D&D 5E Healer's Kits, Spare the Dying, and TPK

[GX.Sigma]

Healer's Kits, as of the most recent revision, can be used at-will to bring a dying ally back up to 1 hit point (fully alive, conscious, and able to contribute in combat). Spare the dying does the same thing, but it's a swift spell. This seems like a really weird system, because it makes it impossible to die as long as there is another non-dead ally in reach.

My question is this: Has anyone seen a PC die in D&DN since this change? It seems to me that the only possible PC-death scenarios (barring instant death or similar effects) are:

1. One character runs off alone and gets killed
2. One character goes down, and the rest run away
3. TPK

It seems that a battle is only ever a total success (all PCs live, all monsters die), a total failure (one or more PCs die and the rest run away), or a suicide (all PCs die). This seems like a bad way to do lethality in a game like this. Can anyone share any stories of lethality in D&DN?

I've only had two deaths in D&DN so far: one was a 1st-level Wizard being insta-killed by Hommlet's friendly 10th-level Rogue shopkeep, and one was a 4th-level Rogue running outside his party's defensive bunker directly into enemy territory in a mass-combat situation.

 

[Paraxis]

I haven't seen any PC deaths in my NEXT game at all.

I like the drama of the death saving throw system they have though, what if they changed the healer's kit to require a roll, and the spell to give you a bonus to your saving throw or a free success towards stabilizing.

 

[DogBackward]

I haven't seen any deaths either, though I've seen some close calls. That said, I think that's a good thing... at least for the basic rules. More and more new players are coming into D&D through more storytelling-based systems or groups, and players dying as easily as they could in older editions can cause problems. It's much easier, from a design standpoint and from a marketing standpoint, to start with a base system that is very forgiving and allow for difficulty-increasing options down the line. One big benefit of this is that new players won't be so easily discouraged by losing a beloved character to the vagaries of the dice. And if you and your table want a more dangerous game, it's an easy fix, and there will likely be several nifty dials you can tweak to make it that way.

 

[Li Shenron]

I haven't seen any deaths yet but I playtested only so much...

I think there is another case possible:

4. Mass damage killing a PC instantly, bypassing the death saving throws sequence

Personally, I think these rules are because players want death to be possible but don't really want it to happen to them. They want to believe they don't die because they play well. So the designers have to constantly oscillate between introducing deadly things to the game, and then introducing a "cure" for every death when you don't like it or a rule that lowers the chance. The silly formula "characters shouldn't die unless the player does something really stupid" is just that, silly.

Honestly, I don't care that much what they do with lethality at this point, I just know they are going to change something about it at basically every iteration of the playtest rules, simply because there is no end to this process of trying to appeal two opposite things that aren't just two ways of thinking from two different groups of gamers, as much as they even are two sentiments that coexist in each player's mind.

 

[NewJeffCT]

I haven't looked closely at the D&D Next rules yet, but I liked what we did in my 3.5E game - I hammered the PCs (big group with 8 players at the end) with everything, including the kitchen sink. But, the PCs had a cleric and a psion, plus a regular NPC cleric ally and all of them had access to Revivify. So, if I hit them with Avasculate from the evil cleric in Round 1, and then the evil cleric's Ice Devil planar ally hit the same PC with a full attack and they were dropped, the party clerics or psion would then move to cast Revivify on their next turn, stabilizing the PC at -1. Then, another PC could either administer a healing potion or wand of healing to the fallen PC, or else wait for the party cleric to cast Heal.

But, Revivify stabilized the fallen PC at -1 if it was cast within a round of death - before the soul departs the body.