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

[BookTenTiger]

Are you really curious to know my stance on this or is this just a rhetorical question?

In any case, for me, "my game" comes first. Players who are not okay with my style and table rules are welcome to walk away. I have never understood the "being a fan of your players" thing.

And please, don't red text me.

Do you play with your friends or just folks who gather for the game?

This attitude only makes sense to me if you are playing with relative strangers (and even then, it hardly makes sense).

If you're playing with your friends, do you really tell them to walk away?

 

[Campbell]

It's my personal feeling that the game becomes a phenomenally different game when group composition changes or at least it should. If it does not that mean the players are not really contributing meaningful. Either way that's not a table I want to either run for or play at if that's really the case.

 

[Manbearcat]

Quick thought as I was just talking to some buddies about this.

I think the focus on PC death is a bit amiss here. PC death is often the 'least bad fate."

In Dogs in the Vineyard, you might be playing a PC who lost their backstory/initiation conflict (this is a player-authored Kicker where the player authors the situation and the GM plays the foil...and it is set up for the PC to lose...but they don't always lose) with addiction or the legacy of their father or their relationship with a particular Sin of The Faith or their ability to detect and defeat sorcery...whatever (something important). In those cases, the player typically has this personal "win con" for their character to overcome this backstory loss.

They might play 12 sessions, trying desperately to scratch and claw their PC to absolution or redemption or healing or comeupance (of another). It_is_a_struggle.

They don't overcome it. They just bear witness to the struggle and the coming to terms with the reality that sometimes absolution, redemption, healing, comeupance just ain't in the cards (despite your best efforts). Its brutal.

However, there is another way that its different. As bad as that sounds, there is an interesting level of closure to this scenario (the experience of the journey of struggle and succumbing loss...but ultimately deeply experiencing who your PC is within that crucible) which doesn't exist in a quick (game-speaking) death by fiery breath weapon.

So its distinctly worse than PC death...but distinctly more intimate...and the journey (and how front-and-center that journey is and how in-charge you are of it) nets more closure across the population of PC losses (comparing, say, deaths in D&D and non-death attrition in a game like Dogs in the Vineyard, Torchbearer, or My Life With Master).

 

[Nefermandias]

Do you play with your friends or just folks who gather for the game?

This attitude only makes sense to me if you are playing with relative strangers (and even then, it hardly makes sense).

If you're playing with your friends, do you really tell them to walk away?

I have been playing with the same pool of roughly a dozen or so people since the late 90's.
Not every campaign is for everyone, so I had to remove players from the game quite a few times throughout the years.

We are currently on a SKT campaign with a heavy focus on survival, overland travel and resource management. I made sure to let them know that we're using everything from encumbrance to random weather and that IT'S NOT a game about epic heroes doing awesome stuff. Every week I check if someone wants to jump off. Currently in the 48th session, with seven players and nobody quit as of now.

By the way the "friends" thing isn't really relevant. I'd rather play with like-minded people than "friends".

 

[Vaalingrade]

Everyone has the veto on their own participation - but only the dm walking away ends the game.

Unless someone else steps up.

Some DMs think they're way more important than they are.

Anyone who has a 'My Way or the Highway DM' and nowhere else to go, I run games Thursday, Friday and Saturdays online.

 

[HammerMan]

Yeah, if the DM is mad set on making them die.

Which is weird to me since the DM can just declare your character has a congenital heart defect at that point rather than wasting everyone's time running through pen and paper Saw.

it is normally (although not always) a bit more good natured then that...

the player builds a High AC High HP (or someway to reduce damage) and goes to the front line every time...
So the DM keeps hearing 15 misses, 17 miss, 22 misses.
Multi encounters the 5e math says would be challenging or even deadly turn into Childs play
DM out to challenge but not kill the players escalates.
escalation either works, and it is fun, or doesn't... and depending on the how it doesn't

sometimes the dice rolls in the DMs favor and something messes up and it turns into a TPK... but

sometimes the dice luck favors the players and it is still barely an inconviance...
that leads to another escalation... until one either works, or TPKs


I have seen campaign long escalations with 2 power gamer PCs turn into out right slam TPKs because the escalation builds too much...

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

As I've said before, I'm a big softie, and will give PCs every opportunity to avoid death. But I don't outright say "no one dies." It can happen and has, albeit not often. I also give PCs a way back to life with that particular character if they want it. My goal is that whatever happens should always lead to more (and more exciting) adventures.

