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

[Lanefan]

Some players do, some players don’t. Anecdotally, I’ve observed that people who started playing with 3e or later tend to be more averse to character death than players who started with 2e or earlier, though of course there are many exceptions.

I second this motion.

I think as the game has gradually shifted focus from loosely structured campaign fronts towards semi-linear adventure paths, and as character creation has gotten more involved, the appeal of character death has waned. When the game is about the story of a group of adventurers on an epic quest, the death of a character is far more disruptive than when the game is about exploring an unknown environment and looting it of valuables.

A very common sentiment I’ve seen expressed by players who started with WotC-run D&D is that they don’t want character death to be off the table completely, but they don’t want character death to feel meaningless. They want it to be appropriately dramatic, and to mean something in the story. They don’t want to just open a chest that turned out to have completely untelegraphed animated laundry and die from being strangled by socks in the third session (this actually happened to me once. It was pretty funny.)

The cynical SOB in me says it's a predictable, if sad, outgrowth of the rise in player entitlement starting with 3e (or even late 2e?) and continuing from there.

Less cynically, you're absolutely right when you say that the rise of the adventure-path or single-storyline campaign plays a role. There it's only natural that the players want their characters to last through the whole thing, or failing that, to go out in a pre-approved blaze of glory.

Of course, there are plenty of players out there who are fine with the possibility of character death at any time. The key is really just to discuss with your players what you and they want out of the game.

If the game had no mechanisms for revival I'd be a lot less accepting of character death both as player and DM; but as those mechanisms exist I lean a bit more toward - well, maybe not quite "kill 'em all and let the gods sort 'em out" territory; but that adventuring is a damn risky way to make a very good living and sometimes your number just comes up.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Nope. The TPK happens and we reset.

This seems utterly surreal to me, I would definitely refuse to play like that. If you group likes it, good for them, I guess... Also, if only one character survives, shouldn't they just commit suicide to force the reset?

 

[Lanefan]

Well, yes. I would expect the question of whether players want or prefer character death would apply only (or mostly only) to permanent character death. Which can apply at higher levels if the PCs don't have (or lose) the spell components to cast revivify (or something higher-level) or if the people who can cast that spell are the ones to die or if the whole party gets killed.

I do agree that the spells as written allow a player to have a character permanently die (or at least be retired).

This brings out a point that probably needs raising: one's answer to these questions might well depend on whhether one is mostly playing and-or familiar with pre- or post- the 2e/3e divide. Why's that? Because before that divide, revival from death wasn't guaranteed: there was always a chance, however small, that you'd blow your Resurrection Survival roll and a temporary death would become permanent. I like this.

Further, if you did come back it'd almost always be at permanent cost of a point of Constitution; so death had a lingering after-effect. I like this too.

Starting with 3e, revival spells are pretty much guaranteed to succeed except in unusual corner cases; and starting with 4e there's no lingering after-effects. Now that 5e has made revival in the field available to anyone with a mere 5th-level Cleric handy, death really has become little more than a speed bump; and it rathr boggles my mind that even with all that there's still such vocal opposition to it from some quarters.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't like the old school fantasy Vietnam style where characters keep dropping like flies, but I definitely want the death to be a possibility in D&D, and other similar combat heavy action adventure games. I want the character death to be rare, but possible. Oh, and I greatly dislike resurrection magic* and tend to delete it from games I run. Death should be a big deal, and actually stick. Having resurrection as possibility is a total drama killer.

* Revivify is an exception, as that's more like intensive CPR.

 

[Iry]

This brings out a point that probably needs raising: one's answer to these questions might well depend on whhether one is mostly playing and-or familiar with pre- or post- the 2e/3e divide. Why's that? Because before that divide, revival from death wasn't guaranteed: there was always a chance, however small, that you'd blow your Resurrection Survival roll and a temporary death would become permanent. I like this.

I started with red book, then did 2E for the bulk of my young gaming. I can definitely say I was less emotionally attached to my characters back then. But that could be from many things: less narrative games in my local group, a mindset that valued different things, or the ease of death/level drain/stat drain, etc. Maybe all of the above.

 

[Reynard]

Consequences of failure should be directly related to the stakes at hand.

