D&D 4E Fun to die in 4e?

[(contact)]

Sure, why not just buy Adventurer's Insurance from the Delver's Guild?

A group I used to play with kept a portion of treasure aside as a 'widows and orphans fund,' and another group all tithed in to a "raise dead" pool.

 

[Henry]

I've said it before, and I'll reiterate -- so many of the "war stories" gamers tell one another involve the death of one or more Player Characters in a past campaign in interesting or humorous ways. If a monster just beats you bloody, that often doesn't stick in our minds. Getting run over by the Steam Golem, being paralyzed while hanging from a dragon's neck and falling 3000 feet to your death, being spattered on a wall fired from a trebuchet, being petrified and made into a lawn ornament, disintegrated in mid leap over a chasm - all these make their way into "gamer legend". Even the famous "Gazebo story" involves a capricious and annoyed DM and an instant-kill effect from a monster.

The balance is making sure you don't die too often in the sum total of games played - that's the trick.

 

[hong]

In Halo and other contemporary FPSes, death is literally just an inconvenience. You don't even have to spend 5000gp to be raised, you come back 10-30 seconds later exactly as you were (maybe missing a few of your guns, but that's it). Earlier games made you reload a save, but often you could save anywhere you wanted, so again there was no huge issue. Nor is there any levelling up: Gordon Freeman in Half-Life is Gordon Freeman, regardless of whether you've been playing 10 minutes or 10 hours, so there is no huge investment (of time and/or emotion) that can be lost. Under these circumstances, death is no barrier to fun.

I am all for this sort of death. In my last campaign, any character who died could, if the player wanted, just come back after the fight. They would be beaten up and bloodied (-1 hp), but alive. They were just "knocked out"/"mostly dead" instead of all dead, but people were too busy to check at the time.

It worked very well. At high levels, resurrection magic makes death a bit of a joke so it didn't affect game balance much. Further, in terms of risk and reward, everyone knows when you've been pwned. Just because you can get up afterwards doesn't erase the fact that you got knocked down. Thus there is exactly the same sort of excitement as associated with the risk of death (which is entirely illusory anyway, since we're talking about imaginary people in an imaginary world).

 

[KarinsDad]

Although an occassional death can be fun and exciting for the group or the player, 3E DND, unlike computer games, requires a lot of work to craft a new PC. Even getting one raised from the dead tends to leave the player of the dead PC out of the action for some length of time (maybe even hours).

So I suspect that dying in a computer game has less negative emotional impact than in DND as a general rule. It is only when the death was extremely classic or funny or worthwhile does a DND death become a positive experience for the player.

 

[(contact)]

IGetting run over by the Steam Golem, being paralyzed while hanging from a dragon's neck and falling 3000 feet to your death, being spattered on a wall fired from a trebuchet, being petrified and made into a lawn ornament, disintegrated in mid leap over a chasm

Boy, that must have been a fun session.

 

[Henry]

Boy, that must have been a fun session.

True, Tomb of Horrors is a pretty good dungeon.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I've said it before, and I'll reiterate -- so many of the "war stories" gamers tell one another involve the death of one or more Player Characters in a past campaign in interesting or humorous ways.

Bad experiences often make for good stories. As evidence I cite ab3's wonderful tales, which were inspired by truly awful gaming sessions.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I was listening to the music from Knights of the Old Republic while reading this, and that reminds me of something.

In KotOR, you don't really "die" unless the entire party "dies".

If one PC (of the 3-man party) drops, the other two can keep fighting. If a second PC drops, the third can keep fighting. Only if all three drop do you get the "you're dead -- reload?" screen.

Could this work for D&D? If a character drops to -10 (or 0, or some other number), he's "out of the fight"*, but the other PCs battle on. As long as at least one PC survives the encounter, the "out of the fight" PCs "wake up" afterwards, at which time they can rest, get healed up, move slowly, etc.

* "Out of fight" doesn't preclude in-combat healing, of course. E.g., in KotOR, you can use Force powers to revive fallen comrades in-combat, rather than waiting for the fight to be over.

I think this has some potential. It preserves the chance of lethality -- a TPK would still be a TPK -- yet it removes a lot of suckiness of character death.

 

[Remathilis]

My Cavaet: Sure its fun to die when death has no real "value". If I can just reload my character (like in a FPS or MMORPG) I don't often care (beyond the initial bummer). In D&D, if my character dies, he's toast (until Raise Dead enters the picture). So my concensus: Give me a game where Death is Meaningful & Rare or a game where Death is Common but Reversible. Anything else is just not fun.

 

[Gentlegamer]

It was fun for me to die several times when I first starting playing the game. I learned something new each time and while my player character was dead and unable to gain XP, I gained valuable experience. Eventually, my player skill advanced enough to survive low levels. At higher levels, knowing that discretion is the better part of valor (learned from experience playing D&D) saved me from combat death on many occasions, while cautious, reasoned approaches to other risky situations saved me from sudden death. If I had died, I would have learned a new lesson to add to my experience for the next time I played the game.