D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

[Chaosmancer]

Given that @Lanefan isn't arguing that at all, I'm not sure of the point. I would suggest charitably reading it as such and save yourself the frustration.

Seems odd to claim he isn't saying that, when he has directly stated that he believes the game is currently heading for destruction and being ruined for not running the way he believes it should be ran.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Sparhawk is probably the only Eddings I've never read.

Okay. Doesn't change much of any of the facts.

Of course he's not, and that's just my point: he's a good example of a grounded every-person character who can and does still hold his own in high-fantasy surroundings no matter how over-the-top things get.

Other than maybe endgame play where things tend to get gonzo anyway, not all of us are interested in exploring the "heights fantasy can go to" in our D&D games; if for no other reason than to quell the "how do you top this?" question from constantly rearing its ugly head.

So, to recap. You original point was there is a "massive flaw" in DnD, because the game has too large of a gap between a commoner and a 1st level character. You said "if WotC really want people to play a supers game why don't they just own up to that, pull off the veil, and design one?"

I responded with the point that, they are not making a super hero game. They are making a high fantasy game, with incredible power in the hands of the characters, like you can see in High Fantasy.

You responded to the very first line in my post, thinking I was speaking about a different character with the "Duels a god" scene from Sparhawk, and said Durnik is a "better example".

And now you are doubling down, on Durnik being a better example... of a grounded everyman who is "normal". Which was NOT my point.

Do you know how you can tell Durnik is normal? Because he isn't the master super spy Silk, or Barak who is an oathbound warrior who magically transforms into a bear. He isn't the chosen of destiny, the nearly immortal wizard, or the nearly immortal sorceress. He can't walk through solid stone like Relg, or is a master alchemist and poisoner like Sadi. Sure, Durnik provides a nice contrast to this team of wildly magical and extreme people, these figures of myth and legend who are beyond normal people.

But.... those are the other characters in the series. Those ARE the rest of the party. So, if the game is HIGH FANTASY then not every single character in every single party starting at level 1 should be Durnik. He's unique in his common status. Sure, he is a great example of that trope, but that trope exists because MOST characters in high fantasy novels are exceptional and beyond what normal farmhands in a village are capable of doing.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Mechanical loss conditions are an ingredient that make a game good by their mere presence; as without the possibility of loss, achieving mechanical win conditions becomes hollow. In modern D&D death is the only mechanical loss condition of any relevance remaining; if there were others - level loss, major item and gear destruction, etc. - then character death wouldn't be the sole focus.

False. Completely false.

Dark Souls, Blood Borne, Elden Ring. All immensely good games, whose entire premise revolves around death being merely a setback. Lack of death does not make your victories hollow. It has been a core part of... heck considering save files, lack of any mechanical loss conditions have been a staple of video games for multiple decades. And they certainly don't feel hollow to the people who devote their lives to them.

And in how many of those tons of games was-is death completely off the table? And-or, in how many of those games was-is death replaced by another equally-penalizing mechanical loss condition?

All of them? That was my entire point?

 

[Chaosmancer]

They are valid, but they require the GM to carefully craft the fictional situations so that they're present. This is much harder to do, especially consistently and for every fight, than just clear mechanical defeat condition outlined by the rules. That's why narrative defeat conditions cannot be the only defeat conditions for a combat heavy mass market game aimed at participants of varied level of skill and experience. This obviously does not mean narrative defeat conditions should not be present; they should and your game will be better with them.

Being hard doesn't mean you can't do it.

Being captured, dragged off to a nest, or any of a literal hundred different things can still be defeat conditions for combat, even if DEATH!! isn't a defeat condition.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Just to balance it out, while I know @Lanefan and I have very different approaches to our own games, we are entirely in sync on not getting attached to our characters.

That has nothing to do with being jaded, my attitude hasn't changed in that regard in 30 years. I was as unattached to specific characters at age 15 as I am right now.

Characters, for me, have always be fungible toys; costumes to put on at the table for the purposes of playing the game. I enjoy coming up with some interesting backstories for the characters, or thinking about funny things they could do at the next session, but I'm also perfectly happy to push the character into deadly situations just to create an interesting situation at the table.

And I do the same sort of imaginings for important NPCs I make, it helps me to develop a picture to portray them better at the table. But the end is always the same; I'm deepening my picture of the character to make play at the able more responsive (since I understand them better, I can respond more quickly to changing prompts.) But the goal is always better play at the table, because any character is ultimately a tool to that end.

Yes, the point of the character is to play the game. With that character. And sure, some people don't get attached to their characters, but again, I'm being told that getting attached is WRONG, that caring about your character dying and seeing it as a negative impact on the game is WRONG.

