NPCs that aren't accessible much of the time, thus leaving the player to simply sit there and wait to be allowed to participate again.

The fundamental issue remains.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If its so trivial why remove it completely?

Well, I don't actually find it trivial--it is the folks complaining about resurrection magic that find it trivial.

And can't you have more than one source of tension in a game?

That's literally what WE are talking about here. WE are the ones who want more sources of tension other than character death. It is everyone else telling US that the only valid source of tension is character death.

YOUR side, including you personally, has repeatedly said that the game ceases to have meaning if random, permanent, irrevocable death isn't an ever-present threat. That the game stops having any tension or challenge the instant any form of managing random, permanent, irrevocable death is introduced, that we should just engage in group storytelling because we've apparently destroyed the ENTIRE game just by altering this one, small part of one specific form of consequence.

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

1: I don't find it trivial. 2: Even if I did, I find other aspects of it (mostly gameplay, rather than narrative) actually interesting.

In fact, I really wish HP in 5e still worked like 4e. Healing Surges, with a system based on needing them, are both more realistic (the recovery of homeostasis can be slow!) and provide more game design space than Hit Dice, with a system based on not needing them. Minor-action healing (what 5e would call "Bonus action" healing) makes for much more interesting support characters, because you can heal others AND do something that actually advances the fight, rather than merely undoing a bad thing. And, because 4e death saves don't reset until you take at least a short rest, the "whack-a-mole" healing problem never occurred in 4e.

But that's definitely too much said about an off-topic thing.

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

I mean, when you do the specific things you've told us to do, rather than...not doing those things?

Removing random, permanent, irrevocable character death absolutely is not "just adjudicating story time." It is, frankly, extremely annoying that you keep saying this without any actual justification. Just because you've said it four times now doesn't mean it's true.

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.

Again, you keep saying things like "Knowing I will always win".

This is an abject falsehood. I have explicitly said this, several times, at least one of them directly to you. Please stop saying this, because at this point, you are actively choosing to ignore the people telling you your statement is wrong and disparaging, in order to keep making that statement.

Nobody "always wins" at my table. Nobody gets to win without working for it--and there are times where even if you work for it, you may still lose. I just want "lose" to not mean "your story ENDS, you LOSE, good DAY sir!" I want it to mean, "Your story just got a hell of a lot darker" or "now you have to figure out how to live with this consequence" or "now you must make a Sophie's choice" or...etc.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mean, that's fair, but realistically, with the way people play characters today, if it takes almost five years for the character to be revived, that actually means the character never gets revived, because the campaign ends long before that. Campaigns that hit a third year are rare. We cannot design a game expecting that most groups hit that point. Because most don't.


Except that it is, if you don't start from three assumptions that are just flat not true about most games today. I already mentioned one, but I'll do both here:
1. Most campaigns run for several (3+) years, and have mostly cohesive participation across that time.
2. Most campaigns have players running several different PCs, which they rotate through regularly.
3. Creating new characters is very simple, takes very little time, and requires no special investment from the player.

The vast, vast majority of players are not interested in the second. They want to play one character at a time. Hence, if you're "handed an NPC" to play, that's effectively being told "okay, this is your character now, have fun!" And a lot of players just...aren't interested in doing that. Pregens are not well-liked, for good reason. They tell you what you WILL play, rather than allowing you to decide for yourself what you wish to play.

The first, sadly, just...isn't true of most groups. Even groups run entirely with friends. I am quite well aware that my DW game is a rarity for having had a relatively stable group for so long....and even then, none of the people who started this game are still in it today, except me, the GM. I would love it if most campaigns could be expected to run multiple years. That'd be an awesome world to live in. The sad fact is that we don't, and designing a rule system dependent on such things isn't going to magically change that fact.

The third hasn't been true of any edition of D&D created by Wizards of the Coast, and I would personally argue it wasn't even all that true at least by late-2e and probably a bit earlier. Blame it on Dragonlance, blame it on Tolkien fanboys pulling D&D away from the influences of Howard and Leiber, whatever--but the simple fact is that even creating a late-2e character could be quite the ordeal, and the general expectation of player investment into said character at creation, not exclusively after many campaigns, was already much higher.

