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

[Micah Sweet]

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.


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.)

I'm reasonably sure both 1e and 2e used those definitions. Maybe it was one or the other.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Just out of curiosity, do you know what "slice-of-life" is? Like, do you understand the concept?

I don't know if it is a tag used in western media, but just a quick look on a single website shows this

View attachment 389757

5,362 manga title, not single volumes, TITLES. As in there are, on this one site alone, over five thousand stories written by professional writers that are, by your definition... not stories? Because an active manga title isn't put together after the fact. But a slice of life story is literally a story where the characters are just people going through the world and making choices.

They also have some of the most popular non-shonen titles out there.

I would say the main differences between "Slice of Life" and a story-focused TTRPG are:

The former are "ordinary" and rarely have climactic events; TTRPG chars almost always begin or become extraordinary and face many climactic events over time
The former rarely have "villains" and don't even need antagonists; TTRPGs almost always have villains and always have antagonists
SoL stories (I wish it had a better acronym) don't usually have dramatic arcs so much as "popcorn"-style events; a story-focused TTRPG almost certainly plays out arcs, they're just done "with" the camera frame, rather than before or after it

But there certainly are similarities. One might say that "Slice of Life" follows the action as it happens, so to speak, which is definitely what a "story now" RPG also does. Further, "Slice of Life" embraces a spontaneity of behavior and growth that a more rigorously plotted story wouldn't, which is very much true of "story now" RPGs.

The closest analogy I can think of for the specific kind of story that "story now" RPGs produce is Choose Your Own Adventure, except that CYOA narratives are completely fixed (y'know, being a written down book) while "story now" is inherently open-ended both in terms of length and in terms of the actions you can choose to take in any given moment. Sometimes, only a few actions make sense (that's the fiction limiting your options)

It's not for me as the DM to decide. It's for the player's with their actions and the dice.

Given the DM controls the world, and thus what is in it, it is also your decision whether to intrude or not. Just as the DM always has the nuclear option of "rocks fall, everyone dies" or the equivalent, they also have what one might call the "pacifier" option of declaring that something bad doesn't happen because Reasons.

Now, to be clear, I agree, unreservedly, with anyone who says that a blatant and ham-fisted "pacifier", a kludge that sticks out like a sore thumb, etc., is bad and should be avoided in nearly all circumstances. I'm just not talking about that particular kind of intrusion. I'm talking about one that does the work to be diegetic (whether in advance, e.g. "I planted these seeds and now they can flower two, twenty, or two hundred sessions down the line", or as an improv "I'll fill in the details later" story hook), that uses the least-intrusive means possible to achieve the desired end, and preserves continuity and groundedness as much as possible while still accomplishing the goal.

It's been rather frustrating, fending off complaints that effectively amount to "well you CAN'T intrude in a way that is diegetic, minimally-intrusive, and grounded" because...yeah that claim is simply false. You can do it. It isn't even that hard, and many games (not just D&D) do quite a bit of heavy lifting to simplify the process for anything except "low level" characters or the equivalent (e.g. low-karma chars in Shadowrun).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

I don't accept single athlete on team = character in an RPG.

When you play a sport RPG, at least as far as I was aware, you play the whole team. You aren't one person, any more than a wargamer is playing a single soldier from a platoon. You are playing the whole kit and kaboodle. Of course your attention is on the team, not any individual player--the team is who you are.

That's where the analogy falls down. In a TTRPG, the team is not who you are. You are one individual member, or a set of individual members if you elect to play by the stable-of-PCs approach. Your allegiance and connections to the team are conditioned by your character's (or characters') reactions to that team, and the team's allegiance and connections to your character(s) are conditioned by their reactions to your character. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, but the sum of its parts are how we develop that "more than" thing.

