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

[Micah Sweet]

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.



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.



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.

@Lanefan doesn't play 5e. Always worth noting in these discussions, as many of your objections are modern 5e-specific.

 

[Lanefan]

The new default is one that actually meshes with one of the other design goals explicitly assigned to early levels: introducing new players. New players need to be able to make mistakes without fear of failure.

New players also need to learn that failure means failure and is thus best avoided where possible. If the tone is set early on that the game is hard on its characters, then it doesn't come as so much of a shock later when the game (in theory) does get harder...except given the coming-online of guaranteed-to-work revival spells and other curative abilities it in fact gets easier as you go along, meaning your idea here just makes it easy all the way through.

Also, setting an early tone that you're ready willing and able to follow through on the threats you-as-DM put in front of the characters means later threats will be taken more seriously even if you're less inclined to follow them through.

Dead characters are always going to feel like failure to new players. Trying to make 1st level simultaneously serve as the gentle, measured introduction for brand-new players AND the gritty hard-as-nails meat-grinder that OSR fans adore is a losing proposition specifically because it will turn away vast numbers of new players.

Had there not been a fairly massive influx of new players between 1979 and 1983 when all that existed was a gritty meat-grinder type of game, I'd concede this. But the 1e glory days did happen, which rather torpedoes your point.

And if today's players are in general less willing to accept and-or push through some early failure, IMO that's their problem.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

Always worth noting in these discussions, as many of your objections are modern 5e-specific.

I don't know that the objection to "forever" campaigns is system specific. You could argue that 5e's player centered design and the power of the PCs natively in the system actually lends itself to more naturally occurring campaigns of great length.

I think this is actually more of a change in modern society, and can be traced back to social media. I simply think your average player has a shorter attention span and as such "burns out" or loses interests long before reaching those lengths. After all, many are exposed to perpetual dopamine highs through infinite 30 second entertainment on their phone. This isn't to comment on Chaosmancer's thought, it's just a separate theory of mine on the topic.

I think similar societal changes have influenced the way people handle player death and set backs as opposed to decades past, like the 80s and 90s. But that's probably a different discussion.

 

[Lanefan]

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 and class options are pretty much hard-limited to what 1e had (we've added in a couple of homebrew classes over the years), and if it ain't there, it ain't there. Which means no, you won't get a Dragonborn no matter how hard you lobby for one.

Once rolled up and in play, however, a character's personality, motivations, actions, behavior, alignment, etc. is (with a very few decency-based exceptions) entirely up to the player. Do what the character would do.

Unfortunately, the problem here is that in order for it to be high-risk play, it must come with...well, high risk. That means characters will usually die. Players in general learn a lesson from that: "Taking risks causes character death. I don't want my character to die. Therefore, I shouldn't take high risks...and should probably try to avoid the small ones too."

Which is why those high risks should come with the potential of high reward.

I can say with absolute certainty that that's how my own players feel about their characters. I've had to painfully slowly coax them out of their shell, showing them that taking risks can actually be fun and rewarding rather than agonizing and marked with a big red F- on their Dungeon World Report Card. Had I put them in a meatgrinder campaign, they would have simply checked out, and the game would have folded, never to be continued. This is a simple, objective fact about my players.

Not to be cruel, but it sounds from this and other posts like you're constantly having to lead that horse to water in hopes it'll one day finally take a drink.

Were it me I'd probably have found a different horse by now and let that first one go on its way.

My problem is that the selfishness-first manifesto promotes either that second path, or an even less desirable third: if we abandon him to die, we all get more treasure later. The ultra-mercenary playstyle is where "honor among thieves" dies.

That assumes "honor among thieves" was ever alive to being with.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Move to Victoria and then stay here. You'll get it.

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.

When I started my current campaign in 2008 I had vague plans for about 5 years worth of material - as in, here's a sketched-out series of adventures I can run; and at average X-sessions per adventure and Y-sessions per year that's about 5 years worth - knowing (and-or hoping!) that either I or the players would, during that time, come up with further ideas and material.

The adventure I'm running right now, 16+ years later, was in that original sketched-out series. They're only just now getting to it, as the "capstone" adventure to one of several story-lines that have run through the entire campaign. And even though it's the capstone, it's not necessarily an end: there might still be subsequent adventures and story arise out of it.

 

[Lanefan]

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?

If your options boil down to:

A - all of you die trying to save the child, meaning the child then dies too; or
B - the child dies but you do not, and you later negate the child's death via reviving it while also avenging its killers

...which seems the better choice?

At 4th level you - depending on the campaign - could easily have the resources required to pay an NPC to cast a high-end revival spell that doesn't require the presence of the corpse.

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.