Of the PCs are delving into dark places in search of fortune and glory, then ignoble death at the bottom of a kobold punji pit is a perfectly reasonable consequence 9f failure. However, if PCs are on a quest to reunite the kingdom and reestablish the connections between the Elder Race and the current rulers, then death is likely an inappropriate consequence of failure.

Often we have these discussions/arguments and we express preferences but do not provide context. Context is everything in discussing RPGs, because every game and party and table is different.

So it is only in.the context of play that we can ask whether players want mortal risk in their game. And that is based on what they have achieved and what they have left to lose.

 

[Fanaelialae]

This brings out a point that probably needs raising: one's answer to these questions might well depend on whhether one is mostly playing and-or familiar with pre- or post- the 2e/3e divide. Why's that? Because before that divide, revival from death wasn't guaranteed: there was always a chance, however small, that you'd blow your Resurrection Survival roll and a temporary death would become permanent. I like this.

Further, if you did come back it'd almost always be at permanent cost of a point of Constitution; so death had a lingering after-effect. I like this too.

Starting with 3e, revival spells are pretty much guaranteed to succeed except in unusual corner cases; and starting with 4e there's no lingering after-effects. Now that 5e has made revival in the field available to anyone with a mere 5th-level Cleric handy, death really has become little more than a speed bump; and it rathr boggles my mind that even with all that there's still such vocal opposition to it from some quarters.

Constitution loss wasn't too bad in older editions due to how stats scaled (although it did negatively impact future rez chance).

However, we tried it for a while in 3.x and it didn't really work too well. Because every 2 points was -1 hp / level, it could result in a fairly vicious feedback loop where once your character died, they'd be more likely to die, which would cause them to be even more likely to die.

IMO, it's better suited to the older school of stat scaling, like OSR games or something like Worlds Without Number, where hp bonuses don't scale linearly, and therefore are less impactful unless you already have an unusually high Constitution (in which case losing those hp is unpleasant, but hardly crippling).

You could certainly have a chance of failure for resurrection magic in modern games. As I understand it, Critical Role does something like this where a rez requires a ritual involving a fair bit of role playing along with a check (that is modified by that role playing). It's been a while since I read about it, but it certainly has a potential place even in more modern editions of the game.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Just gonna hit stuff on the first page and most recent page because I don't have time to comb through all of 'em.

Alot of the time, D&D veterans may have criticisms that the game is a bit too easy. Its certainly easier than the older editions and player death isn't nearly as frequent, but the risk is there.

The question is: Do players actually want this risk?

Question is incomplete, and therefore unanswerable. At least two valid interpretations: (1) do all players always want this risk? (2) do any players ever want this risk? The answer to (1) is "hell no," while for (2) it's trivially "yes."

Yes, even if they are not aware of it. If the game is too easy there is no risk then I believe boredom will set in.

You'll forgive me, I hope, for having an EXTREMELY jaundiced view of any position that claims, "I know better than you do what you need, so don't complain when I do things. I know you better than you do."

It is, I grant, true that many people often do not actually know what they want, whether by actively seeking a thing that they don't actually enjoy, or by merely not actually being aware of the thing they do want. (I experienced a mix of both; I didn't even have a concept of the kind of experience that 4e D&D could provide, and I kept trying to find the right "tweaks" to fix the broken and buggy mess of 3.X so that it would be what I wanted when such a thing is mostly not doable.) But I am ALWAYS going to be EXTREMELY skeptical whenever anyone claims to know better than I do what I want--if I have no idea (or the wrong idea), I'm not going to trust some other person's idea any more than my own.

I think players want consequences. They want their actions to result in something. Some consequences will be positive, some consequences will be negative, but that's all fine... it doesn't matter what the consequence is, so long as one occurs. It gives their actions meaning.

Death is one of those potential consequences, and thus it can be included.

Completely agreed on all counts. Consequences are what matter. Well, specifically, interesting consequences. Boring or dull consequences are to be avoided. That's not always achievable, because it's not always obvious what will or won't be interesting, but the trend should be away from the boring and toward the interesting. (There are whole other worlds of conversation to have about what "consequences" actually means, in detail, but the high-level term suffices here.)

