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

[Micah Sweet]

So no DM can override the dice, ever?

They can, but personally I'd rather they didn't. Nobody's perfect though, least of all me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yes, and so did Mark Antony.



They were nobility and famous heroes capable of feats normal people were not capable of? Only Odysseus could string his bow, that was a huge plot point in his own story.

There's a trick to it...

 

[Chaosmancer]

The popularity of the game in the early 1980s would suggest a lot more than just one table made this "degenerate" method work just fine.

So... which was it? Was this idea of constantly punishing players for doing what you wanted them to do too well an artifact of Gygax's table that wasn't the norm for play? Or was it is the standard of the time and therefore the popularity of the game speaks to how everyone made it work?

Because now you've said both things, and they literally cannot both be true.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Not impossible, perhaps, but the odds of surviving such an event are and remain vanishingly small.

Which means don't try this at home, kids.

Odds of surviving a blast of hellfire is probably also pretty small. Bet 99% of people wouldn't survive it.

Which is why it makes a pretty compelling story about the piety and faith of the Cleric named Temperance that her goddess's will allowed her spirit to remain even as her flesh burnt away. Be the kind of thing they make myths about, the type of figure who would rise to sainthood, maybe face some of the greatest evils plaguing the world, fighting in this new form with new limitations and challenges.

Seems like, in a world of myth like DnD where literal mortal men have become literal gods who are worshipped (Vecna, Bane, Myrkul, Bhaal, Azuth, Cyric, Midnight, Kelemvor, Torm, Red Knight, Diancastra, Murlynd) that such a mythic occurrence is absolutely possible and even expected to happen more than once.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Except in my original point to which you were responding, the abilities were in theory the same: I was talking about the potential death rate of an all-NPC adventuring group doing mission-X and suggesting the potential death rate of a PC group doing the same mission should be similar.

In other words, yes I am trying to compare apples to apples.

And if they're lucky then they just might end up with Rambo; but if they're not lucky they'll end up as someone who died trying to become Rambo. And that's the whole point: it's not the being Rambo that counts, it's the attempt to become Rambo.

Once I've made it to Rambo status my journey's pretty much over. Time to start a new character.

I've never watched a Rambo movie but if he's like any other "action hero" he probably should have died a dozen times or more; and I personally find it jarring when they survive when they really shouldn't.

You can find it jarring all you want. But you pretty much never see an "action hero" trying to become an action hero during multiple movies or books. And while I know you don't play 5e, you have to know that the game does not expect level 20 characters to be "a bad-ass soldier". They expect them to be god-killers. They are inter-dimensional champions. So even if you want to start as a farm boy with a pig iron sword and a pot for a helmet (which if you take 5e character creation seriously, you literally cannot start that low down the totem pole) you still are leaving behind the Rambo level by early to mid-game.

And this is why your apples to apples comparison falls apart. Even a level 1 character is incredibly impressive compared to the common farm hand. This is why a level 1 fighter has a good chance on taking on two of the city guardsmen in a fight. It won't be an easy fight, but he can do it. And outside of a fight, he is a polygot with professional level training in at least 4 skills AND a trade. The type of people you would legitimately compare them to are not green-horns who are as likely to stab their foot as they are a stationary target. These are hardened warriors who have seen combat, mastered multiple weapon styles, and are deadly with anything they can grab.

 

[Chaosmancer]

So I very strongly agree with you about one thing here. Destined for interestingness. Yes, absolutely. This is basically one of my guiding mantras when running a game: "Whatever you choose to do, something interesting will happen." I just do not equate being interesting with being great, powerful or even intrinsically exceptional. (Though facing exceptional circumstances, certainly.)

But being interesting has to include interesting things happening. Dying in a bandit ambush isn't interesting, it happens all the time to random people. Dying in a goblin raid isn't interesting, happens all the time. Dying to a spike trap in a wall isn't interesting, it happens to grave robbers all the time.

But to me this doesn't require to have an impenetrable plot armour. Boromir died, Tasha Yar died, Robb Stark died. You can be an interesting character that does interesting things without such plot armour.

Frodo didn't die. Samwise Gamgee didn't die. Merry and Pippin didn't die. Gimli didn't die. Gandalf died and came back. Legolas didn't die. Aragorn didn't die.

And HOW did Boromir die? Did he die falling off a cliff on the way to Moria? Did he die to eating poison berries in the wilderness?

No. He died protecting Frodo from 20 to 1 odds, after attempting to steal the Ring, redeeming himself as he fought deadly foes who were not beneath him (orcs were not trivial fodder in the books) and ONLY dying because the orcs did not meet him in honorable melee combat. Boromir's death is EPIC, not in terms of power-scaling, but in terms of meaning. He did not die in a ditch like a dog. He died as a princely hero facing impossible odds and succeeding at his goal of protecting the one he swore to protect.

