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

[EzekielRaiden]

So you do play minute-by-minute? Everyone sits around the table pretending to sleep because their characters are? Do you RP going to the latrine?

Nope. It's not something I have any interest in doing. I'm just saying that it CAN be done.

Why the **** would you?

No idea! It seems like a pretty unwise choice to me. But just because it is unwise does not mean it is not something a person could choose to do. Hence, it is literally possible, but it is practically extremely unlikely because it is extremely unwise for various reasons.

The whole point of the example was to show someone else (Micah) more or less what was very graciously admitted above: verisimilitude is a currency, which should not be spent frivolously, and one of the places where it is pretty much objectively a non-frivolous expense is improving pacing by cutting out many things that are realistic but terribly uninteresting.

Further, you're using examples far afield from what I said. I used a much more specific point than just any downtime whatsoever. I was specifically referring to the unrealistic choice of having it be the case that all rumors, leads, strange reports, etc. turn out to be worthwhile to investigate, e.g. there is a near or total absence of "dud" adventure hooks. This is not the same as taking a microscope to every part of the characters' lives; instead, it is a world that is (very!) unrealistically jam-packed with actually interesting events. The characters would still be doing things to investigate the leads, they just rarely/never do stuff to investigate only to learn that it was a total waste of time to have done so. In the real world, lots of time gets spent following up on duds of all sorts: bad/flawed military intel, false police reports, academic cul-de-sacs, promising drug candidates that have unacceptable side-effects, scientists following reasonable hypotheses that produce null results, etc. It is very much a narrative conceit to have nearly all (or even truly all) of the places that the party goes looking actually contain something worthy of the time spent.

EDIT: unless of course you are redefining the word "literally" or there's a complete failure of communication. But in a typical D&D game? Where a single session could easily span days or even weeks? It's literallynot possible.

It literally is though, in the formal sense of the term; it is strictly true that it is possible to do. You literally can do it. It would be almost completely awful! Very few people would want to do it! But you absolutely CAN do it. Nothing is preventing you from doing so. You keep citing how it would be bad or dull or plodding to do it, various ways of saying "that's a very very bad idea", as though that somehow makes it not physically possible to do. Giving reasons why it would be unwise to do it, that there would be negative effects if you did do it, is not at all the same as showing that it cannot be done. Indeed, I would say it is conceding that it can be done. If there are negative consequences for doing a thing, then by definition, the thing must be doable.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So...gotcha? You do what you have to sometimes.

Certainly.

I want to add, I respect rather highly your post earlier about the (for lack of a better term) economy of verisimilitude, and how it should be spent on worthwhile investments, more or less. I know you and I have had our lengthy disagreements in the past and will probably have future ones too, but I thought that was a particularly noteworthy gesture. I meant it with full sincerity when I said the post was most gracious. I fear I have not always had such grace myself.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Certainly.

I want to add, I respect rather highly your post earlier about the (for lack of a better term) economy of verisimilitude, and how it should be spent on worthwhile investments, more or less. I know you and I have had our lengthy disagreements in the past and will probably have future ones too, but I thought that was a particularly noteworthy gesture. I meant it with full sincerity when I said the post was most gracious. I fear I have not always had such grace myself.

You're quite welcome. It's not every day someone makes a point on the Internet and someone else accepts that they're right about it (and perhaps more importantly that they were wrong). Glad I got to be the rare exception this time.

Point well taken.

 

[Oofta]

Once again: no-one is advocating for it. The point is simply that it is possible. And by choosing not to do it, by choosing to skip parts of the adventure because they are not interesting, one is making a decision for narrative reasons.

Nope. It's not something I have any interest in doing. I'm just saying that it CAN be done.


No idea! It seems like a pretty unwise choice to me. But just because it is unwise does not mean it is not something a person could choose to do. Hence, it is literally possible, but it is practically extremely unlikely because it is extremely unwise for various reasons.

The whole point of the example was to show someone else (Micah) more or less what was very graciously admitted above: verisimilitude is a currency, which should not be spent frivolously, and one of the places where it is pretty much objectively a non-frivolous expense is improving pacing by cutting out many things that are realistic but terribly uninteresting.

Further, you're using examples far afield from what I said. I used a much more specific point than just any downtime whatsoever. I was specifically referring to the unrealistic choice of having it be the case that all rumors, leads, strange reports, etc. turn out to be worthwhile to investigate, e.g. there is a near or total absence of "dud" adventure hooks. This is not the same as taking a microscope to every part of the characters' lives; instead, it is a world that is (very!) unrealistically jam-packed with actually interesting events. The characters would still be doing things to investigate the leads, they just rarely/never do stuff to investigate only to learn that it was a total waste of time to have done so. In the real world, lots of time gets spent following up on duds of all sorts: bad/flawed military intel, false police reports, academic cul-de-sacs, promising drug candidates that have unacceptable side-effects, scientists following reasonable hypotheses that produce null results, etc. It is very much a narrative conceit to have nearly all (or even truly all) of the places that the party goes looking actually contain something worthy of the time spent.


It literally is though, in the formal sense of the term; it is strictly true that it is possible to do. You literally can do it. It would be almost completely awful! Very few people would want to do it! But you absolutely CAN do it. Nothing is preventing you from doing so. You keep citing how it would be bad or dull or plodding to do it, various ways of saying "that's a very very bad idea", as though that somehow makes it not physically possible to do. Giving reasons why it would be unwise to do it, that there would be negative effects if you did do it, is not at all the same as showing that it cannot be done. Indeed, I would say it is conceding that it can be done. If there are negative consequences for doing a thing, then by definition, the thing must be doable.