I’m not sure players can be said to universally “like” the risk of death in the game of D&D - but it is a baseline assumption of the game that PCs are adventuring in a dangerous world. So whether or not all or most or some or none “like” it, millions still meet around tables (virtual or otherwise) to play and have fun.

Agreed. But a "dangerous" world is not strictly the same as a "lethal" one--danger comes in many forms. Often, the things that hurt most are the ones that leave no physical mark--at least, not on the player character.

What type of player death risk is tolerable? Is it just the ones where no agency is had between how their character dies? If so, does that include the swing of dice?
What about deaths that occur because of a mechanic that players simply forgot? What about deaths that were preventable but only through some obtuse method, like having counterspell to avoid the cleric getting PWK'd?

Having gone through some of these myself, this is an excellent question--and difficult to answer. As others noted, system preferences usually reflect a player's tacit set of tolerable death risks.

Speaking only for myself: I dislike games that are really really beholden to swingy dice, but want to retain some swing (bounded swing, one might say) as that does add a little spice to the uncertainty. I've lost a character to a combo of swingy dice (DM happened to crit--in Roll20, so no fake rolls--on a big nasty's hardest-hitting attack just after I'd hit my "okay I need healing" point) and forgetting a mechanic (I had armor that, as a free action, gives you healing equal to your surge value 1/day--had I remembered, it would've saved the char's life). I accepted the death with good grace, rolled with it, and had some really neat story result from getting the char revived--this was at 4th level IIRC, so there was no non-quest-style way we could get a resurrection, even in 4e.

Thing is, I accepted that death because this DM had proven to me, in very short order, that he knew his stuff--and that he was, as DW puts it, "a fan of the characters." He wouldn't screw me out of this character's interesting story. In rolling with it, we got to see some really quite excellent additional parts of the story, and some brilliant roleplay from my fellow players. (You know you've been playing your Paladin right when the snarky joker of the party solemnly requests said Paladin's revival: "And he's saved us lots.....more than I usually care to admit.")

In the abstract, though, and especially as DM? I tend to avoid permitting too much of most of the above. I don't use irrevocable save-or-die mechanics so the PWK thing would never come up. If I've forgotten a mechanic, I am always happy to accommodate a player's preferred way to fix the error. If my players forget a mechanic, I try to remind them gently, not harping on things but offering suggestions. Dungeon World doesn't have overly-swingy dice, and it's very difficult for a single attack to even potentially kill a character. Etc. Death is, as I've said, still possible in my game, but it is unlikely and the players almost always have enough resources and agency to address the possibility--if they wish to.

All permanent death does is end a particular PC's story. I find that boring at times. I've been in "killer" games where everybody quit because there was no point, death was random and meaningless. Eventually the characters became meaningless and just a set of numbers on a page because there was no point in developing history, personality or story.

I know we have often disagreed, Oofta, but I could not say this better. Fully agreed. (Well, I avoid games like this, so I haven't played any, but otherwise.)

Death being off the table may make it boring for you, for a lot of people knowing that their PC could die at any time takes away a lot of their fun. To put it another way, I've run campaigns where no one died and no one was bored. There are many, many ways to fail. Death is one of the most boring failure options IMHO.

110% this. Engaging outcomes and the risk of loss. Neither wholly matches "deadliness" itself. Deadliness is one road to them, but the sights thereon may fall flat, and the weather is often bad. Other roads sometimes offer a better trip.

I think the focus on death as a needed consequence is very limiting. It puts undue focus on death as the sole motivating consequence, which means that it becomes a large focus of play.

Agreed on this (though not necessarily about the resource rate part I snipped).

And, this is a logical outcome of how the rules are presented. Death really is the only thing the rules codify as a consequence, spending a lot of pages on how it happens, how to prevent it, and how to reverse it.

Part of the problem is that "interesting consequences" are extremely difficult to codify in rules. A consequence is interesting when it matters to people. One's life is, fairly naturally, going to matter to most people, and thus makes an easy consequence for systematic approach. But things like "the people you care about," while about equally universal (almost everyone has at least one other person whose life they value), is substantially harder to codify as a rule--and that doesn't even get into things like philosophical values, organizations, places, sought objects...the list goes on. Alignment is one incredibly fraught attempt to capture philosophical-value consequences. Whether it is a problem because of its method or because such things are inherently problematic, I don't know. Given the difficulty of answering ethics questions IRL, though, I'm not inclined to be hopeful about a D&D system of handling ethical consequences, no matter how important ethical consequences are for most people.