I would love to know where you are getting the data that tells you what most or a vast majority of players want and don't want, well enough to represent them in this post.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Whereas for me, they are protagonists in a story. It's just a story where nobody, not even the GM, knows exactly what the next chapter will hold, let alone the ending. We know parts of the map, but there are blanks that will be filled along the way We know some of the characters, but not what will happen to them, nor where their "true" loyalties might lie, nor...etc., and we'll meet new ones along the way. We know some of the goals, but not all of them, and we don't know whether those goals will succeed or fail or fall somewhere between.

Because that's what is most interesting: we play to find out what happens.

In what way does that make them protagonists in a story? Seems to me that the PCs are just people going through the world and making choices based on what they find there. That isn't a story until someone puts it together after the fact and tells it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I would love to know where you are getting the data that tells you what most or a vast majority of players want and don't want, well enough to represent them in this post.

Really? You're gonna pull the "where's your data" card?

Look around you. We had to have a "renaissance" or "revival" or whatever the R in OSR stands for, because that style had nearly died out. It resurged! And then it became niche but supported.

Are you going to tell me that the vast swathes of new players, weaned on Critical Role and The Adventure Zone, are truly hungering for characters that are paper-thin nothings until they've had a year+ of weekly adventures first?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I wasn't asked, but I can do something with this.

Something I have tried to do with my campaign is give each character a connection to something in the background of the campaign. Sometimes these are pretty mild things, e.g. we had a Druid to start with, and I wanted to make a faction of evil druids, so...done! No need to work further than that, that's enough of a connection to get things started.

So, let's say we've got characters who have a reason to care about the various major threats running around. Cool. Now one of those characters dies. Alright, that's fair; just because the one person died doesn't mean nobody else has motives, we can develop new stuff with time.

But now imagine a full-on TPK. Say the players are game for this, and get invested in a new crop of weirdos. Now something new and different has to connect them to the villains, otherwise the story quickly moves in a pretty dull direction of "we do it because we're paid". I imagine I could probably do this a second time, though it would probably be quite rough around the edges for a while.

Now imagine a second full-on TPK. Okay...now we need a third crop of weirdos, and all of them need new and different connections to the campaign. Now imagine a third, a fourth, a fifth TPK.

By the time you've lost the whole party three times, it becomes really, really difficult to tell a satisfying, long-term story. You just don't have the time to play out character development, to see relationships or rivalries form between various PCs (or between one PC and other NPCs), unless you use really canned, prewritten stuff (e.g. "I'm Roberta, sister to the late Robert, and I will avenge the death of my brother!") Constantly losing the whole party really does lead to an inability to meaningfully tell a story outside of something really basic. Basic is good as a sometimes food, or as the day-to-day stuff between major events, but making it the whole of your narrative diet really does drag the experience down.

That's a thing where "overuse of character death" is an issue, in an actual gaming space. (Of course, the same problem occurs for the same reasons in a narrative setting, if you kill off all the main characters in a book even once, you are GOING to lose most of your audience--the only difference is that the line between character and audience is removed with TTRPGing.)

I have never even heard of a campaign that suffered more than one TPK. That example seems very unrealistic to me.

I do get your point, however. At some point the motivation to keep going along with the plot will change in an unfavorable way or disappear altogether. If you're playing the game as a story, that would be a real problem.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Really? You're gonna pull the "where's your data" card?

Look around you. We had to have a "renaissance" or "revival" or whatever the R in OSR stands for, because that style had nearly died out. It resurged! And then it became niche but supported.

Are you going to tell me that the vast swathes of new players, weaned on Critical Role and The Adventure Zone, are truly hungering for characters that are paper-thin nothings until they've had a year+ of weekly adventures first?

I think it's a fair bet some of those vast swathes have never even tried a game that wasn't modern-style D&D.