 

[the Jester]

If every PC starts at 1st level, when the rest of the party is level 5+, that leads to either PCs choosing not to engage (because they'll get killed) or dying even more (because they engaged with monsters set to challenge the higher level PCs, which splat them across the dungeon floor. Neither of these is particularly interesting.

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

Well, I have found that 5e is the best edition for mixed-level parties since 2e. Even high level monsters are generally not unhurtable by low level pcs. Compare to 3e and 4e, where a first level guy was absolutely going to get murdered by a CR 4 monster, and probably wasn't going to be able to touch it.

Also, I think you're assuming that the monsters the party faces are all pitched at the high level pcs. That's not necessarily the case; since low-level monsters can challenge high level pcs, an encounter with a mixed level party can feature lots of low level bad guys or a mix of high and low level bad guys. I've found mixed level play to be eminently survivable with just a small amount of adjusting expectations on the player side ("I probably shouldn't charge the giant flaming dinosaur since I only have 15 hp left", but that could be anyone at any level) and a small amount of judiciousness when choosing monsters on the dm's side. I've been running ES@1 since 5e dropped and haven't found it to be a problem except in truly extreme cases.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It always seems to me it’s mostly people who don’t have to put in the work DMing who think it is a democracy, or should be one.

Nah. Most of us DM. People disagree with you from experience, not ignorance.

in 2e I had a Ranger that started as first level as a quasi multi class (spell fire from Volo's guide). I had established when the character was made that as I found out more about my 'gift' I would want to become more invested in magic and duelclass at some point to wizard unless the campaign went way crazy (it did but I still did around level 7ish).

My background could be summarized in a few paragraphs but I wrote it as 11 pages (yes wrote not computer typed). It also involvoed 2 other PCs who each wrote there own back stories (one much shorter and one much longer then mine). of the 7 players at that table we all had some form of background. It was all worked out with the DM, and worked into the story and as such it worked well.

I knew the fighter and the wizard/thief from my background, he (fighter) grew up in the town near the farm my (who i thought was my) family owned, and he was a bully who used to pick on and beat me up as a kid (I was a half elf he was human). She (Wizard/Thief) was the only of the 3 of us that WANTED to be an adventurer... she was someone we both competed to impress. By the time we were all late teens early twenties she had run off to adventure, he had been drafted into a local small war, and I was firmly in the mind he would just be a farmer...maybe someday own the family farm... then the red wizards AND a f ing beholder showed up destroyed his family home and tried to kidnap him until an old man that he didn't know saved him, and sent him to a bar... and that bar was the first game us all meeting, and the fighter apologizing to me, and both of us to her... and meeting 4 other people who all had an old man they didn't know some how get them to come to the bar... oh, and I had to admit at that point I knew I was being hunted.

our backgrounds MADE that game.

Hell yes. I love it when my PCs build backstories that make it easy to make the campaign about their characters and/or the things and people they care about.

He's not wrong though. DMs and players are not equals and it's a bit silly to pretend they are.

Yes, they are.

No one should have to play or run a game they do not want to. We all have the right to set whatever boundaries work for us. No one is special on this account though. At least that's how I see it. When I run a game my labor does not entitle me to anything. I do it because I like it. Not because I expect special privileges.

Absolutely.

The players can all walk away too. Then that Real Ultimate DM power doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

The players can also just tell the DM no.

And if the DM doesn’t want to run something, they don’t have to. If a player doesn’t want to play in a game, they don’t have to. The easiest solution is for the DM to offer up a game and see if there are interested players. Go from there. Players can try to pitch a game and see if a DM wants to run that, but it doesn’t seem to work out that often.

The easiest thing is actually for the DM to be willing to compromise, and not have a set in stone campaign affixed beyond alteration in their mind from the start.

but only the dm walking away ends the game.

Nah. Not necessary at all. I've taken over...5 campaigns, and I've friends who have taken over other campaigns. Hell I took over a game mid battle once, but that wasn't a DM walking away so much as having something come up, so I DMPC'd my PC for the rest of the session because my PC had the least stakes in the fight, and he handed me the encounter notes.

I'm very much of the stance that the DM, and I say this as the main DM in my group, who DMs about 80% of the time, is not particularly special, needs no special treatment or consideration, and is fully an equal at the table.

 

[Bacon Bits]

If a PC does, they die. I very rarely link specific plot details to specific PCs precisely because of that.

However, when PCs die, I will usually ask the player if they want to continue playing as that character or if they'd rather roll up something else. Either way, I'll make it work.

It's more important to me that the players are having fun in the game than it is to have an uncontrived narrative.