D&D General Do players even like the risk of death?

[Neonchameleon]

The injuries table exists in the 5e DMG as an option instead of part of the core rules because people found that consequence to be boring.
To be very clear I'm not calling your gritty game boring, far from it. But it strikes me that these attacks on 1e are extremely biased.

The injuries table has no place in D&D. This is because D&D is centered around zero consequence hit points and combat actually having lasting consequences other than death changes the nature of your relationship to combat and how both PCs and monsters behave. Death spirals, both short and long term, are something D&D (and especially 5e with its bullet sponge enemy design) goes out of its way to avoid. Meanwhile I've played games with long term injury and death spirals - and they put overwhelming emphasis onto either avoiding combat or attacking from ambush.

Ironically, magical items were far more easier to get a hold of in earlier editions than 5e.
And are you really comparing 1e and 2e characters to 5e and calling 5e PCs starting characters?

Yes I am. A starting level 1 character is for this purpose a starting level 1 character. Which is where the game starts.

 

[tetrasodium]

In answering this question one needs to have in mind many assumptions, most importantly your expected number of encounters.

• Based on guidelines in the DMG, I assume about 100 encounters over a character's full career (1-20)
• I divide those between <hard and >hard at about a 2:1 ratio
• The former I measure about a 0.8% risk of character death, and the latter about 8%
• My rule for replacement characters is they are rolled at one level below the lowest level survivor
• With that rule, we tend to top out at tier 3 e.g. level 15 characters at most

Given those values, a party of four will likely experience about 50 deaths over their career.

• With revival magic, many of those are survived
• In my world, revival costs several hundred to several thousand gold pieces, depending on the spell dictated by the manner of death
• I reduce the DMG guideline scaling of treasure hoards, so parties are not as cash rich in my campaign

I find that, with less than 1% chance for a character to die in most encounters, parties need about 30 lives over the full course of a campaign. Historically that has amounted to about a dozen lives after revival magic, i.e. 12 characters generated for 4 to survive.

How can a DM use this information? What I have found is that by tracking the number of deaths, and knowing my background assumptions for availability and affordability of revival magic, I have hit a point that players describe as punishing lethality. That works for my group. I have also found that having a bright line between normal encounter, and a deadly one, has been helpful.

As well as being mindful of the cumulative chance over encounters, and the viability of magical revival, you also need to think about what is at stake? Our most recent death slew a much-loved level 8 druid. The player will reroll a level 4 character. Their stake - what was swept off the table - was levels 5-8.

The difference between dialing down vrs dialing up things like lethality is more complex than which side can mechanically do it easier & if mechanically it's the same level of effort once you strip the players from the difficulty. A perfect analogy is patent 1 complaining to parent 2 that parent 2always makes parent 1 be the bad guy to the kid by nevervkaking them eat their broccoli and always letting them have marshmallow topped ice cream with a side of cake and candy for meals. Physically it's not really any different level of effort to put ice cream and cake on a plate as opposed to broccoli and xjicken; getting past the hurdle of convincing a kid to eat one vrs the other is a very different bar. Worse though is that of ice cream and cake is the default on the menu its orders of magnitude higher effort to go back to chicken & broccoli. It's easy to make changes that make players enthusiastically accept changes that make them more awesome more insulated from risk or more powerful than the default... going the other way is not so simple

 

[AnotherGuy]

Yes I am. A starting level 1 character is for this purpose a starting level 1 character. Which is where the game starts.

I think my point got lost in the translation.
You said that having one's items destroyed in earlier editions was obnoxious and boring and that was why they got rid of that consequence because you were left with a starter kit character.
I highlighted that we're talking about an edition where magical items are much more abundant than 5e so the loss of items is not the end of the world whereas in 5e magical items are supposedly more scarce and the characters given all their powers/abilities are no longer starter kit characters.

 

[Fanaelialae]

The difference between dialing down vrs dialing up things like lethality is more complex than which side can mechanically do it easier & if mechanically it's the same level of effort once you strip the players from the difficulty. A perfect analogy is patent 1 complaining to parent 2 that parent 2always makes parent 1 be the bad guy to the kid by nevervkaking them eat their broccoli and always letting them have marshmallow topped ice cream with a side of cake and candy for meals. Physically it's not really any different level of effort to put ice cream and cake on a plate as opposed to broccoli and xjicken; getting past the hurdle of convincing a kid to eat one vrs the other is a very different bar. Worse though is that of ice cream and cake is the default on the menu its orders of magnitude higher effort to go back to chicken & broccoli. It's easy to make changes that make players enthusiastically accept changes that make them more awesome more insulated from risk or more powerful than the default... going the other way is not so simple

I see where you're going with this, but it's a bit of a false comparison. We make children eat their broccoli because eating nothing but ice cream can have very serious consequences for their health. The same cannot be said for players and mechanics like level drain.