80-90% chance of dying would be too high for my liking too. I'm pretty sure I would not like Lanefan's games that much. But I still do not want infallible plot armour either, I don't want a promise that my character will be great and powerful, I don't need my character to be like Conan from the get go. And this is especially true for D&D, where the characters can level from relative nobodies to mythic heroes. To me that is cooler if it is not destined. That I had a genuine chance to fail makes succeeding feel more meaningful and the perils faced more real.

Infallible plot armor implies something that isn't being proposed. We aren't saying characters should escape all situations without a scratch on them. There are different things meant by plot armor. You could technically say that Frodo had plot armor, that's why Boromir saved him. Because the plot demanded that Frodo make it to Mount Doom. But "not dying" is just one level of this sort of thing. There are many different things that could happen.

And we've pointed this out before, but when you say that a lack of death means you don't feel like you had a chance of failure, then all you are really saying is that no other cost or challenge or trial matters. You are saying there is one metric of challenge, and no others. It must be death, because no other loss of any sort can matter... while also knowing that Death at certain point becomes easily reversible in DnD. Meaning it loses all meaning and purpose ANYWAYS because the threat of death is removed at higher levels.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Also, I rarely if ever get emotionally invested in my characters to that extent; and even if-when I do I can still pivot easily into remembering the character fondly rather than playing it should its career end prematurely.

I would point out that the majority of people cannot do that with something they have invested dozens to hundreds of hours into. Like, if you spent two hours baking a cake, and someone walked by and slapped it off the table, the majority of people aren't going to be like "well, I wasn't really invested in that cake, and there are always other cakes to make. I'll remember it fondly for what it was." The majority of people are going to be upset.

DMs often cite how much time and effort they put into their settings as reasons why they don't want players to "mess it up". They get invested in the things they spent hours making. I myself have a character who has not been introduced into a new game yet. I've written... 7 to 8 pages representing their life. Their teenage years, their struggles with their parents, their relationship with their home town. Add that to the amount of work I spent making the character, I've likely invested a good six hours into this character with zero screen time.

And what is about to happen is you are going to tell me I should not do that. I should not invest in that character. I should not think about them as a real person with a real history. I should not care about them. I should not consider their philosophical outlook and things they may do in the future. I should not have spent that much time making them.... because you want to make it easy to destroy characters, and my investment represents a problem. Because if I just made a character I didn't get emotionally invested in, then I could play the game the way you play it. I could "properly" interact with a group. But while I'm a weirdo for the amount of writing I do? I'm not that strange in the amount of time spent thinking about my character. Most people get invested emotionally in their characters. Because they've spent hours and hours and hours thinking about them and building them out. In being them.

 

[Chaosmancer]

They can, but personally I'd rather they didn't. Nobody's perfect though, least of all me.

Right. They can.

So when the NPC dies, it is because the DM consented by NOT overriding the dice, which they can do. They can choose to save the NPC, and they do not because they have consented to that NPC's death. What the dice say doesn't matter if they can override it, and this isn't a matter of whether or not you like that fact.

So, making it so PCs only die if their player consents... is 100% in keeping with how NPCs work. The only difference between the two states, is that most DMs are running hundreds of NPCs, so they don't care if most of them die. While a player has one character they are running.

 

[Chaosmancer]

There's a trick to it...

And forty men who knew him, knew his legends, and had been at his house for ten years, and were told they needed to string it couldn't... also, in most versions I've read the trick is.... being strong enough to do it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I would point out that the majority of people cannot do that with something they have invested dozens to hundreds of hours into. Like, if you spent two hours baking a cake, and someone walked by and slapped it off the table, the majority of people aren't going to be like "well, I wasn't really invested in that cake, and there are always other cakes to make. I'll remember it fondly for what it was." The majority of people are going to be upset.

DMs often cite how much time and effort they put into their settings as reasons why they don't want players to "mess it up". They get invested in the things they spent hours making. I myself have a character who has not been introduced into a new game yet. I've written... 7 to 8 pages representing their life. Their teenage years, their struggles with their parents, their relationship with their home town. Add that to the amount of work I spent making the character, I've likely invested a good six hours into this character with zero screen time.

And what is about to happen is you are going to tell me I should not do that. I should not invest in that character. I should not think about them as a real person with a real history. I should not care about them. I should not consider their philosophical outlook and things they may do in the future. I should not have spent that much time making them.... because you want to make it easy to destroy characters, and my investment represents a problem. Because if I just made a character I didn't get emotionally invested in, then I could play the game the way you play it. I could "properly" interact with a group. But while I'm a weirdo for the amount of writing I do? I'm not that strange in the amount of time spent thinking about my character. Most people get invested emotionally in their characters. Because they've spent hours and hours and hours thinking about them and building them out. In being them.

Some people do that. My wife does that. Very few other players I've ever gamed with are anywhere near as invested in their PC as the two of you seem to be. TV writers don't always write as much about a series regular as you did.