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

[Micah Sweet]

Did you read my post?

I DID advertise it. And then they still were shocked and kept asking, one person even said "we are starting at level 1 right?" when I advertised it as a level 3 game.

That was... the entire point of my post.

I was supporting your statement.

We're not always in disagreement.

 

[Maxperson]

I find this principle interesting, since I was given to understand you take a dim view of players playing the species they would like to play, unless it's a Henry Ford-style "you can have any color you want as long as the color you want is black" sort of thing, but behavior you have nothing but full support for. I'm not really sure what to make of that.

There's a big difference between "You can play your character(already made) as you will." and "You can create any kind of character you want." Race and class can be curated without altering the former at all.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I find this principle interesting, since I was given to understand you take a dim view of players playing the species they would like to play, unless it's a Henry Ford-style "you can have any color you want as long as the color you want is black" sort of thing, but behavior you have nothing but full support for. I'm not really sure what to make of that.

Species choice is a worldbuilding decision. It's a different metric from character behavior, and one that many DMs (myself included) have a vested interest in. I see nothing inconsistent about wanting a firmer hand on one than on the other.

 

[Micah Sweet]

@EzekielRaiden, do you ever DM a game? Why don't you start a 5e game and tweak it to be more what you want? Build a rapport with that group and then get a player(s) to DM so you can be a player in a game style you like.

PS - I say 5e because I think you will have an easier time than advertising an 4e game. The real goal would be introduce 4e bits to your 5e game and then try to get them to move to that system!

@EzekielRaiden has been looking to play the game they want as long as I've known them here.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Fair enough.

One of my specific goals is to allow for the campaign to last an indefinite* length of time, and one of the primary things that causes campaigns to end earlier than they otherwise might is that the character levels get beyond what the system can reasonably handle (in 1e this was about 10th-12th level, in the WotC editions it's at or near "capstone" level). And so, slowing down advancement by any number of means** is a useful thing for me to do.

Current result in the 1e-adjacent system I run: 16+ years (and counting), over 1080 sessions (and counting), but as yet no PCs of 12th or higher level and only one at 11th. The party I'm running right now range from 7th to 9th.

* - well, indefinite other than I-as-DM will die sooner or (preferably!) later.
** - including slow advancement, cycling through different interconnected parties and characters, having level drain as a known (if uncommon) thing, having new or replacement characters come in at a lower level than the current party average, and some other tricks.

I can't say I understand the appeal of trying to run a single game for multiple years, and only stopping when you die. That seems to be just a recipe for disappointment to me. I'm glad it works for you, but I have seen far to many things where "the end goal is as close to forever as we can get" lose quality over time to ever want to attempt it myself.

Again fair, but progress can come via wealth and items and in-game benefits as well as via levels.

Also, in theory the amount of mechanical character progress from any one level to the next should - assuming good design - be about the same; meaning roughly the same degree of added benefit should accrue when bumping from 1st to 2nd as when bumping from 12th to 13th. Therefore it makes no sense in this regard to have 1st and 2nd levels go by so fast.

Items can, but wealth really can't I don't think. PCs start level 1 fabulously wealthy. 150 gp of stuff. If the player's just settled down and did nothing, they could live off of that to the same level as the local blacksmith of cartwright for about half a year. They casually carry around 5 to 10 gp as though it were nothing, which could feed a poor family for a month. Sure, you aren't living like a king... but it is really quite difficult in-game I think to feel the difference between "I eat at a mid-tier restaurant every night" to "I eat at a high-class restaurant one third of the time" or "I have a personal chef"

I also disagree with your theory. Firstly, because level 1 and 2 were not the designed start points. They were ADDED, the developers for 5e originally said that you should start at 3 and only added level 1 and 2 after the fact. Secondly, because you cannot get the same degree of benefit going from 9 hp to 15 hp [about a 66% increase] as you would going from 75 hp to 81 hp (about an 8% increase) even though both times you only increased the hp by 6.

But even then, the point isn't that you cannot or should not slow down leveling, just that people wanting to see faster leveling can ALSO be in it for the game, not solely for the "numbers go up" aspect of leveling. The two things are not connected.

The last is where your problem arises. My experience has been that campaigns either last less than a few months or for ten-plus years, and I've seen (and run) about-equal numbers of each.

I'm aware that your experience is different. But you have to understand that 10+ year games are vanishingly rare. I don't care that you've had a dozen of them, the vast vast vast number of people playing the game today have not, and have no expectation of that being possible. I would potentially kill to get a group that could stick together for five years of consistent gameplay. I am never going to get that. Planning my games with the expectation of that would be like planning Thanksgiving to have a hundred people and a Michelin rated chef and his team to cook the meal. That isn't going to happen. We are going to have about 10 people, and we are going to cook the meal ourselves in-between work hours, and that's that.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Maybe.

Depending on your level and-or resources, and on whether the DM was willing to allow you to think outside the box, another option could have been in play, namely to retreat in the moment and then do two things:

1. Come back later with more people and bigger guns and wipe those fey off the face of the planet, and
2. Using a Wish, True Resurrection, or similar, bring the child back to life (and if possible, erase its memories of that whole incident!); paid for if needed with the loot you took off the fey you just killed.

