D&D 5E Do PCs at your table have script immunity?

[Scars Unseen]

I voted for the third option, which was close to what I go for. Players can die for any reason, but I do try to steer the results when the dice rolls decide to just pile on a player. Dying because the enemy gets a lucky shot is one thing; dying because every action you attempt fails spectacularly, leaving you feeling like an uncoordinated kid at a t-ball stand is another. So I may fudge some rolls, maybe steer the narrative in the player's favor if they keep catching bad breaks. But if it's just a normal encounter and a character's number happens to come up? Or especially if it was avoidable, and the player just made bad decisions? Yeah, sometimes you just die, and it isn't always dramatic.

 

[see]

Looking in the poll results so far, there's a lot less disagreement than there seems to be in the comments. Top answer is "No", the #2 answer is "No (mostly)", and they combine for roughly 80% of respondents. The unqualified "Yes" is in last place, with less than a tenth as many supporters as "No", not even doing as well as "Other".

Just remember, DMs, this just means you can freely kill the characters. Killing the players is much more fraught with complications.

 

[Nefermandias]

Just remember, DMs, this just means you can freely kill the characters. Killing the players is much more fraught with complications.

It depends where you live, really.

 

[Scars Unseen]

It depends where you live, really.

"You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, 'as greedy as a pig'."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I've been in some non-gaming organizations that in theory operated using this model. I say in theory because the in-practice quickly turned into a morass of passive-aggressiveness and backbiting, leading to the organizations shedding members as fast as they acquired them, and eventually imploding.

Consensus only works if nobody is stubborn. It only takes one stubborn person to blow up the consensus model, and IME everybody is stubborn at least to some extent.

Sounds like badly run consensus being run by people who were either not trained in it or not committed to it. Either that or they had a bad form of consensus for what they were doing. There are ways to resolve blocks and prevent all that.

But that all can happen, yes, and I've seen it too, especially when some people aren't actually committed to consensus. There's the risk of the person who won't stand aside or keeps blocking. Democracy has a whole bunch of similar flaws that people ignore because they're used to it though. It's mainly novelty and people not understanding or following rules that makes consensus end in tears.

In a gaming group it's unlikely to be an issue. If someone is being stubborn then you just go somewhere else, ideas-wise. I mean, if one player absolutely does not want to play a Ravenloft game, it's not like outvoting him will have good results either.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My point is that a game rulebook is no place to tell people to have basic common sense and respect towards other human beings, that's all.

Also, the poster I was responding to sounded like he was suggesting that anyone who doesn't share his views on how things should be handled at an RPG table lacked those basic social skills. That's frankly insulting.

I don't really understand this impulse to inject moral/ethical life advice into every product/item imaginable - I see it everywhere lately. Maybe this is a sort of collective rejection of the impersonal amorality of capitalism... but this isn't really the spot to discuss that.

People have been putting this kind of basic "how to make it work" advice in game rulebooks since the 1980s. Pretending it's a modern thing is funny but not in a good way. One example would be Cyberpunk 2020s "Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads". Pretending it's unhelpful or novel is posturing is the silliest kind.

 

[Thunder Brother]

For me as a DM, once a dice has been rolled that means I'm leaving the outcome to chance and need to accept the results, no matter what they are.

If a PC dies as a result of play, then that's that. If I were to lean on the scales to prevent a death from occuring, then I'm removing a major source of risk and consequence from the game, and I feel like my players would respond to that, either consciously or unconsciously, in ways that would harm the experience.

In my current campaign, a PC died because he rolled a 1 on a death saving throw after already rolling a failure in the previous round. He was one turn away from being stabilized by another party member. It felt bad, but that's the game sometimes. The other PCs mourned, the affected player rolled up a new character for the next session, and we moved on. Importantly though, the PC's death became a part of the campaign's story, and has come up in each subsequent session.

It sucks because I had ideas for this PC, situations where he could maybe have been given the spotlight. But that's the way it works sometimes. There is no script, just possibilities with uncertain outcomes.

 

[Nefermandias]

People have been putting this kind of basic "how to make it work" advice in game rulebooks since the 1980s. Pretending it's a modern thing is funny but not in a good way. One example would be Cyberpunk 2020s "Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads". Pretending it's unhelpful or novel is posturing is the silliest kind.

Did I say anything about novelty? In my opinion, it was offensive then and still offensive now. I don't need a random game designer telling me how I should behave as a human being.

 

[S'mon]

Thus, I don't find many who are interested in playing with large power discrepancies any more.

It works best when the players (& PCs) have a lot of choice over threat level.
For my multi-group 5e sandbox campaign, new PCs come in at half (rounded up) the level of the highest level PC in the entire campaign - current highest PCs are 7th so new PCs come in at 4th. This seems to work well in the sandbox, but for my Odyssey of the Dragonlords campaign which is semi-linear I just use one party XP tally & level, since there is much less freedom to choose challenges.

 

[S'mon]

Has this like, literally ever happened? All the DM has to do to stop it is say "Yeah I don't want to run that, someone else can be DM!".

Social pressure?

"It says here on the Internet that GMs should do what the players want! Otherwise you're a bad GM!"