If sports TTRPGs were in fact actually about each player playing just one, singular team member (at a time)? You bet your bottom dollar people would be Very Salty about their character being forcibly retired, having to bow out due to debilitating injury, etc. Because then it actually would be "athlete on a team = character in an RPG", and "forcibly retired" would be the equivalent of D&D-alike character death.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

In my present campaign we've had:

• One full character death from a Deck of Many Things
• Another effective death from a Deck of Many Things (Character's soul imprisoned by a powerful enemy the party has yet to locate)
• One close call after a character got knocked unconscious and then picked up by a chimera; after which the party nevertheless proceeded to blast them with AoE magic and an AoE shot from a magical cannon.

The PCs were well aware of the fact that the Deck of Many things was potentially character-ending. To the point that the PC who obtained it kept trying to convince random NPCs to use the thing (the Deck was empowered by a trickster god so that it would not vanish until the entire party had had the option of drawing cards if they wished)

 

[Lanefan]

I can tell I was tired, I completely neglected to actually respond to the latter.

Whether the GM makes them doesn't help the argument. That just turns it into being given a pre-gen to replace your existing character, which is worse because now you aren't even getting to decide what kind of character you play.


Your first point is the one that is in error. You have done what so many others have done in conversations like this: taken what I actually said, and inflated it into something grotesque and horrible, and then complained about how grotesque and horrible it is as a result.

Not in this case. I'm well aware you're only talking about permanent-random-irrevocable death in your posts.

I was referring specifically to situations* where a dead (or petrified, etc.) character cannot be replaced or revived by any means in any sort of timely manner (as in, it might be as long as 5-10 sessions before an opportunity even occurs), and suggesting what a DM might want to do when these type of adventures/situations arise. Taking death off the table entirely for that run is but one of those suggestions (and not the one I'd personally use).

* - an example of such a situation might be when the PCs somehow get stuck in a lengthy adventure on a plane or in a place where a) every other occupant is a non-playable monster (e.g. a land of the dinosaurs where Humans, Elves, etc. don't yet exist) meaning dead characters can't be replaced and b) the party has no field-usable revival capability meaning dead characters can't be revived.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't accept single athlete on team = character in an RPG.

Which is probably why you're tripping up on the analogy.

When you play a sport RPG, at least as far as I was aware, you play the whole team.

Again, not talking about sport RPGs here, but actual real-world sports.

You aren't one person, any more than a wargamer is playing a single soldier from a platoon. You are playing the whole kit and kaboodle. Of course your attention is on the team, not any individual player--the team is who you are.

That's where the analogy falls down. In a TTRPG, the team is not who you are. You are one individual member, or a set of individual members if you elect to play by the stable-of-PCs approach. Your allegiance and connections to the team are conditioned by your character's (or characters') reactions to that team, and the team's allegiance and connections to your character(s) are conditioned by their reactions to your character. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, but the sum of its parts are how we develop that "more than" thing.

Whose story is more important, then, in the big picture - the party you're part of or the character you happen to be portraying at the time?

Answering the latter is in my view a rather self-centered take on the whole thing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Whose story is more important, then, in the big picture - the party you're part of or the character you happen to be portraying at the time?

Neither. Neither is more important.

Each one can only exist because the other exists. They're symbiotic. It would be like asking whether the time signature or the key signature is more important for Swan Lake, or whether the texture or the temperature is more important for ice cream, or whether the leaves or the roots are more essential for a mighty oak. Neither can meaningfully exist without the other; taken in isolation and made the "only" important thing, each of them would be either totally pointless, or grotesquely inflated.

Without the party, the individual character has little to respond to, relate to, interact with, etc. Without the individuals, there is no party at all. The story manifests through the interaction between these elements (and between each, or both, and the world, of course.)

Answering the latter is in my view a rather self-centered take on the whole thing.

Hence why I don't--but I also don't say that each individual player is exclusively subservient to the group story either. It's a give and take.

Further, my playstyle isn't the one that encourages advantage-grubbing, selfish behavior. I know we've discussed this previously. You've made quite clear that you expect each and every player to play maximally selfishly. I don't. I expect each and every player to balance personal needs and group needs. Sometimes, that means the player has to work through something they'd rather they didn't have to (for example, allocating treasure to the person who benefits the most, or who has been shortchanged for treasure, rather than the person who wants it the most.) Other times, it means the player needs to speak up and advocate for their position.