You might like the idea of level drain, but that doesn't make it any objectively better or worse than no level drain. If your players don't have fun with it, then it may be better to leave it out.

Let me put it another way. If I'm playing a video game and I'm getting frustrated because a level is an hour of play and I keep dying, I put down the controller and walk away. Maybe I'll pick it back up later and maybe I won't. I play video games for fun, not to prove to anyone how "hardcore" I am. If it's not fun, then the game is not fulfilling its intended purpose for me. Whereas I don't love salad, but I eat a salad for lunch at least 5 days a week because I know it is good for me. Its purpose is not enjoyment, except in the sense that I hope eating salads will allow me to enjoy retirement in good health (though that's still decades away).

Sure it might be easier to force your players to accept level drain if it's the only option. However, I think it's reasonable to consider whether you even ought to, given that many people play this game for fun. I think that a reasonable approach would be to talk to the players and explain that you'd like to do a one-shot with level drain - if they like it you can keep playing that way, and if not you don't. It's not as though level drains are inherently better for them, though they may find they enjoy it if they give it a chance.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I am a huge fan of the 5e level drain mechanic, because it is very easy to tune it to become more lethal or long-lasting or both, which is by far more acceptable than having one's levels erased as in the earlier editions.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I think my point got lost in the translation.

Partly. I thought that you were commenting on how 5e characters at first level are mechanically and thematically more interesting than 2e (which makes level drain even worse; if level drain were a thing it would be possible to level drain a 5e paladin into unswearing their oath).

You said that having one's items destroyed in earlier editions was obnoxious and boring and that was why they got rid of that consequence because you were left with a starter kit character.
I highlighted that we're talking about an edition where magical items are much more abundant than 5e so the loss of items is not the end of the world whereas in 5e magical items are supposedly more scarce and the characters given all their powers/abilities are no longer starter kit characters.

And so what? By destroying magic items at random (rather than the occasional targeted nerf which can be extremely deserved) you are making characters blander and more generic and undoing their progress, making them less interesting. It's a less terrible mechanic in a Monty Haul game than a miserly one - but terrible in both.

 

[Democratus]

And so what? By destroying magic items at random (rather than the occasional targeted nerf which can be extremely deserved) you are making characters blander and more generic and undoing their progress, making them less interesting. It's a less terrible mechanic in a Monty Haul game than a miserly one - but terrible in both.

Strongly disagree. This is the stuff of great war stories.

The grizzled Paladin who carries around the pommel of his once-mighty Holy Avenger as a reminder that one should not take blessings for granted. The bard who wears the melted magic ring of his lost elven love so that his tragedy will inspire song and story. The rogue who had to sacrifice her magic climbing rope in order to get out of a tight scrape.

Losses like this make for fantastic backstory. Heck...one of the most famous fantasy characters of all time, Aragorn, carried around the shattered remains of a sword that was destroyed in an encounter.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Strongly disagree. This is the stuff of great war stories.

The grizzled Paladin who carries around the pommel of his once-mighty Holy Avenger as a reminder that one should not take blessings for granted. The bard who wears the melted magic ring of his lost elven love so that his tragedy will inspire song and story. The rogue who had to sacrifice her magic climbing rope in order to get out of a tight scrape.

Losses like this make for fantastic backstory. Heck...one of the most famous fantasy characters of all time, Aragorn, carried around the shattered remains of a sword that was destroyed in an encounter.

And all those are basically custom-tailored consequences which you are claiming are at random things. The grizzled paladin who lost their +1 sword to a fireball is now carrying around a +3 - just as they would be under normal circumstances. The rogue did not "sacrifice" their ring under the AD&D rules - it was a random chance from an AoE spell. And the melted ring is entirely independent of the AD&D rules.

Losses like that might be fantastic backstory - but they are not things that are remotely a consequence of the rules I'm criticising. A Blades in the Dark style Devil's Bargain mechanic that gave the rogue the opportunity to sacrifice their ring is entirely different from it being destroyed by a random AoE spell. And the paladin with the shattered Holy Avenger is far more likely to be a tailored major consequence in Fate. And backstory is backstory.

 

[Vaalingrade]

So do I; and if my character happens to die in the process or lose all his stuff or whatever: in the grand scheme of things, so what?

As I detailed in the post you quoted, it's boring and annoying to me. It's usually a detriment to the story and makes me do more work instead of having fun.

Yeah it's a bummer in the moment, but those bummer moments are cancelled out by great things happening at other times.

Or... or... I could just not have the crappy moment to balance out and just have more great things?

 

[Baldurs_Underdark]

Personally, I do not see how you can have any character development or storytelling if characters keep dropping like flies.

Real questions to me seems to be if you are interested in a long and complicated story or are satisfied with much shorter story arch of 1 or a few sessions.