D&D 5E Death, dying and class balance

[ninjayeti]

I find these types of discussions are really asking the wrong question. They ask how to make death more significant when they really should be asking how they can challenge PCs better when death isn't as likely as in earlier editions.

PCs might never feel like they're in risk of dying in any of these 'battles', but they can feel challenged. I think that is what you really want.

Those are some awesome examples, and I 100% agree that a good DM finds new and different ways to challenge players. However some players (myself included) find that the possibility of character death adds excitement to the game in a way that succeeding or failing at a scenario like the ones above does not. It's like the difference between betting $1 on the game and betting your rent money on the game - in both cases you want your team to win, but emotional investment is going to be much higher when the stakes are higher.

I understand that not everyone shares this attitude, and I am not trying to convert anyone to my viewpoint or tell people they are doing it wrong if they disagree. I would just like you to understand this point of view. At the end of the day I don't think the OP is asking the "wrong" question, or that nonlethal challenges is what he "really wants."

 

[Ancalagon]

[MENTION=6789120]ninjayeti[/MENTION]

Exactly. Players want to feel they are being heroes because they are risking their lives. The key is "how much risk?"

Today I went to get a haircut. I risked my life (true story). I could have been hit by a car on the way there!!!... There was a non zero chance of death. BUUUT this chance is so small that it didn't feel heroic at all.

Now let's say that on the way back there was a fire and I rushed in to save a child... people would have called me a hero. There *was* a risk of death, and it was significant.

I don't think that the risk of death should be so high that the campaign becomes a slaughterfest. BUT it should be high enough that the players feel the risk is meaningful. The PCs *are* risking their lives by saving the princess/stealing the diamond on the altar/etc.

 

[Celtavian]

First off, RE: the part in bold, it looks like I typo'ed. When I first started playing, I expected HD healing to be sufficient and magical healing to be unimportant, because of how weak clerical healing is. What I didn't realize is that clerical healing is not even close to a ceiling on effectiveness.

As for the gishy superhealer, have a look at my post here as MaxWilson for details: (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?471899-Ridiculously-good-healer-(just-for-fun)). The gist of it is stacking Aura of Vitality (70 HP healing) with Extended Spell metamagic for one sorcery point (140 HP of healing), and also with Disciple of Life (240 HP of healing).

Even if you roll poorly on stats and can't afford a Str over 10, by level 10, you'll wind up with a plate armor-wearing, Con save-proficient superhealer with good melee and range capabilities. Mobile cancels out the movement speed penalty from plate armor (Longstrider would too of course, but I like not having to spend the spell slot, and having Longstrider in reserve) and also enables Booming Blade tricks. With only Str 10 her to-hit isn't anything fantastic, so she's not as good as a real gish, but still not bad. That's half of what I meant by "surprisingly gishy", and the other half is the way she can cast Blur and Shield to tank if she wants to, or just drop a Careful Web on the party (to which PCs will be immune because careful) which makes it basically infeasible for melee enemies to engage you while you're standing within it. By level 12 she can be a warlock 2 with Agonizing Repelling Blast, which makes her even better at range and at support tasks such as blasting enemies off cliffs and into walls of fire. Access to Bless is just gravy, and having four or five uses per short rest of Cutting Words is a lot like a Shield spell that can go to anyone in the party--or you can save it for skill checks and saving throws of course.

Does that answer your questions about "why not life cleric"? Bards are already better healers than life clerics thanks to Aura of Vitality, even before you consider Extended Spell shenanigans. Also I hate playing clerics, which is probably the single biggest reason why this build has remained theorycraft for me and not something I've actually played. (Well, that and the reason that I mostly DM.) But because I'm a powergamer at heart, my RP objections to clerics are warring with my powergamer instincts, looking for a compromise that can satisfy both...

Final comment: a superhealer will have Stealth and Perception expertise and is not unlikely to have a Stealth skill of +10 or better relatively soon, but unlike a Rogue she doesn't have Cunning Action to exploit it during combat. Don't let that stop you though. Sometimes, Hiding with your regular action is a perfectly good choice especially if it lets you e.g. stay safe/untargetable within darkness while healing someone every round with your bonus action (Aura of Vitality for 2d6+5 thanks to Disciple of Life, for twenty rounds in a row thanks to Extended Spell). Don't feel like you absolutely have to do damage every round.

