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

[Lanefan]

Never seen them. Didn't comment on them for that reason. Rowling's Wizarding World has rather soured for me as I age. The worldbuilding is painfully, painfully lax, full of incredibly stupid notions (like the idea that wizards don't have bathrooms because they use magic to whisk their turds away).

It's not a perfectly built world, but it does the job it's asked to do.

It's too bad you haven't seen the FB movies, as Jacob is a wonderful example of an ordinary Joe who gets caught up in some very not-ordinary things.

So...now you're okay with a context where death, not just of a pointless and depressing variety, but any death whatsoever, is off the table?

A context, yes; that being a specific situation where the characters have to have plot armour in order to preserve the integrity of the established setting. Were we instead playing Corrie and Kera (two charcters I just dreamed up who don't appear in any of the canon material) then there'd be no need for such.

Further, were we roleplaying Seamus and Lavender during the summer after their final year in school (i.e. beyond the time frame of the books and movies) that plot armour could and would come off.

Not for me. Never for me. Which is kind of the problem. Most people turn to games to, y'know, enjoy them.

Indeed, and some people enjoy playing (and-or playing with or DMing) shooting-star characters.

As I know I've already said to you, I do, and I cannot pivot like that. A truly permanent death, especially one that was pointless and stupid and depressing, will linger. I'm gonna grieve for that character, for quite a while. Days at minimum, typically weeks. And this isn't just for my characters! I'll grieve others' characters similarly, sometimes more than their actual players do! (The only real exception here was our poor Ranger in Hussar's Phandelver game, and that only because I barely got the chance to know the character before he kicked the bucket, as he joined after I did and then died only a few sessions later. A wight dropped him to 0 HP, which causes instant death.)

Gotta say, that's taking it all far more seriously than I'd ever recommend.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

OK, now I'm lost.

The way I see it, there was something more than good enough about the Gygax-based game in the early 80s (i.e. pre-Dragonlance) to get people to play it; and lots did even though it was, as written, brutal on its characters and tough to learn as a player (or DM). What that tells me, now and forever, is that a rough brutal lethal-in-fiction game can be popular; because we've already seen it happen.

Dragonlance and the Hickman revolution - plot armour, big epic stories, etc. - came along in the mid 80s and, lo and behold, that's right around when the game's popularity started to fade. Now obviously it's not a 100% cause-effect connection, there were other aspects involved as well, but I don't think it's all coincidence either.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's not a perfectly built world, but it does the job it's asked to do.

It's too bad you haven't seen the FB movies, as Jacob is a wonderful example of an ordinary Joe who gets caught up in some very not-ordinary things.

A context, yes; that being a specific situation where the characters have to have plot armour in order to preserve the integrity of the established setting. Were we instead playing Corrie and Kera (two charcters I just dreamed up who don't appear in any of the canon material) then there'd be no need for such.

Further, were we roleplaying Seamus and Lavender during the summer after their final year in school (i.e. beyond the time frame of the books and movies) that plot armour could and would come off.

Indeed, and some people enjoy playing (and-or playing with or DMing) shooting-star characters.

Gotta say, that's taking it all far more seriously than I'd ever recommend.

The best plot armor is always "prequel".

 

[Lanefan]

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.

All this does is point out some massive flaws in 5e (and 4e, as well) design. The gap between commoner and 1st-level character is way too big, and the subsequent power curve as the levels advance is way too steep.

I mean, if WotC really want people to play a supers game why don't they just own up to that, pull off the veil, and design one?

 

[Lanefan]

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.

See, that's the difference - with a cake, the whole point is the finished product; the tedious work that goes into making it is just a means to that end. With a character, in theory there's no equivalent to a "finished product" - the character is always evolving and ideally the game has no pre-set end point - and thus the whole point is the process, the day-to-day in-the-moment play that eventually adds up to something more, be it for the character or the party as a whole.

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.

That's entirely your own choice, and IMO if that character enters play one hour and perma-dies the next you've no-one else to blame for the loss of those hours spent back-story writing other than yourself. Risk-reward - you've taken the risk of doing all that work in hopes of getting the reward of seeing it inform your long-term play of the character.

Corollary risk, if you didn't consult with your DM first, is that some or all of what you've written might get vetoed.

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.

Go ahead and think about this stuff, sure, but don't commit it to paper until the character's shown it's going to last a while.

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.

Maybe I'm jaded after having lost so many of 'em, but I do try (and usually but not always succeed) to keep player and character compartmentalized and separate. The player side of things says "Meh, it's just a game, and this time I lost - again" while the character side holds the thoughts and feelings of whatever character(s) I'm playing at the time.

And even if I'm not confident on a character's survivability I do what I can to give it a distinctive personality and characterization right away in its first session in order to make it entertaining and-or memorable; that way if it does turn out to be a shooting star at least it did its bit for the fun of the group while it lasted.

 

[Micah Sweet]

All this does is point out some massive flaws in 5e (and 4e, as well) design. The gap between commoner and 1st-level character is way too big, and the subsequent power curve as the levels advance is way too steep.

I mean, if WotC really want people to play a supers game why don't they just own up to that, pull off the veil, and design one?

