Search results

Well, the first word of my post was "If," and I did at least imply that the medium should affect one's expectations. I'll say that explicitly: The medium (novel, movie, TRPG, whatever) should matter tor your expectations of it.

If the players see their characters as protagonists in a story, why wouldn't they expect their characters to have at least as much protection fro actual death (plot armor) as protagonists in a novel or movie or TV show? If you want to argue the players shouldn't see their characters thus, I'm...

I think this might be the first time I've seen anyone non-sarcastically say that Drizzt and Elminster were positive features of the Realms. :LOL: In the 5e games I DM, I've had good success with entities that think of adventurers as something like investments, because there are all sort of...

Y'know, there times I seriously don't know why y'all bother with us.

I expect you'd see people in this thread complaining obliquely about something that might eventually start to look like that sort of brigading. I stay out of the threads that's most likely to happen in, here, for game-preference reasons, but I haven't seen any reason to think it's happening.

In the 5e campaigns I've DMed, how the PCs have been and are treated is mostly a direct result of their behavior--in most cases, there's a certain amount of rushing in where those with wiser heads would fear to tread--and in the most recent one they were established locals with pasts and...

Yeah, I probably wasn't super-clear. While he left when his character died, it was more a matter of that was his opportunity than anything else.

I don't think I've done much 5e play wherein the PCs were nobodies, it's not a trope I find useful or enjoyable as DM or as player. This might be a difference in our core preferences. And while I know vaguely what wuxia is, I gotta admit I'm less clued-in about xianxia or (in this context)...

My understanding is that "fisking" is taking a post apart more granularly than is useful, destroying context to make rebuttal easier. I don't think I've been doing that (apologies if I have) and I know you haven't (thank you). I guess in my campaigns, things have tended to escalate such that...

Sometimes the random things that come up lead the PCs to interesting things, or otherwise result in interesting play/choices, so they happen in my games, but I'm not looking for some number of combats in any random day, and I'm not rolling every hour or anything, either: I roll for when the next...

I at least can mostly agree with this--I think random encounters can be worthwhile, but I don't set those at a difficulty likely to kill the PCs, and I don't use them to wear the PCs down. I have, a couple of times, set up gantlets for the PCs to run, which were set to wear them down--but they...

They drop. If someone heals them, they get back up again. If they die from failing death saves, the table needs to work out what happens next: When it happened in a Tier Four campaign (not the one that there now) someone else in the party attuned to the rod of resurrection the dead ranger/cleric...

I've found that I can establish that the low-level PCs are fragile quickly, and the players I'm DMing for tend to hold tightly to that for a long time. The fact I can manage effective challenges through Tier Four might help, here. As for "worldbuilding through PCs," I've been able to do that...

The point of my "argument predicated on popularity" was merely that you seemed to be complaining that people don't play the way you want them to. :LOL: And the "when" in your last sentence seems to imply a playstyle I'd likely find deeply unsatisfying in play. Why would (or should) I try to run...

I think there'd still be some amount of "sit tight" unless the players were all running multiple PCs in the same adventure. Just more "sit tight until we get your other character here" instead of "sit tight until we get your character back alive." Aside, of course, from that sort of troupe play...

Y'know, I'm a firm believer both in starting from first level and in getting them to third quickly (my ideal is three sessions, one at first and two at second). That was very much my understanding of the intent, reading the rules and looking at XP tables (though I've never used XP for...

So you're saying that death other than "make a new character" (more like "sit tight until we bring your character back') is a suitable consequence, and it's perfectly OK that bringing back dead PCs is so easy in D&D 5e? I'm not particularly inclined to disagree. I think it's easy to read "I want...

Or the players just need to go running off without informing their allies where they are (or somewhere their allies cannot go). Also, given how much authority the GM has in conventional TRPGs, "the GM needs to do it" doesn't really seem to me like a meaningful restriction. :LOL:

The fact the soul must be "free to return" is in the mechanics, but really I think meaning is far more likely to be found in the narrative than in the rules. I know that will kinda run counter to your preferences, but I don't mean necessarily that it needs to be some sort of climactic storybeat...

If something destroys--or even captures--the soul, it is not free to return (a requirement even for true resurrection, I believe). In my settings, that's beyond what even wish can mend, and in the case of "capture" it requires some effort in the narrative; when I had PCs involved with rescuing a...