I had a player building this type of Lore Bard. Multiclassing seems to be the primary culprit for so many shenanigans. I'm going to have to cap it somehow.

 

[Azzy]

What really makes it easy are the rules for death and dying: high threshold for instakill, low likelihood of dying from death saves

Define low.

Here is the base chance that a character dies, remains unconscious, stabilizes, or recovers 1 hp in each round subsequent to being reduced to 0 hp:

Round 1: 0% Dead, 5% Recovered (at 1 hp), 0% Stabilized, 95% Unconscious
Round 2: 4.25% Dead, 9.75% Recovered, 0% Stabilized, 86% Unconscious
Round 3: 15.7% Dead, 14.05% Recovered, 12.5% Stabilized, 57.75% Unconscious
Round 4: 29.13% Dead, 16.94% Recovered, 29.38% Stabilized, 24.56% Unconscious
Round 5: 40.46% Dead, 18.16% Recovered, 41.38% Stabilized, 0% Unconscious

This assumes no instant death and no outside interference (nobody helping the character, nobody attacking the character). If an enemy does attack the fallen character, for instance, the chance of death goes up.

This system favors the character living, but the threat of death is not insignificant (especially when you consider enemies attacking the fallen, AOE attacks, etc.).

 

[devincutler]

Killing PC is not the goal of DnD. And even then they come back with an new pc.
DM should focus on mission failure/success.

Not the goal but the risk should be present and should mean something. But it should be rare. You want character death, play Runequest. Not D&D.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Not the goal but the risk should be present and should mean something. But it should be rare. You want character death, play Runequest. Not D&D.

Er, D&D is all about the potential for violence. If you want lethal failure to be a strictly unimportant part of your game--if you want "bankruptcy" and "loss of social status" to be what your players worry about rather than death--your campaign might work better in a different system like GURPS.

At any rate, while you can play D&D without risk of character death, I've probably perma-killed 5 to 10 PCs over the last year and a half of play, and D&D works just fine in that mode.

 

[Libramarian]

This might be an artifact of the initiative system you're using. Perhaps one reason my players don't rely on popup healing is because of the AD&D-style (WEGO: everyone declares/everyone acts) initiative system in use. When five of six giant rats are attacking you this round and you're already at 2 health, or when you're at full health but you just hurled yourself into the middle of a clump of four Umber Hulks, popup healing is pretty irrelevant. The players become very, very aware of exactly how many enemy hits they can take before becoming hamburger. In the case of the giant rats, what happened was that the giant rats hit him just enough times to bring him down to two failed death saves (i.e. once to put him at 0 HP, and then once more auto-crit due to 5' melee attack against an unconscious target, resulting in two failed death saves), and at the start of the new round before anyone could declare an action he rolled his death saves and got a natural 1. Sayonara, Gale!

The point I'm trying to make in a roundabout way is that cyclic initiative tends to result in predictable combat where players are very comfortable that they'll be able to coordinate effectively. This tends to make combat safer, not just for healing but for e.g. exploiting the Mobile feat or gaming spell durations like Wrathful Smite. Could it be that trying a new initiative system would resolve your discomfort over "safeness" in a satisfying way?

Hmm. good point. We've been using group cyclic initiative, which makes coordination even easier than individual cyclic. I might move to AD&D style of simultaneous initiative, but I think even if that removes most incidences of popup healing in practice, I would still want to get rid of heal-from-zero. When making houserules I try to think through the consequences but I also try to avoid status quo bias.

I think a very easy way to avoid the "pop up" healing being abused. In 2nd ed, if you were using the optional "death at -10" rule, if you were healed back in the positive you were all messed up and groggy and generally useless until you had rested. This could be mimicked with the use of the exhaustion rules. Even adding a single level of exhaustion per near death should be enough of a penalty to discourage the "pop up"

If you want something more drastic, then use more levels of exhaustion, or even the lingering injury rule.

I liked the look of the exhaustion and lingering wounds at first but I've been disappointed with them in play. It just slows the game down as PCs rest until it clears. Penalties fixable with resting (or resources replenished with resting) slow the game down. Good penalties are either permanent or fixed by accomplishing something rather than just resting early, or longer.

