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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7937335" data-attributes="member: 71699">You know, now that you draw my attention to it, I think my rule of thumb is less informative than it could be, through seeming overly precise. In possibly more informative terms, I'm suggesting that for a typical party of four it would take participation in two deadly encounters to see have the chance of character death be about a coin-flip. That is across the whole party, so no one character is 50/50 to die! Attritional encounters - easy to hard - are then an order of magnitude less risky. Players might go through twenty such encounters and experience no worse than that coin-flip chance of death in two lethal (i.e. deadly).What this draws attention to - my general point - is that it is not enough to say some kind of encounter is potentially deadly. What does "deadly" mean? Given the worst possible die rolls and no DM intercession, all encounters are potentially deadly. I think that one thing deadly must not mean is 100% certainty of a character death! Except in the most intentionally brutal, meat-grinder campaigns. Additionally, deadliness interacts with the availability of revival magic. And encounter is only really lethal if the death turns out to be permanent.And what of the suggestion to test such encounters. What does "test" mean for "deadly". Must I see a character die? What if I always see all characters die!? Probably too deadly (in most cases), right? With concerns like that in mind I felt a DM might benefit from a rule of thumb - a way to know what she means by deadly. I settled on about a coin-flip of seeing a death, for every two such encounters. This is a low but palpable chance of death per character, and feels in the range of real world examples like Dunnigan's estimate of 2% casualty rates in the front line of conflicts (I take it that not every part of the front line amounts to a deadly encounter, so where the fighting is fiercest the toll must be higher).</blockquote>

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