All this to say: We spend so many pages on Death As A Consequence because no practical number of pages would be sufficient to cover any of the others.

However, every fight needs to have a purpose and a risk.

Agreed. Even "trash" fights, to borrow the MMO term, should have some purpose--even if that "purpose" isn't one that would translate into the fictional world. (E.g. "this fight is here because we need the PCs to feel time pressure," when the in-world "purpose" of the fight is...because those patrolling monsters coincidentally happened to be there at that moment. I'm pretty sure most people would call that "not actually a purpose" IRL.)

This leads into a further question: Does a loss-spiral have negative impacts on the campaign? Loss-spirals are a made-up name meant to represent a situation where a previous loss compounds on to a future loss. For example, a ritual being completed might make a certain powerful devil appear or the capturing of PC's land them in the center of the dungeon of the enemy with no resources recovered. How do you feel about these loss-spirals?

I try to avoid them, in part because yeah, I DO think they have a big risk of negatively affecting a campaign. This is part of the "controlled swing" thing: if swing is real, and you keep playing over a long span of time, eventually a "DM lucky, PCs unlucky" moment happens back to back--thus putting the PCs at a huge disadvantage for the "big fight" (as in your example), which they then lose, which puts them at an even worse disadvantage for the next fight...etc.

The problem isn't strictly the swing, but rather that no measures were implemented to correct for extreme swing, only to "keep on keeping on," as it were. Bad results make worse results more likely, and when those worse results happen they make truly awful results likely, etc. That can really sap the fun out of the play-experience if it isn't addressed, and it can be difficult to do that if you allow it to go on too long. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," but that requires really serious forethought; the alternative is, IME, to level with your players and figure out a solution together.

I usually take the prevention route, mostly by including powerful but usually-constrained allies, or consumables that are potent but irreplaceable. The natural "it can't be replaced, save it for a rainy day" instinct keeps my players from abusing the latter. Their NPC allies actually having the party's respect and trust keeps them from abusing the former. You don't ask the dragon who's legit helped you out of a couple binds to just SHOW UP every time things go wrong, because you like him and his fiancée and you don't want to jeopardize his secret mission; you don't just summon the head of the Church's internal police to help you clean out a sewer because you know he's busy with trying to prevent interplanar forces from corrupting the world.

I second this motion.

As do I, as long as it's understood as a trend/correlation, not an ironclad causative link.

Less cynically, you're absolutely right when you say that the rise of the adventure-path or single-storyline campaign plays a role. There it's only natural that the players want their characters to last through the whole thing, or failing that, to go out in a pre-approved blaze of glory.

Thing is, this sort of vein has been present in D&D ever since you had groups that weren't "descended" (educationally) from Gygax's and Arneson's tables. For very very nearly as long as there have been people playing D&D to be Bilbo dangerously heisting his way through Smaug's lair and his dwarf friends holding their own against forces a dozen times larger until reinforcements arrive, there have been people wanting to play Legolas and Aragorn and Gandalf, movers and shakers who (in one case explicitly) aren't allowed to die because they're needed, and who go on to have cool destinies or just rewards afterward (taking your outsider-best-friend to the afterlife with you, becoming king and re-enacting the most famous romance in all of history, getting to finally return to your paradise home after thousands of years, etc.)

Concerns about accurately representing fiction don't even really apply, because it wasn't about accurately representing the fiction, but rather accurately representing the personal fantasy: the heist-style play is a fantasy about doing incredibly dangerous things and being smart enough (and lucky enough) to pull it off, while the adventure-style play is a fantasy about doing incredibly dangerous things and being heroic enough (and smart enough, albeit in a different sense) to pull it off.

 

[The Green Hermit]

This seems utterly surreal to me, I would definitely refuse to play like that. If you group likes it, good for them, I guess... Also, if only one character survives, shouldn't they just commit suicide to force the reset?

It is a good thing we play with different groups then.

 

[guachi]

Heroic death, if you can pull it off, is awesome. I've had one campaign long ago that had this. We were all jealous of the player whose PC died heroically.