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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Do players even like the risk of death?
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<blockquote data-quote="Maxperson" data-source="post: 8270485" data-attributes="member: 23751"><p>My group invests and spends time on their PCs, and wouldn't dream of trying to remove death from the table or view such a loss as a bad thing. So long as death isn't common, it's okay to do both. </p><p></p><p>In my last campaign I had 3 deaths, which is higher than usual. Typically a campaign of mine has 0-1 PC death, so 3 was pretty high.</p><p></p><p>The first death was to a Banshee. 3 of the 4 PCs failed their save, leaving the Barbarian to try and fight the Banshee and save everyone, which didn't work out well. One of the 3 PCs failed all of his death saves. Cause of death: Bad luck.</p><p></p><p>The second death was to a group of Spawn of Kyuss. They had been dutifully getting rid of worms for most of the fight, then one player inexplicably decided not to and ended up with the worm burrowed and no magic to stop it from killing him. Cause of death: poor decision making.</p><p></p><p>The third death was to an encounter that had been designed as a deadly challenge for the group. They had encountered it and it had used hit and run tactics, vanishing from sight. They knew it was powerful, but decided to split up and look for it. The afore mentioned Barbarian encountered it alone and while he did more than half its hit points in damage before he died, he died. Cause of death: poor decision making.</p><p></p><p>I will never step in if a PC is dying due to a poor player decision. That's player experience and I want high level players <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I will step in if extreme bad luck happens, such as my rolling a bunch of 20's for the monsters at the same time as the players are rolling a bunch of 1's. The party shouldn't die to extreme bad luck, so I will fudge a few rolls to make the fight more even. They can still lose or even TPK, but the extreme bad luck won't be the cause. With the Banshee, the whole challenge of it is the occasional bad luck, so I didn't change anything. Without bad luck, it's a cakewalk encounter.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Maxperson, post: 8270485, member: 23751"] My group invests and spends time on their PCs, and wouldn't dream of trying to remove death from the table or view such a loss as a bad thing. So long as death isn't common, it's okay to do both. In my last campaign I had 3 deaths, which is higher than usual. Typically a campaign of mine has 0-1 PC death, so 3 was pretty high. The first death was to a Banshee. 3 of the 4 PCs failed their save, leaving the Barbarian to try and fight the Banshee and save everyone, which didn't work out well. One of the 3 PCs failed all of his death saves. Cause of death: Bad luck. The second death was to a group of Spawn of Kyuss. They had been dutifully getting rid of worms for most of the fight, then one player inexplicably decided not to and ended up with the worm burrowed and no magic to stop it from killing him. Cause of death: poor decision making. The third death was to an encounter that had been designed as a deadly challenge for the group. They had encountered it and it had used hit and run tactics, vanishing from sight. They knew it was powerful, but decided to split up and look for it. The afore mentioned Barbarian encountered it alone and while he did more than half its hit points in damage before he died, he died. Cause of death: poor decision making. I will never step in if a PC is dying due to a poor player decision. That's player experience and I want high level players ;) I will step in if extreme bad luck happens, such as my rolling a bunch of 20's for the monsters at the same time as the players are rolling a bunch of 1's. The party shouldn't die to extreme bad luck, so I will fudge a few rolls to make the fight more even. They can still lose or even TPK, but the extreme bad luck won't be the cause. With the Banshee, the whole challenge of it is the occasional bad luck, so I didn't change anything. Without bad luck, it's a cakewalk encounter. [/QUOTE]
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Do players even like the risk of death?
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