While I do largely agree with your thoughts here, I also want to note that modern D&D editions are simply different games, with different priorities and assumptions but similar trappings and the same name. I would say they made what they wanted to make, or at least what the people holding the purse strings wanted them to make. So not really a mistake.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm assuming you mean normative force as "the quality which turns a standard into a norm" as is used in law.

If that's the case, I think any sufficiently popular convention is a rule if it changes the way the game is played. Rule here means,

No. Because whether or not it is popular has nothing to do with whether it is actually saying, "you must do X" or "you cannot do X".

"one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere."

Governing conduct.

Something that can be completely ignored is not governing conduct.

Going from there, assuming the convention changes the way the game is played, the difference between that and a rule ceases to be meaningful after a certain popularity level. This would be because that convention's popularity is the normative force that makes it a "norm." And since it changes the "regulations or principles governing conduct" within the game, it becomes a rule by a plain reading of the definition and meets the criteria you laid out above.

No, it doesn't, and no, the popularity level is not what makes it have normative force. "A norm" is something typical or standard. "Normative force" actually means--as you explicitly quoted above--governing behavior. As in, it induces or forbids certain behavior.

You are substituting a different word, one I didn't use, and then presuming that I must be agreeing with you because your word works the way you wanted, but isn't a word I ever used. That is not kosher.

With the semantics out of the way, I will ask once more. Whats the difference between a sufficiently popular convention or expectation, that alters game play, and a rule? Because under these definitions the convention becomes the rule at a level of popularity that makes it a "norm" or "standard."

Exactly what I already said: normative force. Both words were important, and you can't substitute "norm" in for "normative" for the same reason that you can't substitute "form" in for "formative" even though both come from the same root.

I will allow you to have the last word on this.

I'm sorry, but this comes across as incredibly condescending, particularly when you have just put words in my mouth ("norm" instead of "normative") and then declared victory with your alternate word that doesn't mean any of the things I said.

Edit: Just so it's clear. The outcome here is that the classification of the DMG's phrase on fudging is not relevant. It's either a norm through popularity and becomes a rule or it's not and its a convention or expectation.

I reject this entire "clarification."

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Indeed, and some people enjoy playing (and-or playing with or DMing) shooting-star characters.

Then I think there should be useful, productive, well-made, completely opt-in rules to support their preference.

Just as things that I prefer--such as having actual mechanics for non-combat content, or protection against R/P/I deaths, or characters being able to craft their own preferred equipment--should have useful, productive, well-made, completely opt-in rules.

In the cases where a default really does have to be set, one useful (but not totally universal) rule of thumb is to look for one-way transitions, and set the default on the side that is easy to move away from, but hard to move toward. Well-constructed nontrivial asymmetric balance, for example, is a very difficult thing to generate in general, but extremely easy to deviate away from.

Conversely, I'm sure there are some areas where things I would prefer should not be the default. I'm a bit sleep-deprived so no real zingers are coming to mind, but for some less-dramatic ones, "quest" rules for helping players set worthwhile and achievable goals and then earn XP for completing them, "reskinning++" rules that provide a reliable structure for (just as an example) how to make minor but meaningful gameplay changes (such as swapping elements on spells or features so that a "cryomancer" character is reasonable without being abusive), would make sense as being inherently opt-in, rather than an opt-out baseline. Likewise, given the difficulty of creating a reasonably-comprehensive baseline of DCs that aren't just blanket fixed values, even though such an "encyclopedic" approach (as I term it) is...very much not to my taste, that should probably be a default starting point, with both highly-simplified (for "OSR" type gamers) and improvisation-focused (for folks like me) alternatives as opt-in mechanics layered on top or taking the place of those rules.

No single universal pattern or rubric can exist for saying what things definitely should be a shared default and what things should be opt-in alternatives, but I've never seen a single shred of evidence that we couldn't do much, much, much better than 5e has with integrating diverse perspectives.

Gotta say, that's taking it all far more seriously than I'd ever recommend.

Do you think I have a choice in the matter? You might as well tell me not to feel humble feelings when I see a sublime waterfall (happened earlier this week) or righteous indignation when I hear about an acquaintance being mocked and belittled by a friend for being transgender (happened a few hours ago, someone I know on NationStates recently came out as trans to their friends, and one of them--a gay man to boot!--openly denied that transgender identity even exists.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

See, that's the difference - with a cake, the whole point is the finished product; the tedious work that goes into making it is just a means to that end. With a character, in theory there's no equivalent to a "finished product" - the character is always evolving and ideally the game has no pre-set end point - and thus the whole point is the process, the day-to-day in-the-moment play that eventually adds up to something more, be it for the character or the party as a whole.

That's entirely your own choice, and IMO if that character enters play one hour and perma-dies the next you've no-one else to blame for the loss of those hours spent back-story writing other than yourself. Risk-reward - you've taken the risk of doing all that work in hopes of getting the reward of seeing it inform your long-term play of the character.

Corollary risk, if you didn't consult with your DM first, is that some or all of what you've written might get vetoed.