A good basic mechanic for penalties would be that you pay them off with XP, or that they last for a certain number of encounters or sessions. Like you can't heal them with spells or by resting, you have to "walk them off". The ultimate example being of course starting a new character at level 1.

Another option to avoid pop up healing would be to require a check to return to consciousness after being healed from zero. I've never understood why being healed to 1+ hp automatically wakes you up, apart from tradition. Although that increases the risk of TPK more than death for any individual PC.

I think that improves the game as well. Pop up healing is not just cheesy and too easy on individual PCs, it makes the party as a whole unintuitively resilient, which is bad for sandbox gaming because the players don't really know what their party can handle, what they need to avoid or run away from, and what they might be able to handle with "combat as war" tactics.

I think KOed characters should be out of the battle for sure. Then it's just a question of how many KOs should be deaths.

Define low.

Here is the base chance that a character dies, remains unconscious, stabilizes, or recovers 1 hp in each round subsequent to being reduced to 0 hp:

Round 1: 0% Dead, 5% Recovered (at 1 hp), 0% Stabilized, 95% Unconscious
Round 2: 4.25% Dead, 9.75% Recovered, 0% Stabilized, 86% Unconscious
Round 3: 15.7% Dead, 14.05% Recovered, 12.5% Stabilized, 57.75% Unconscious
Round 4: 29.13% Dead, 16.94% Recovered, 29.38% Stabilized, 24.56% Unconscious
Round 5: 40.46% Dead, 18.16% Recovered, 41.38% Stabilized, 0% Unconscious

This assumes no instant death and no outside interference (nobody helping the character, nobody attacking the character). If an enemy does attack the fallen character, for instance, the chance of death goes up.

This system favors the character living, but the threat of death is not insignificant (especially when you consider enemies attacking the fallen, AOE attacks, etc.).

I was assuming outside interference, ie the chance that the character fails 3 death saves before recovering or stabilizing from any cause. Even if the party ignores the fallen PC until the battle is over, the battle will usually be over before the PC racks up 3 failed saves. As I mentioned earlier I don't like attacking downed characters, it feels antagonistic to me.

 

[devincutler]

Er, D&D is all about the potential for violence. If you want lethal failure to be a strictly unimportant part of your game--if you want "bankruptcy" and "loss of social status" to be what your players worry about rather than death--your campaign might work better in a different system like GURPS.

At any rate, while you can play D&D without risk of character death, I've probably perma-killed 5 to 10 PCs over the last year and a half of play, and D&D works just fine in that mode.

Er...no D&D has always been about violence, but not about easy or realistic character deaths. Again, that is the purveyance of a system like Runequest, with body part hit points, no levelling, and prevalent critical hits.

D&D is about being 10th level and easily surviving a 1000 foot fall (20d6).

D&D has usually been about the PCs being special snowflakes. This was more before 3rd edition when you had the teeming masses of zero level people and a 1st level PC was almost a god compared to them, but D&D has always been about character survival and the ability, at higher levels, to wade into combat and come out on the other end drenched in the blood of your enemies.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Hmm. good point. We've been using group cyclic initiative, which makes coordination even easier than individual cyclic. I might move to AD&D style of simultaneous initiative, but I think even if that removes most incidences of popup healing in practice, I would still want to get rid of heal-from-zero. When making houserules I try to think through the consequences but I also try to avoid status quo bias.

Ah, I see. Maybe you could elaborate on what you dislike about heal-from-zero? I kind of dislike the aesthetics that result from stopping at zero. One guy had an interesting rule: track negative HP down to -10. That way, 1 HP of healing isn't necessarily the difference between "unconscious" and "perfectly functional", you might have to heal 11 HP.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Er...no D&D has always been about violence, but not about easy or realistic character deaths. Again, that is the purveyance of a system like Runequest, with body part hit points, no levelling, and prevalent critical hits.

D&D is about being 10th level and easily surviving a 1000 foot fall (20d6).

D&D has usually been about the PCs being special snowflakes. This was more before 3rd edition when you had the teeming masses of zero level people and a 1st level PC was almost a god compared to them, but D&D has always been about character survival and the ability, at higher levels, to wade into combat and come out on the other end drenched in the blood of your enemies.

Oh, I understand now. Sorry, I missed your original point because of lack of familiarity with Runequest. Yes, that does indeed sound even more deadly than any edition of D&D has ever been. MERP is kind of that way too.