Obryn said:
Despite my willingness to consider other styles, my current game (a 4e megadungeon sandbox) is a medium-high lethality game. We usually have a character death* every 5-6 sessions. I think 4e does a pretty good job of handling it. With the CB, rolling up a new character takes ~20 minutes on average and the ability to overcome death through the expenditure of resources is also available pretty early in the game's power arc.
Well, let's get a little more specific about my claim, here. "High Lethality" to me, does not signify how often there is a character death that may or may not be counteracted by a raise. To me, as I was using it, it signifies how often death makes the party fail -- how easy D&D is to "lose."
So for this, the most useful metric is: how often is there a TPK?
It's a mechanical argument, about the mechanics of the game: How does 4e penalize death, mechanically? Well, unless there's a TPK, it really doesn't. Well, possibly, you earn less GP (no High Score!), if you're raising a lot of folks. Even in a TPK, it doesn't have to (whip up new characters at the same level!).
In 4e, this is usually a rare event, indeed -- a possible specter I don't think most tables have ever seen. This is what I mean by 4e not being very good at giving you a kind of game with a lot of consequential dying. Even in a high lethality game that bans resurrection, the worst case scenario is usually that you roll up a new character at the same level, and chug along almost as if nothing happened, mechanically speaking. There might be some big story consequences, but, mechanically, all that happened when the Cleric died was that
Healing Word got replaced with
Majestic Word (or whatever). Basically nothing. If the party wipes and you start over from level 1,
that is a pretty severe consequence. That's how you "lose D&D." That's what happens on a TPK. Other than that, you keep chugging along, gaining XP and treasure almost automatically, until you "win the game" by getting to Level 30, sooner or later, or the campaign loses steam and no one cares about getting to level 30 anymore (the typical end to most D&D campaigns, I believe).
So, when I say 4e isn't very good at giving you a game with a lot of lethality, I mean that 4e isn't very good at giving you a game where death matters mechanically. The rules don't punish dying very harshly. Swapping out a party member is not a big deal, as far as the rules are concerned.
Now, that's not to say that it's not a big deal from a story perspective. It clearly, definitely, is. Even if your character later gets raised, it's a pretty big deal. Because there's no reason in the rules to avoid death, the reason is entirely provided by the narrative of the game, by how much the player gets attached to the character.
But how death affects the story of the game is a completely separate conversation from how it affects the mechanics of the game. It's a story effect. It's key to the game's experience, but it doesn't speak to the mechanical effect of having your HPs drop to 0 and failing 3 death saves and not having a party raise you.
A "high lethality" game, to me, would be a game that you can "lose," where the mechanics have consequences for failure, where there is a real risk of experiencing those consequences, and you can talk about things like "challenge" and "luck" and "skill" playing a role in the outcome.
It's my understanding that 1e was much better at delivering this kind of experience -- a game that is possible to lose. Every session probably had SOMEONE dying, and had a real risk of EVERYONE dying. "Killer dungeons" were a basic part of the play experience. When you died, you started back at level 1, or at the very least lost out on XP for the adventure. Resurrections were nearly unattainable. The challenge was to get as high as possible without dying, and it involved luck and skill.
Those mechanics enhance a game where the goals were different. The goals of a 4e game -- even one with a high lethality -- are pretty much NOT to "stay alive" or "get a high level." Those are things that happen pretty much automatically. What's more ephemeral in 4e is how that happens, and the story events surrounding it. Death is not a consequence, or a hazard, or a problem, mechanically speaking. Not for the game. It is, at most, a reason to try out a new race/class combo and keep going.
So while I'm sure your game has a pretty high rate of for-realsies (non-rezzed) character death in comparison to bog standard 4e, that doesn't mean it's necessarily a game with "high lethality," as I would use the term. Similarly, WoW doesn't have a "High Lethality," even though you can drop 10 times a night. Death doesn't mean much (though it means slightly more than it does in D&D.
). Games with save points don't have very high lethality. Tetris does, though (sooner or later, you lose). Chess does (someone is always going to lose). Poker's very high (only one person out of an entire table ever gets to "win.").
You'll notice that games with heavy storylines don't feature high lethality (as I'd use the term). This is because the two don't easily coexist. A long story needs time and consistency to tell, and a high lethality makes failure to be expected, and victory to only be pried forcefully from its jaws. This is key to the D&D debate, because D&D blends the story with the game, and there are folks who lean in each direction (though neither would likely give up the other side entirely). For this, it's the difference between wanting to
earn your high levels, treating them as the goal and reward, or wanting to earn your story victories, treating THEM as the goal and reward. A 4e D&D game with a lot of character deaths is still going to eventually reach 30th level, whenever the DM gets round to giving out the XP, regardless of if it's a completely different cast of characters at that point or not. A 1e game with a lot of character deaths won't get out of the kobold caves. If it makes it to name level, it'll big a Big Deal. The goals of the games are completely different, and the relationship between "0 hp" and "failure" is going to be different for each goal.