No, those are not options. Coming back later and reviving the dead child is not an acceptable answer. And look at what you presented FIRST "depending on your level and or resources". Think about that. You are starting with the premise that allowing a child to die is FIRST a matter of power. I believe we were level 4 at the time, so tell me, should level 4 characters based on their POWER and RESOURCES allow a child to be murdered?

This sounds like flat-out bad DMing.

And?

This, though? It's on the DM to let you play your characters as you will, even if said DM doesn't understand or agree with your (in or out of character) motivations for so doing.

I mean, I love it when characters take reckless risks for laughs and gold. More, please! But if you players want to save lives instead then so be it; it;s your choice, and if doing so costs your characters their lives (which taking those reckless risks could just as easily have done) then so be that too.

I sort of agree with this, in that I'd like to see the high-risk play (when successful) be rewarded more than the lower-risk play, regardless of why that play is being made, because otherwise there isn't much incentive to do anything other than the safe boring routine thing.

An example from two nights ago: our party was fighting a bunch of very tough foes in a dungeon's "boss battle". The boss was a massive great frog-like thing, big enough to swallow people whole on a whim. We put what seemed like boatloads of damage into it but it wasn't having much if any effect, so one of our Fighters decided to try something rash: he intentionally jumped into the frog's mouth and let himself be swallowed so he could chop it up from the inside. And, somewhat amazingly, he pulled it off: the Fighter survived the stomach acid just long enough to kill it, then got hauled out before dying.

High risk action.

I'll leave the opinions on whether that Fighter should get a higher reward to others as I have a conflict of interest: the Fighter who did this was Lanefan, my PC.

I'm fine with both of those characters, other than (sometimes) the "let his friend be killed" part. Sometimes when a character's going to die anyway there's no point in sticking around so two characters can die instead; but often it can be a choice of leaving one character to die or sticking around and having nobody die, and those are the ones that hack me off.

Out of all the games I have been in, where we went longer than a year, I believe three of them have had scenes where my character was killed while fighting solo, or nearly solo, against an enemy while the rest of the party sat and watched. Not because my character or me wanted to fight solo, but because the party determined that they didn't like the risk involved in helping me. One time they decided to play cards, while my character was fighting for their life in a prison cell that nullified all their powers. That session ended with the DM forcing them out of their cells to pursue my corpse, and I skipped the next session. Becuase I was dead, there was no way to revive me in the next session, and I would have shown up to just watch the party fight the nemesis from my background, in her first and only appearance in the game. And that didn't sound fun to me, to sit at a table, doing nothing, while the story beat I'd waited a year for played out without my character. This particular game I recounted with the fey almost had a scene like that I think, but I did play a game with that group where I was again abandoned by the party.

But it isn't about high-risk, high-reward. That's not the point I was making. If you are a paladin who swore an oath to protect the innocent and uphold justice, but you only do that when it is safe to do so... you are not a paladin. You are a coward. Believing in ideals is supposed to be hard. The archetype of the Paragon is one where you should be the one who stands up to injustice when it is dangerous, perhaps even foolhardy to do so. And too often, the response I see online to players doing that is to mock them, call them idiots, and say they deserved to die for doing something so obviously dangerous. To posit that it is better for just one of the characters to die instead of all of them. And sure, in the early days of DnD playing ratcatchers and graverobbers, maybe that was the point of the game. Maybe the idea was that heroes and those with ideals are idiots who deserve death.

But the modern game hasn't given me the impression that that is what it is about.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

the response I see online

That’s a problem with the internet, not the game rules.

 

[Chaosmancer]

That’s a problem with the internet, not the game rules.

Where do you think most people in the digital age learn the game rules and expectations?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Where do you think most people in the digital age learn the game rules and expectations?

Critical Role.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Out of all the games I have been in, where we went longer than a year, I believe three of them have had scenes where my character was killed while fighting solo, or nearly solo, against an enemy while the rest of the party sat and watched. Not because my character or me wanted to fight solo, but because the party determined that they didn't like the risk involved in helping me. One time they decided to play cards, while my character was fighting for their life in a prison cell that nullified all their powers.

Wait... are you trying to correlate length of campaign with this horrible ending to your character(s)?

That session ended with the DM forcing them out of their cells to pursue my corpse, and I skipped the next session. Becuase I was dead, there was no way to revive me in the next session, and I would have shown up to just watch the party fight the nemesis from my background, in her first and only appearance in the game. And that didn't sound fun to me, to sit at a table, doing nothing, while the story beat I'd waited a year for played out without my character. This particular game I recounted with the fey almost had a scene like that I think, but I did play a game with that group where I was again abandoned by the party.

It's up to the DM to introduce a way for you, as a player, to get involved. Having you sit out and watch b/c your character died is a terrible resolution for the DM to uphold. Surely you could be offered to roll up a new character or be given control of an NPC in the meantime while the storyline continues towards finding your PC's corpse.

Ugh... really sorry to hear about these experiences of yours. That's some serious gameplay disconnect that seems to be blatantly ignoring the ultimate goal of the game: for everyone to have fun while creating exciting, memorable stories. I know it's probably a more nuanced situation but, based on what you have written, I would not continue to play in such a group.