Death, Dying and Entitlements.

[Ourph]

In all honesty that is going a little over board.

There are plenty of ways to have in-game consequences that matter to the players other than character death. I don't see why one consequence should be sacrosanct if it is one that the players don't find motivational or fun.

What if you have player's that say they don't have fun unless they get all the items they want? Do you give them everything they want?

I don't know; I've never had a player ask for that. Have you?

If someone did ask for that, I would try to understand why they thought that kind of game sounded fun and work with them to make the game as enjoyable as possible for them. I certainly wouldn't tell them to "get lost" if they were my friend and I was interested in playing a game with them. I also wouldn't expect them to spend their precious leisure time playing a game they found unenjoyable because someone on the internet thought their approach was badwrongfun.

You can houserule anything you want but I wouldn't recommend messing with the core rules too much.

Thanks for the advice. However, neither eliminating death as a consequence, nor providing magic items that appeal to the players and fit the concept they have for their characters requires houseruling anything in any of the games that I play (e.g. 4e, WFRP, CoC, Labyrinth Lord, etc.). So it is not really a problem I'm concerned about.

 

[malraux]

Yeah I see what you're saying about the Player's getting upset. I killed off a friends character because his character was being ridiculously violent (constantly shouting death threats in towns, killing babies as intimidate checks, threatening npc's with sexual assault). He tipped me over the edge once so i had a treant in the forest they were in (lvl 18 to his lvl 6) crush him and throw his body from the group and made it unrecoverable. He was cranky with me and genuinely didn't enjoy the game for like a year, feeling like his death was unfair.

If I had sent something more his lvl and killed him properly with dice rolls, I think it would have gone better. I ended up letting his character get resurrected though a year (real time) later and he's acted much better (little to no threats of rape).

Note, this wasn't a character problem, it was a player problem.

 

[I'm A Banana]

It's a playstyle thing.

If your d00ds can die forever easily, they need to be able to re-spawn just as easily (either the same d00d, or a new d00d made up quick like a minute). This demands low character complexity. You won't find that in 4e.

If your d00ds are well nigh invincible (the "fall unconscious" or somesuch), you need to be okay with screwing over the rest of the world while they watch. While a good DM will do that in 4e, as it stands, it's not something that there are good mechanics or advice to encourage other than "DO IT, THAT IS ALL."

How much do you want the game to be about survival and luck, and how much do you want the game to be about characters and stories? It has trouble being both, since narratives require high character reliability, and games about survival and luck require high character mortality. It's VERY dissonant to split the difference. For your table, at least for your current campaign, you need one. And if it's the former, 4e doesn't do the best job of it. And if it's the latter, 4e could use some improvements.

The gripes on each side are just about badwrongfun. Both styles are fun in their own ways, the trouble happens when one expects one of the styles, and gets the other, or when someone expects that D&D only can do one of them.

 

[IanB]

I think 'entitlement' is kind of a loaded word to use, it sets the player vs. DM relationship as innately hostile which it really shouldn't be (IMO). D&D is typically collaborative at its core - even in dangerous, high-death-count games - not antagonistic.

 

[Blue]

Until 4e, I was overly careful. Stupidity or spectacularly bad luck could kill you, and with my group it was usually the latter. Intense character stories, a homebrew low-wealth world that made finding someone (or later getting 5000gp in diamonds) a real challenge, and plots tied around each character.

In 4e I'm come to realize that it's really damn hard to kill a character through just bad luck. Because once a PC is under it switched to a different mechanic of death saves that don't care how much you were hurt, and it's really rare to hit minus half HP and die without the death save failures. Also any healing starts at 0. It also rarely has save-or-die issues. Lastly most of the leader classes are good at pulling a group up when things start to go south*.

So you can really take off kid gloves without being adversarial and rely on the PCs to be good and smart and pull it off, or fail for their own lack. When on the player side of the screen there's plenty of times I thought it would be a TPK or we were doomed, but we pulled it off. (Well, we did have one TPCapture. but that was earned through stupidity. All of us players missed the hints we were going against a fiery dragon (Volcano dragon to be exact) with a bunch of fire-creatures, and had an opportunity to pick up fire resistance and passed it by.)

* I'd rather see a party with a leader that can pull out the bacon if things go south than one who amps when things are going well. With the latter things will go well more often and the DM might amp up challenges to keep things interesting, but when the ramped up challenges start to slide downhill and PCs start dropping, it's hard to reverse the trend.

 

[FireLance]

What are your opinions on the matter?

I am of the view that a roleplaying game does not necessarily have to be a character-building exercise for the player.

 

[Ourph]

And if it's the former, 4e doesn't do the best job of it.

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.

 

[Havrik Stoneskimmer]

Here is how I personally like to play.

I design my encounters to be balanced according to the DMG XP budget guidelines. I take into account the PCs' equipment and abilities and my players' strategic skill. I make every attempt to create an encounter that will be thrilling and challenging but not lethal.

Right before combat starts, I get into the heads of the monsters and work out what each one's goals are.

And then once we all roll initiative, I play to win.

I don't fudge the dice (IMO there'd be no reason to bother rolling them if I did). I might be a little generous with the monsters' tactics if things seem overwhelming (having a monster surrender or run a little earlier than I might otherwise do), but only if it can be justified by the narrative of the combat. And I don't use obnoxious techniques like a coup de gras it really makes sense from a story perspective. But in general, I am playing to accomplish the monsters' goals (which may or may not mean trying to kill all of the PCs).

It's pretty darn hard to die in 4e. PCs have lots of ways to heal, even when they aren't near a cleric, and even when they fall down, the rest of the party has at least 3 rounds and usually several more to heal, stabilize, or trigger the second wind on the dying PC.

And even if you die, death ain't the handicap it used to be in the olden days. If the player wanted to have the PC raised, I would make that possible one way or another. If they want to change to a new PC at the same XP, that's fine too.

The only time I would pull a punch is on a TPK. If the entire campaign story shuts down that's no fun for anyone, and a TPK almost certainly means I screwed up building the encounter. In this case I would find some way for the PCs to survive, whether it means being captured as hostages or rescued in the nick of time by a party of NPCs that happened to be passing through.

Either way, whether it's a PC death or a would-be TPK, it creates a new and interesting path for the story. Just like failing a skill challenge, failing a combat doesn't shut the game down, it just means the players have to deal with the consequences of failure.

 

[aurance]

Then why bother with rolling dice if it's not the final arbiter?

D&D is a random game because it would turn into a cops and robbers "I shot you, no I shot you first, nuh uh I shot you first".

Because thankfully, D&D is not constrained to a slippery slope of all randomness or all determinism. That's a false dichotomy.

 

[Fifth Element]

And the DM is entitled to tell them to get lost.

I think the DM's duty is to tell the players what kind of game he's running, and let them decide if they want to play.

...or tell the DM to get lost. But I generally think that the group deciding together what type of game they want to play is more productive than a series of "this is the way it's gonna be" declarations. Especially if you game with your friends.