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  1. prabe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    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...
  11. prabe

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

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

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

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

    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...
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    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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