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

[Crimson Longinus]

So since I used all 2014 monster statblocks, are you of the opinion that the 2024 character options have gotten weaker? Because it was 2024 characters (with a single non-2024 subclass) against 2014 monsters. So it would be really weird if the monsters are suddenly far tougher than before...

No! I explained this to you. Under 5.0 the encounter you describe would have had difficulty modifier of 2.5 due multiple monsters, making it count way above deadly encounter whilst under 5.5 that multiplier does not exist so the encounter counts as moderate. The encounter did not change, but what difficulty it is classified as did. So had you built an encounter with similar budget under 5.0, it would have had way less monsters of weaker monsters.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

Sure. And sometimes you find out that your character dies.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

About henchmen and other ways to rapidly replace characters. I feel that if you need to have such contingencies, the character death is happening way too often for my liking.

I think if a character dies, it is fine for the player to sit out the rest of the session, so that they can plan a new character between sessions and they can be introduced in appropriate moment, probably in the next session. But this assumes that this is very rare occurrence, happening on average less than once per player per campaign, not something that constantly occurs, so that players need to be replacing characters all the time.

 

[pemerton]

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.

But if you're going to make death just this sort of speedbump, why bother with death at all? All it is adding is a certain absurdity, because something (ie death) that should be profound becomes casual and even ironic or ridiculous.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

But if you're going to make death just this sort of speedbump, why both with death at all? All it is adding is a certain absurdity, because something (ie death) that should be profound becomes causal and even ironic or ridiculous.

With that I fully agree.

Granted, I don't have problem with revivify, as I see it as some sort of fantasy emergency treatment, where you revive a person who is technically dead in a sense that their heart has stopped etc, but they're not yet truly gone.

But with longer reach death reversal it creates this weird situation where dead people are just quantum dead. They could be revived later, and presumably the characters know this. So the death cannot be reacted to normally, it cannot be processed normally, it cannot have the dramatic impact it would have normally. I hate this.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I find this distinction pedantic, particularly because I know I have heard people use both terms for the other alleged definition, and others who have used one term or the other for both uses without distinction.

Regardless: what you call "henchmen" are effectively already-made secondary PCs, so the argument has again become circular, you are already requiring that the players have a stable of playable PCs at the ready. And if you don't have henchmen, thus removing the circularity, you are thus put into the other problem, where the only people you can draw on to replace a dead PC are meaningfully inaccessible.

I was using the classic OSR definitions of those terms.

Generally the GM makes and plays henchmen (though IME they are often run by a player in combat situations for ease of use). Thus, they are active in the adventure as allies and potentially available to be run by players who lose their PC, temporarily or otherwise. I don't see it as circular.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Sure. And sometimes you find out that your character dies.

Yep. I'm just very, very slightly reducing which specific situations cause you to find that out.

But apparently, taking away just that one thing is somehow destroying the game. Is somehow being a "saboteur" (a word actually used by a person on this very forum!) to the game.

I was using the classic OSR definitions of those terms.

Generally the GM makes and plays henchmen (though IME they are often run by a player in combat situations for ease of use). Thus, they are active in the adventure as allies and potentially available to be run by players who lose their PC, temporarily or otherwise. I don't see it as circular.

This is the first time I've ever heard anyone make such a claim. Do you have a source? I'm not saying you're wrong, OSR ain't my bag and no one should be surprised by that, so ignorance of OSR jargon wouldn't surprise me in the least. I'm just very surprised that something apparently so cut-and-dried has both (a) never been mentioned anywhere as far as I have seen, and (b) is so widely ignored/overlooked/abused that you're the very first person to ever tell me of this distinction.

(As an example, I know of at least one OSR-adjacent game--"World of Dungeons", a different "D&D by way of PbtA" system, which attempts to preserve as much as possible of really really classic old-school D&D play--which refers to all persons whose services you pay for to assist you, whether they be mule-guards or shield-carriers, as "hirelings." Mostly since that's what DW calls them, I suspect, but still.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

With that I fully agree.

Granted, I don't have problem with revivify, as I see it as some sort of fantasy emergency treatment, where you revive a person who is technically dead in a sense that their heart has stopped etc, but they're not yet truly gone.

But with longer reach death reversal it creates this weird situation where dead people are just quantum dead. They could be revived later, and presumably the characters know this. So the death cannot be reacted to normally, it cannot be processed normally, it cannot have the dramatic impact it would have normally. I hate this.

My solution to this problem is to make of death a quest.

You want to resurrect your ally? It's gonna take more than just a spell. Maybe it would be "just a spell" for someone deeply immersed in their faith or philosophy, but anyone like that is going to ask for some form of payment or exchange for their services. For the PCs to do it themselves, even if they have the knowledge, they need something more.

Maybe, instead of diamonds, each resurrection ritual requires something special, commensurate to the strength or age of the separated soul. (Hence why those who have died "of old age" can't be brought back; at that age, nothing is valuable enough.)

Or maybe a resurrection spell, of any kind, is simply something that lets you make a deal with Death, or with some divine figure, to get your friend's soul back. The diamonds are merely your "opening bid", your "downpayment" to show that your negotiation is serious. Now you have to haggle for the soul--and you know both Death and the gods won't expect anything less than equal value for the soul being restored. (Even unquestionably good gods cannot afford to be profligate with their power--but perhaps they are already in your debt.)