There is no magic formula for determining what the correct behavior is. It is a spectrum, and one needs to pick the correct balance point for each situation, between the extremes of deficiency and excess (which one might call "selfishness" on the one end and "subordination" on the other), where the balance-point is amiability. Being a reasonable partner, who can roll with the punches and accept that they don't always get their way, without allowing that to become "okay, I guess I never get my way."

 

[GobHag]

Which is probably why you're tripping up on the analogy.

Again, not talking about sport RPGs here, but actual real-world sports.

Whose story is more important, then, in the big picture - the party you're part of or the character you happen to be portraying at the time?

Answering the latter is in my view a rather self-centered take on the whole thing.

So what if it's self-centered?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I think I see the disconnect. You expect that, were I not testing the new encounter building rules, I would have strictly followed the encounter building guidelines.

I wouldn't have.

And actually, isn't that an utterly bizarre take in the face of the normal complaints about 5e's level of difficulty? I made the encounter I made specifically because it made sense for about that number of enemies to show up. But it was seven enemies vs five players. That's not an unreasonable fight. Three lesser warriors, two stronger bodyguards, and an apprentice shaman is a pretty thematic set-up for a fight, the mushroom was honestly added because it fit the location and the fight felt like it could be TOO EASY.

And despite the fact that this seemed like an utterly bog-standard encounter for me, I'm supposed to expect that DMs with experience in multiple systems struggle to challenge their PCs, when I've taken the supposedly even easier, even less challenging, even more simple version of this system, followed the rules, and came up with a challenge whose only critique so far is "if you were using different rules that would have been a deadly fight"

So the only reason I somehow came up with a challenging fight was... having one more active monster than PCs that started the fight. Seems like that should say something, considering how many people have told me that it is nearly impossible to challenge PCs in the old rules, and now PCs are even stronger.

No one has said it is impossible to challenge the players, but that the encounters build by the (5.0) guidelines will not do it. And WotC agreed, thus changing the guidelines. And here you seem to agree as well, implying that under the old guidelines you would have ignored them, and ran this (what would have counted well above deadly) encounter nevertheless.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Given the DM controls the world, and thus what is in it, it is also your decision whether to intrude or not. Just as the DM always has the nuclear option of "rocks fall, everyone dies" or the equivalent, they also have what one might call the "pacifier" option of declaring that something bad doesn't happen because Reasons.

Now, to be clear, I agree, unreservedly, with anyone who says that a blatant and ham-fisted "pacifier", a kludge that sticks out like a sore thumb, etc., is bad and should be avoided in nearly all circumstances. I'm just not talking about that particular kind of intrusion. I'm talking about one that does the work to be diegetic (whether in advance, e.g. "I planted these seeds and now they can flower two, twenty, or two hundred sessions down the line", or as an improv "I'll fill in the details later" story hook), that uses the least-intrusive means possible to achieve the desired end, and preserves continuity and groundedness as much as possible while still accomplishing the goal.

It's been rather frustrating, fending off complaints that effectively amount to "well you CAN'T intrude in a way that is diegetic, minimally-intrusive, and grounded" because...yeah that claim is simply false. You can do it. It isn't even that hard, and many games (not just D&D) do quite a bit of heavy lifting to simplify the process for anything except "low level" characters or the equivalent (e.g. low-karma chars in Shadowrun).

You can. GM controls the world, and they can make anything happen, and a skilled GM can use vague foreshadowing and illusionism to make contrivances seem less contrived.

But I don't want to, at least not for big stakes. Because as GM, I too am there to "play to find out," not to railroad the PCs into safety. I am a softie, I have a bit hard time having bad things to happen, even though I feel real peril and feeling of genuine challenge might require it. And here having things predetermined and actually following the rules helps. I set the initial conditions, but then I just play the world with integrity and follow the what the rules say. Then the players do what they want, and results will be what they will be. We all will play to find out.