I just gotta ask: do you tend to play uptight Paladinic types? If yes, then IMO and IME being hung out to dry sooner or later is pretty much par for the course, as the rest of the party simply may not want a character like that around.

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.

The bolded is how I've always seen it. Sometimes 1 death really is better than 4 or 5 or 6 deaths, and you just gotta cut your losses and bail out.

This is in contrast to your experiences noted here, where it seems in both cases you were intentionally hung out to dry by your party. It sucks at the time, but it's also indicative of a party setting its own in-character tone of the type of people it'll willingly accept in its ranks and - believe it or not - can even be a sign that the party is starting to unify into a more cohesive whole rather than a bunch of squabbling cats.

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

The modern game has many problems. This is but one.

 

[Oofta]

Well, it's unfortunate that you think they aren't meaningful. I think they are, and I have hope that it will, eventually, lead to change.

And if wishes were horses, beggars would fly. The opinion of any one individual, especially one unlikely to ever purchase anything from WotC, is never ever going to change anything. This forum likely barely registers on WotC radar, do you really think the opinions of one poster could ever change anything?

 

[Lanefan]

And if wishes were horses, beggars would fly. The opinion of any one individual, especially one unlikely to ever purchase anything from WotC, is never ever going to change anything. This forum likely barely registers on WotC radar, do you really think the opinions of one poster could ever change anything?

One poster? Probably not.

Many posters? Who knows. One could argue - I think with solid foundation - that WotC-era D&D design has very much been influenced by in-hobby public opinion including surveys, convention panels, unsolicited feedback, and yes - forum posts here and elsewhere.

And it's worth remembering that many always begins with one.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You could argue that 5e's player centered design and the power of the PCs natively in the system actually lends itself to more naturally occurring campaigns of great length

This is certainly my experience. We only played D&D modules in 1st edition, creating characters of the level required. I think this was because levelling was so slow and character abilities were so limited. It was a grind, and there were lots of more interesting RPGs to play. 5e is the first version of D&D where I have had sustained long campaigns, with several lasting over 2 years.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Species and class options are pretty much hard-limited to what 1e had (we've added in a couple of homebrew classes over the years), and if it ain't there, it ain't there. Which means no, you won't get a Dragonborn no matter how hard you lobby for one.

Once rolled up and in play, however, a character's personality, motivations, actions, behavior, alignment, etc. is (with a very few decency-based exceptions) entirely up to the player. Do what the character would do.

I just don't really see why these two things are so separate. This applies to @Micah Sweet as well. I don't understand why agency exclusively within behavior is absolutely sacrosanct, the player MUST always be able to play EXACTLY the kind of behavior they want, no matter how disruptive that might be, but their agency within selection is totally unimportant and not only can but should be thrust aside any and every time it might be disruptive to some other goal.

That's where I see a disconnect. One side makes an aspect of player agency sacrosanct no matter how disruptive it might be, the other condemns an aspect of player agency specifically because it might, possibly, be disruptive. Why are behavioral disruptions sacrosanct, but character-selection disruptions anathema?

Which is why those high risks should come with the potential of high reward.

High reward is worthless when you die after your second or third or fourth high risk.

That's the problem. A given character isn't taking one high risk. They're taking high risk after high risk after high risk after...etc. The inevitable end of that is death by high risk. Playing it safe doesn't earn you the big bucks. But it does mean you last a hell of a lot longer.

A 99% chance of making $1000 and a 1% chance of gruesome death, vs a 50% chance of making $1 billion dollars and a 50% chance of gruesdome death? After only five such consecutive risks, you have the same chance of dying in the first path as you do surviving in the second. Sure, you've only made $5000 as opposed to the theoretical $5,000,000,000 you could've made--literally a million times more!--but a billion dollars is worthless when you're dead.

Not to be cruel, but it sounds from this and other posts like you're constantly having to lead that horse to water in hopes it'll one day finally take a drink.

Were it me I'd probably have found a different horse by now and let that first one go on its way.

Tell me. If your well-loved friends of many years exhibit just one single behavior that isn't entirely the way you'd like, would you "let [them] go on [their] way" and instead seek out total strangers to bring in for stuff?

Because that's literally what you're telling me to do here. These players aren't randos who responded to an ad. They're my good friends. I invited them into the game specifically because I like and appreciate their thoughts and tastes. That they are skittish and risk-averse is simply part of working with them to produce a good game. It is not, in any way, some kind of failing or problem with them that would induce me to dump them.

That assumes "honor among thieves" was ever alive to being with.

Then that just reinforces the problem. People who backstab one another without a second thought are exactly the kind of people who do the thing that you find so annoying, leaving someone to die when sticking around another handful of rounds would mean no one dies.