I thought I was clear on what I was saying. Maybe not. It would be impossible from a practical standpoint to have an RPG that spans the amount of time my typical D&D campaigns span. Could you in theory have a game where you played a specific character for a day or so like the old 24 TV show? I suppose. I doubt anyone has ever done it though. @EzekielRaiden stated (bold added) "No. You literally can, if you want to. Some RPGs do." So please, Mr. Raiden, name a published RPG that does this, that never skips time.

You can stretch the hypothetical game to the breaking point, attribute any facet of game design you want to being done for "narrative" reasons. But I think it's an impractical hypothetical and a redefinition of the word narrative. We skip time because we have limited hours to play games, that is different, as far as I am concerned, from doing it for purely narrative reasons. It also has nothing to do with realism.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Some people do those things, yes. But it's not a given.

Yes. That is what I said. That is what every single person who agrees with me has said.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I thought I was clear on what I was saying. Maybe not. It would be impossible from a practical standpoint to have an RPG that spans the amount of time my typical D&D campaigns span. Could you in theory have a game where you played a specific character for a day or so like the old 24 TV show? I suppose. I doubt anyone has ever done it though. @EzekielRaiden stated (bold added) "No. You literally can, if you want to. Some RPGs do." So please, Mr. Raiden, name a published RPG that does this, that never skips time.

You can stretch the hypothetical game to the breaking point, attribute any facet of game design you want to being done for "narrative" reasons. But I think it's an impractical hypothetical and a redefinition of the word narrative. We skip time because we have limited hours to play games, that is different, as far as I am concerned, from doing it for purely narrative reasons. It also has nothing to do with realism.

Microscope would be a bit of an out-there example, but technically that's exactly what it's for: to let people play through the story of the world, from a scale as large as the entire universe to a scale as small as a single person's minute-by-minute experience (hence the name, "Microscope", zooming in to ever-finer degrees of detail). The game I was actually thinking of when I wrote that is a very bad game, but technically does invoke such pointlessly-specific details: FATAL. It goes into such nitty-gritty detail that it has reference tables for...well. Maybe I shouldn't explicitly name them in a public forum. Suffice it to say that there are tables in it for utterly irrelevant details that you are apparently expected to account for on the regular.

Further, there are some RPGs which aim for a more structured experience. Fiasco has already been mentioned. There are other games out there, I'm sure (though I have not sought them out myself), where minute-by-minute choices really do matter. Some perspectives on highly old-school play certainly verge in that direction. Remember Gygax's explicit all-caps warning about how a meaningful campaign is impossible without strict timekeeping records? Further, isn't that what LARPing is? You're literally doing it live--you HAVE to "play through" any boring bits that happen to occur. I imagine the organizers would take steps to minimize such stuff, but I sincerely doubt that it is possible to totally eliminate them. And LARP isn't totally divorced from TTRPGing; my experience with Werewolf the Apocalypse included using books that were dual-purpose tabletop and live-action ("Mind's Eye Theater" stuff), with rules for both approaches when a difference between them would matter.

I would certainly agree that nearly all games involve some expected minimum degree of eliding out detail (though LARP might challenge this since, well, you're literally living through the experience). But just as a person can live through all the boring details, we can play through them as well. It would just be an exceedingly dull experience in the vast majority of cases. Hence, it is possible, not just in principle but also in fact. It's just usually an exceedingly bad idea.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Do any games actually do that? You would have to limit the entire "campaign" to what you can be played contiguously at the table. Even assuming you did something like the old 24 TV show where every episode was a real time accounting of what went on. But even then, there was plenty of time were time was skipped for individuals.

I just don't see how it could work, or why you would bother.

No one does it. No game does it. That is the point.

Someone upthread essentially said "We don't use any narrative conceits in our game". This is just a point that they obviously MUST use some narrative conceits, because the game would become unbearably dull and painful to play if they did not.

 

[Oofta]

No one does it. No game does it. That is the point.

Someone upthread essentially said "We don't use any narrative conceits in our game". This is just a point that they obviously MUST use some narrative conceits, because the game would become unbearably dull and painful to play if they did not.

Skipping time is not done for narrative reasons. It's done because we have limited time at the game table.

But this, like many topics on this forum, seem to be just arguing semantics for no real reason.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Skipping time is not done for narrative reasons. It's done because we have limited time at the game table.

But this, like many topics on this forum, seem to be just arguing semantics for no real reason.

When you "skip over" every lead that is a dud, are you skipping over scenes that actually could be played out and have weight to them? This is why I said what I said earlier, about being focused on that specific thing.

Because this isn't "we don't pay attention to the times where you're asleep or using the bathroom" stuff. This is skipping over actual situations that test your skills and abilities, but which turn out to be a complete waste of time.

Doing that is not a matter of "we don't have infinite time to play." It is, very specifically, avoiding something because doing it would be boring or irritating pacing--shortening "duds" to just a few descriptive sentences, or even just cutting out duds entirely, never having duds in the first place. That is, absolutely, a narrative conceit: "Don't waste the audience's time with empty action." It is not a matter of pure time-saving practicality; it is a matter of steering the focus-of-attention so that it either only looks at things that are "interesting," or reduces "uninteresting" things into mere sentences.

Yes, time-saving practicality is one of the reasons we, for example, do not spend 8 hours of play-time where the characters are asleep. Time-saving practicality is not why a person would say, "I don't really ever include dud rumors; if the PCs hear a rumor, there's something to it." Which is precisely the sort of thing that was mentioned upthread, and why I kept saying that you had inserted yourself into a conversation about that, but which you seem stubbornly unwilling to even remotely consider.

 

[soviet]

I think you can certainly make an argument that any travel through foreign lands in a fantasy setting has huge potential for interesting (if not necessarily impactful) moments and is worth spending more time on.