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

[Lanefan]

All you're testing there are player preferences.

What I am saying is that if you take a player pre-3e and post-3e, they'll have the same opinion on whether the funnel was to their liking. Playing a system with encounter guidelines doesn't make players want fair encounters if they didn't previously. It simply makes it more apparent if they already did.

Are you including 3e itself in the 'pre' or 'post' category?

I'd posit that in general the longer ago a player started playing the more accepting they'd be of a funnel model.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Are you including 3e itself in the 'pre' or 'post' category?

I'd posit that in general the longer ago a player started playing the more accepting they'd be of a funnel model.

I suppose in this case it would fall into post, since the other poster's argument was that encounter guidelines make games less lethal, and those debuted in 3e.

 

[Umbran]

It still doesn't change the fact that the risk of death is acceptable to most, maybe even the vast majority who play the game.

Of course, that wasn't the original question. "Find it acceptable," is not the same as, "want." I mean, I don't really like olives. But I will put up with them on a pizza, if that's what is needed to get pizza.

Your argument about the playtest and design of 5e seems like the most solid point - though, lacking access to the actual feedback, I think the best we can get to is "find acceptable" rather than "want." Given that the risk of death is traditional in D&D, you'd expect that anyone for whom it was a deal-breaker had already been weeded out of the D&D player pool in previous editions.

I am playing in three different 5e games right now. One is run by a guy for whom it is his first turn behind the screen in 20+ years, and his daughter is playing. He is definitely not looking to kill PCs. I suspect that there's no real chance of PC death in this game. In another, the GM is running what seems to be a pretty stock version of Rime of the Frostmaiden. As a basic WotC design, I expect that death is entirely possible, but unlikely given the experience level of the players (not the characters - the players). In the third, the GM is not pulling punches, and I think we've wound up with someone making death saves every session. If the dice don't favor us, someone's going to become a smear on the flagstones sooner or later.

All of these are "acceptable". Each of them is more fun than the alternative of sitting around watching TV for the evening. But the one with the highest risk of death probably isn't the most fun of them.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I'm late to the party with this thread, but I think responses to PC death depend a whole lot on the game's XP/progression system. I realize that most threads here are sort of 5E by default, but 5E is almost uniquely driven by uber-quantified character progression, to the extent that scenarios are recommended for specific levels, and DMs are sort of assumed to base individual encounters on those levels, by way of CR.

Outside of 5E (and PF and other D&D-by-another-name systems) this is an extremely wild and rare approach. What are levels in Shadowrun or GURPS or Savage Worlds or Blades in the Dark? To me, if I had a 10th level character who died, and that meant rejoining the group with a fresh character and slogging my way back up to being useful...that would entirely suck. But if I was playing Alien or Vampire or PbtA, and the death was interesting, then sure, let's get back in there with someone new!

 

[Oofta]

Except it is there in black and white in the respective rule books. That element is not even debatable. Of course play style includes preferences and decisions, which then introduces subjectivity.

And I take your point that death is more arbitrary. It certainly is, though again, steps can be taken to mitigate this. You’ve also demonstrated my point around discourse by referring to it as “player vs DM”. I have no doubt there were a myriad of bad DMs that played like that. But again, btb, it’s hammered home over and over that the referee is impartial.

I always got the impression that Gygax was very much DM vs player style DM. That he was about testing player skill.

There's nothing wrong with that if it's a style the group enjoys.

 

[SehanineMoonbow]

Only if there is an established afterlife lol. Character deaths are painful.

 

[tetrasodium]

Only if there is an established afterlife lol. Character deaths are painful.

revivify, reincarnate, raise dead, resurrection, true resurrection. There may even be others I'm forgetting

 

[MichaelSomething]

Does this look fun to you???

 

[Democratus]

The best, most epic campaign I've played in the last decade was Out of the Abyss.

We had 16 character deaths in that campaign, with 6 players at the table. It was absolutely thrilling.

The single character who survived the entire ordeal is a legend in our game group to this day.

 

[FrozenNorth]

There really isn't enough for me to go on here, but as you were there and had the extra information I'm missing, your interpretation rules.

It’s PF2, so there are some rule considerations in effect.

The previous turn, I had maneuvered next to the bandit leader so I could unleash a spell against him (we were low level, so it was a 1st or 2nd level spell). I used my last action to move away, and this is where I made my tactical error.

I had forgotten that the bandit leader had a reaction that allowed him to follow me, so at the end of my turn, he was next to me and away from the rogue. At the time, the rogue was in melee mode, so he couldn’t easily attack the bandit leader.

In PF2, movement costs an action (though you get 3 actions). So the net effect of the bandit leader using his special ability was that he lost an action getting back to where he started. The best call would probably have been to drop me and let the rogue waste an action getting to him.

But even if he cared about the other bandits, he probably should have attacked me once or twice before returning to the fray.

Overall, the effect was, I chase you down, decide you are not worth attacking, then waste an action getting back to where the action is.