This is an incredibly strange post. Was there a forum glitch?
Anyway, by that definition there is no such thing as random PC death. I'm not going to engage with a useless definition of a word.
Random PC death is when the PC dies without any narrative leadup or payoff, as a result of dice rolls rather than because the PC bought into the development. The coup de grace can occur because the PC radomly got dropped. There are rare cases where that can be turned into a moment of significance, such as with Mollymauk's death in campaign 2 of Critical Role. When there isn't a satisfying or fun opportunity of that kind, I don't use it.
If you have some comment or question about that that isn't nitpicking wording, I'm happy to have that discussion. I won't engage any further than I have with any sort of nitpicking.
Not sure this is what you mean at all, but if a PC’s death is not random in the moment, then it is…. planned? That actually sounds much, much worse, IMO.It's very much random. Non-random would be a death with narrative lead-up and/or payoff. If it's just done because there is an opportunity and you want a deadly game, it's random.
When I do seek deadly combat, I simply use deadlier enemies.
Right, we don’t play meat grinders, but also I don’t enjoy PC deaths that don’t have PC buy in to the story of that death.Not sure this is what you mean at all, but if a PC’s death is not random in the moment, then it is…. planned? That actually sounds much, much worse, IMO.
If we’re playing a campaign where death is on the table, then some combo of dice rolls in any deadly encounter could lead to it. Especially for those who roll in front of the screen. Randomness is a part of the game (unless you follow the philosophy of “Ignoring the Dice” espoused in the Role of Dice section of the DMG). Ideally, there is a story flowing through the entire campaign - that can change as a result of the choices made by the PCs and subsequent rolls - that provides context for the campaign being deadly (or at least having the potential to have deadly encounters at times).
I suppose saying that one does not want death to be random could be considered casting a vote against playing a campaign where there is little to no story and is just a meat grinder.
That’s it. If you have someone bearing down on you, I don’t see “making sure” about someone at your feet.I think attacking downed player characters is a good thing to do if the rest of the party are making themselves unreachable leaving one Pc to tank. The dire troll the party were attacking on Wednesday attacked a downed Pc because one of the other PCs hid in a narrow space and the other flew into the air with magic. No person left behind.
My personally? This is precisely why I've gone the "replace 3 death saves with the Exhaustion chart" route. Because getting someone to 0 HP then requires 6 "failures" to die, rather than 3. Thus I can hit unconscious characters and not feel bad about it, because its still going to require two or three total hits of that sort to kill them that way. But at the same token, PCs are going to suffer the effects of going to 0 and gaining Exhaustion levels in future combats even if they didn't die (because of the penalties exhaustion puts upon them.) What this means is that Death is no longer the punishment for combat... it's all the issues that come with Exhaustion that will "challenge" them in the future.
That's an excellent point. If NPCs got death saves, you can just about guarantee PCs would perform finishing actions, whether it makes narrative sense or not. Why can't NPCs do the same?Sure, but then I imagine players will occasionally spend their action attacking 0HP named creatures.