Go ahead and think about this stuff, sure, but don't commit it to paper until the character's shown it's going to last a while.

Maybe I'm jaded after having lost so many of 'em, but I do try (and usually but not always succeed) to keep player and character compartmentalized and separate. The player side of things says "Meh, it's just a game, and this time I lost - again" while the character side holds the thoughts and feelings of whatever character(s) I'm playing at the time.

And even if I'm not confident on a character's survivability I do what I can to give it a distinctive personality and characterization right away in its first session in order to make it entertaining and-or memorable; that way if it does turn out to be a shooting star at least it did its bit for the fun of the group while it lasted.

NGL, this is straight-up some One True Wayism, Lanefan. "Just stop having the emotions that impede my style of play, and then you can be exactly like me, and everyone can play the correct way!"

 

[Crimson Longinus]

But if they are rules, then (whether or not everyone was on board for them), they must be applied consistently. That doesn't mean they trigger every second. But when they do, they should be used.

And no, things do change. Expectations are often not met. Conventions can be set aside at any time for nearly any reason. Rules, in order to be "rules", must have SOMETHING to them that actually makes them normative. If they are not, in fact, actually normative--if they are simply guidance or a gesture at something or whatever--then they are not rules.

That's what "rules" means. Without actual force, they are mere suggestions.


If it has no published rulebook and 100% of the things as part of the game are purely conventions, it has no rules.

"Poker", to give you an example, has almost no rules because without greater specificity you know almost nothing about it. You don't know whether it's five cards or seven cards or more or fewer. You don't know whether there are community cards or not. You don't know the scoring, etc., etc. You don't even know if the dealer is a player or not. Without greater specificity, just about the only "rules" are that that players get dealt some number of cards, and that rarer combinations of cards have greater value, but you don't even know the specific combinations.


Absolutely the hell not, considering we just had a recent thread about this stuff and the majority opinion was "roll in the open."


It matters, because a rule has normative force. A convention does not. "Maps are oriented with North pointing up" is a convention, vastly more popular than any alternative. Yet nothing even remotely stops a person from publishing a map with any direction, even an ordinal direction, pointing up. Some maps even can't be oriented that way, e.g. polar maps or ones that attempt to preserve area without preserving direction (the "orange peel" type maps).

Popularity is irrelevant to whether it has normative force. Plenty of laws are quite unpopular. That doesn't mean it's suddenly not a law anymore.

Just like laws, rules are rules because they have normative force. If someone actually breaks a rule, their behavior has to be corrected. If a statement can be ignored or not at leisure, it has no normative force. It isn't a rule. It's a guideline, suggestion, recommendation, or piece of advice--not a rule. This applies as much to house rules as it does to anything else; a house rule is not a house suggestion, it is in fact actually a rule that people are expected to follow.

Even DMs have rules--even in 5e, as much as it tries to position the DM as an autocrat who does whatever she wants, whenever she wants, for as long as she wants, purely because she wants to do so, for any reason or no reason at all.


No. It's when it has actual normative force. While "expectation" (dominant or otherwise) is technically irrelevant, it is important that the rules actually be communicated to the player, which might qualify for however you define "the expectation." Something that has normative force, but which is concealed from the people upon whom that normative force applies, is not just a rule--it is coercion, or worse.

Simply put: Does it have normative force, or not? If it is in fact normative, then it is a rule. If it is not normative, if it is merely suggestive, allusive, advising, recommending, etc., then it is not a rule.


Whether you choose to call it a rule does not actually affect whether it is a rule. People call things by incorrect names all the time.

Fudging is when a person (generally, the DM) lies about some result or figure, generally a die roll, claiming that that result was something other than what it actually was. I say "generally, the DM" because when players do this, it is called what it is: cheating.

Fudging cannot be a rule because, by definition, it is lying about the results. Hence, it is (by definition) breaking the rules. I'm aware that the text of 5e has a non-normative suggestion that DMs should lie about results if they think their false result is superior to the true one. I strenuously disagree with this suggestion, and find it both patronizing and insulting to the players subjected to its "advice."


When it has normative force. It is a very simple standard. As soon as something actually has normative force, it is a rule. It doesn't matter whether this normative force was acquired because a designer wrote it down, or because an old game fell out of fashion and a new one replaced it. Chess, as we play it today, is rather a different game from its High Medieval counterpart; what we call "chess" today was originally, yes, a convention called "Mad Queens" chess. It was, in fact, a scandalous SJW game in its heyday, because women could play chess just as well as men could, and could beat them, and (worst of all!) a woman was the most powerful piece on the board, while a man--the king, for God's sake!!!--was the second-weakest piece on the board.


It really isn't. A rule has normative force. Non-rules do not have normative force.

D&D has rules. People call them rules and understand them to be rules. And part of the rules is that GM can override the rules. Doesn't change that the rules are rules. The GM can also fudge. And that is not breaking the rules.

Oh, and you're definitely wrong about conventions and laws too. A lot of UK for example is run by conventions, not laws. Doesn't really matter. King Charles still cannot actually unilaterally sack the prime minister and appoint a a new one, even though it is just a convention that the king doesn't do that sort of a thing.