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  1. prabe

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

    @EzekielRaiden has explained his meaning/s enough times that I have the explanation memorized: "Permanent" means it won't go away on its own and "irrevocable" means the players can't change it once it happens; I think it's a different way of getting to my point that it's "make a new character"...
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    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    The near-TPKs I've run recently have all been in situations where that would likely have been permanent, and we would have had to figure out what happened next. And one of them would have wiped a 19th-level party. If you think it's "pretty much impossible" to kill--even permanently--PCs in 5e...
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    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    If resurrection is available, this isn't wildly unreasonable. If "death" means "make a new character," the metaphor isn't so much losing a game, or even having a bad season, as it is the team going bankrupt and ceasing to exist. I'm pretty sure that at least @EzekielRaiden is very specifically...
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    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    I think any comment/s I make about how D&D could be run are probably better understood as applying to all the people at the table, though in any game where the GM is responsible for establishing the situations, and for establishing how elements of those situations react to the PCs, it seems as...
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    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    That's a helluva presumption on your part. He happened to own the game store we were playing in, and his life was full enough that he needed to do some pruning. Apparently his character's dying was an opportunity for him to prune playing in that campaign, and there were no hard feelings.
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    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    I think the people who don't think death needs to always be on the table in a game like D&D might say that neither death nor a career-ending injury is likely to be the primary consequence in a TRPG about ... some competitive league sport with a ball involved. The focus in such a TRPG seems...
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    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    There was someone in the Indy Racing League who just died a few years ago, I think, and there was also someone this year who was trying to climb Devil's Tower in Wyoming and instead fell to his death. The latter admittedly wasn't (probably) a competitive sport thing; my point is that people die...
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    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    In principle, I allow players to take a lingering injury for a character instead of having them permadie. In practice, it hasn't mattered: The player whose character permadied left the table.
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    Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

    Just because he's quotable (he is) doesn't mean he should be quoted (he shouldn't) or that he's right (he's not).
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    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    My own approach is that the fights the PCs stumble into/over very probably won't kill them (I won't design them to be deadly, but stuff can happen) but the fights the PCs go looking for just might. Obviously other approaches exist, and work at the respective tables.
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    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    Some mix between these two is pretty much how I run the ability, period: You can make non-hostile contact, you can send messages. I also used the Rogue with the Criminal background in my third campaign as a conduit of Underworld information to the party: This is who these guys are, this is their...
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    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    I'm not a big fan, mostly for reasons having to do with my own experiences, but it is a trope. If I were to run something in that direction, I, like you, wouldn't want to negate people's background/backstory choices right out of the gate.
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    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    I figure the game world follows real-world physics as much as it has to so the players can make sense of it and make decisions based on it. While my setting's primary game-world is slowly awakening to sentience, it exists in a solar system a lot like our own (because I made it so). I personally...
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    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    I don't think it's implausible, or breaks the game or anything. I don't know that it's a given, either (and I don't understand you to be saying it is). I do have good reliable mail service in my setting, especially in the big cities.
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    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    I specifically wrote my setting for D&D 5e, because that was the ruleset I wanted to play and run. When I ran a game of Cypher, I used a (homebrewed) "Real World + Weird" setting, because that seemed to be where the game wanted to be. If I ever run Chaosium's Rvers of London TRPG, it won't be in...
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    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    Yeah, I think it's possible to run a twist with player buy-in, it just takes more work to get there. In principle, fish-out-of-water stuff can be fine, I've just always found it, as player and DM, to be deeply frustrating (and not found it to do anything particularly extra for party cohesion)...
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    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    Yeah, if you're going to do that sort of thing, you need to get some player buy-in. Less than a twist-centric campaign, I think, but some; and making sure no one picked a background that'd just get nuked seems like a way to make that easier. EDIT: But see my comment upthread containing my...
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    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    Different priorities, of course. I generally am happy to write a setting that works with the expectations of the game (ruleset) I want to run.
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    Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

    'Tis enough, 'twill serve.
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    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    The three campaigns I've run for 5e, in my homebrewed setting ... (First campaign, 1-20) The PCs started in a city that was promptly menaced by various undead. The party took eight or so sessions to resolve that, then started looking at things they were interested in outside that city--but they...
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