Or maybe the spell projects the party into the Underworld, so they can aid their friend's escape from there. The stronger the spell, the stronger the helping PCs are while they're on the "other side" or the longer they can stay--but the stronger the target's soul, the deeper they "land" in the Underworld when they die.

Do stuff like this, and every death still matters. It genuinely tells a story, rather than simply being "Altogether, Jhen'ee adventured twenty-three hours, and then she died." And the above, all of it, has tons of precedent in myth and legend! Orpheus and Eurydice. Ishtar and Tammuz. Gilgamesh and Enkidu. All sorts of folklore involving a "sleep of death" or "apple of life" or the equivalent. A quest to go into the Underworld and return with power or a loved one's soul or something similar is literally almost as old as storytelling itself. Deals with the devil to restore a loved one to life--at a price. Etc.

If the player is genuinely done with the character and wants to move on, great. But if they aren't? We can do so much more with it.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm sorry Lanefan, but you seem to have lost the thread of the conversation here. The reason the sport-game thing was brought up was very specifically because someone made the claim that:

1. Sports TTRPGs exist
2. Sports TTRPGs allow the sport team you're running to lose matches
3. Losing a match is equivalent to having a character die†
4. Therefore, removing the ability to lose matches in a sport RPG is equivalent to removing death† as an obstacle in D&D-alike games
5. Removing the ability to lose matches in a sport RPG would make playing them pointless
6. Therefore, removing death† as an obstacle in D&D-alikes would make them pointless

(Note, I have used "death†"/"die†" instead of just "death" for reasons explained below.)

You have gone WAY, WAY far away from the argument originally made. I don't really have any desire to continue debating it with you as a result, because you're now arguing a completely different point, for completely different reasons, on a completely different analysis, where the one and only thing that is the same is the fact that you happen to be talking about sports RPGs. You aren't talking about losing games, you're talking about losing individual players from the team; you aren't talking about people ceasing to be able to participate, but rather identification or affiliation with the franchise; and you aren't talking about this in any way "proving" that removing (a very specific form of) death as a consequence, but rather trying to show that your perspective on things maps nicely to a view of building a football team (or whatever) and its management staff.

I was never talking about sport RPGs - someone else brought that one in - I instead used that as a jumping-off point to start talking about actual sports teams.

And no, I'm not talking about losing individual games or matches. Those don't even factor into my analogy here, though I suppose they could if a game/match mapped to an individual scene or combat in an RPG. My analogy is very simple:

Athelete* on a team = character in an RPG
The franchise itself = the party in an RPG

Athletes come and go but the franchise carries on, in the same way characters relate to parties in an RPG. Some campaigns such as my own and the ones I play in have multiple parties (franchises) where characters (athletes) jump from one party to another sometimes, eerily similar to how athletes sign with different teams, or are traded.

(I just now realized that there's a neat third level to this analogy as well: The league = the players at the table. Leagues gain and lose franchises over time just as tables gain and lose players)

A character death maps to an athlete's injury; perma-death meaing it was career-ending and revival meaning the athlete recovered and resumed playing.

* - used as a different term from "player" in order to reduce confusion.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

My solution to this problem is to make of death a quest.

You want to resurrect your ally? It's gonna take more than just a spell. Maybe it would be "just a spell" for someone deeply immersed in their faith or philosophy, but anyone like that is going to ask for some form of payment or exchange for their services. For the PCs to do it themselves, even if they have the knowledge, they need something more.

Maybe, instead of diamonds, each resurrection ritual requires something special, commensurate to the strength or age of the separated soul. (Hence why those who have died "of old age" can't be brought back; at that age, nothing is valuable enough.)

Or maybe a resurrection spell, of any kind, is simply something that lets you make a deal with Death, or with some divine figure, to get your friend's soul back. The diamonds are merely your "opening bid", your "downpayment" to show that your negotiation is serious. Now you have to haggle for the soul--and you know both Death and the gods won't expect anything less than equal value for the soul being restored. (Even unquestionably good gods cannot afford to be profligate with their power--but perhaps they are already in your debt.)

Or maybe the spell projects the party into the Underworld, so they can aid their friend's escape from there. The stronger the spell, the stronger the helping PCs are while they're on the "other side" or the longer they can stay--but the stronger the target's soul, the deeper they "land" in the Underworld when they die.

Do stuff like this, and every death still matters. It genuinely tells a story, rather than simply being "Altogether, Jhen'ee adventured twenty-three hours, and then she died." And the above, all of it, has tons of precedent in myth and legend! Orpheus and Eurydice. Ishtar and Tammuz. Gilgamesh and Enkidu. All sorts of folklore involving a "sleep of death" or "apple of life" or the equivalent. A quest to go into the Underworld and return with power or a loved one's soul or something similar is literally almost as old as storytelling itself. Deals with the devil to restore a loved one to life--at a price. Etc.

If the player is genuinely done with the character and wants to move on, great. But if they aren't? We can do so much more with it.

That certainly is much cooler than just casting a spell. But I still feel this is something that can work maybe once a campaign, and there needs to be a diegetic reason why the process is not repeatable, otherwise it just becomes the standard operating procedure and ceases to be cool. "Oh great, Timmy's dead; back to the Hades again, gang!"

First I thought it was cool in Critical Role how they did the resurrection ritual and all the players cried and it was very touching. But then they just kept repeating and repeating it and it worked every time, and it just became silly. (Except if a NPC died, then they for some reason didn't bother to resurrect them, even though they obviously could.)