I'm also perfectly happy to push my characters into interesting situations. The fact that I am upset if they die randomly, with no purpose, and are permanently removed from the story does not mean that I treat them like a porcelain doll. Too precious to put into danger. It means I would like them to be like a Nokia phone, able to handle a heck of a lot of punishment.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

They are valid, but they require the GM to carefully craft the fictional situations so that they're present. This is much harder to do, especially consistently and for every fight, than just clear mechanical defeat condition outlined by the rules. That's why narrative defeat conditions cannot be the only defeat conditions for a combat heavy mass market game aimed at participants of varied level of skill and experience. This obviously does not mean narrative defeat conditions should not be present; they should and your game will be better with them.

Point of order: You have shown that the rules of the game cannot be written such that they expect only-and-exclusively narrative loss conditions. This is perfectly true and I have never said otherwise.

But there's an implication here: every game must have both mechanical loss conditions and narrative loss conditions, indeed, most if not all of the mechanical loss conditions that the rules support must always be present. E.g. "[narrative defeat conditions] should [be present] and your game will be better with them" only makes sense, in the context of the other things you've said, if you're already presuming that the bedrock of mechanical loss conditions is already present, otherwise there wouldn't be any loss conditions at all, which (AFAICT) no one here has ever asked for and which all of us agree would be bad.

I am only saying that, sometimes, for some sessions/arcs/campaigns/groups, hard-requiring all of the harshest possible mechanical loss conditions is a bad fit, and likewise that for some cases, narrative loss conditions are better. I'd be a fool to dismiss all mechanical loss conditions, which is why I haven't done that. I'm just saying that the universal mandates claimed by some in this thread are wrong because of their claimed universality. Lanefan has explicitly said both that without mechanical loss conditions, all successes or achievements are "hollow" and empty; and that if even one kind of death is on the table, for some reason all of them have to be on the table all of the time. The only possible conclusion to draw from these is that anyone who isn't playing exactly as lethal as he does is doing it wrong, because their successes and achievements are "hollow" unless all types of character death are an everpresent risk.

Your preferences are possible and the new version of the game even added an optional defeated condition to replace death to specifically cater to such preferences. It still of course requires the GM to avoid framing situations where the defeated characters would logically die, and I think that limits quite a bit what sort of encounters and situations you can use, but I don't see a way around that limitation in any "no death" approach.

It doesn't require that. Instead, it requires either:
1. A modicum of preparation, as I explained earlier. I've almost certainly over-prepared for this, especially given the low lethality of my game, but it really doesn't take that much forethought. Having one ally NPC who would have a vested interest in their survival is all you really need.
2. Improvisational flexibility, where you set it as a mystery, you don't know why this effect has occurred, but the group can work to learn why, how, and (oftentimes) from whom, and possibly learn to intentionally harness some of that power.
3. Systems already in place (as you noted already) that mitigate the issue directly, though I would try to avoid ham-fisted uses thereof. Subtlety is valuable.

You can still have situations where lethal danger is present. The only difference is that, barring intentional effort on the player's part (be that "no I want the character to die", "I accept the risk and try anyway", or intentionally going for "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" or whatever else), there will always be some kind of way for the player to continue participating as that character, if they wish to. There may be horrendous costs that the player is not willing to pay, or to ask others to pay; there may be horrible downstream effects from this event; there may be a lingering scar, debt, or sacrifice; etc., etc.

I make no promises that the world will be sunshine and roses, and in fact very nearly promise the reverse. The bright parts of Jewel of the Desert are truly, sincerely bright; but the dark parts are truly, sincerely dark. Chiaroscuro, not grimdark; the latter is as bad as Father Knows Best whitewashing, as both things result in being unable to see any contour or contrast. Screw up badly, at the wrong time or in the worst way? There will be permanent, possibily irreversible consequences.

I just do a little bit of effort to ensure that that one specific form of loss, the destruction of a character and thus all the emotional investment one has put into it, doesn't happen for light and transient causes. This doesn't require bending the world into a pretzel. As I have said elsewhere, multiple distinct players have, privately, thanked me for the robustness and consistency of the worldbuilding in Jewel of the Desert. The seeds are there, waiting to germinate, and they can be found and plucked out--if you can fit the pieces together early enough, which the PCs have done. They've also failed to do it at times, and only realized the true meaning of something once the proverbial trap has been sprung. That rewards perceptiveness and creativity, without mandating that the PCs must succeed. Sometimes they do; I'd say often they do, because they put a lot of effort into preparing before they set out. But sometimes they don't.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Being hard doesn't mean you can't do it.

That seems like a non sequitur given that no one has suggested that.

Being captured, dragged off to a nest, or any of a literal hundred different things can still be defeat conditions for combat, even if DEATH!! isn't a defeat condition.

Sure, But you need to build the fiction specifically to allow that. Like you cannot have ravenous zombies that eat the brains of everything they defeat etc. And being dragged off to the nest, (presumably to be eaten later,) what if you're defeated again, when you try to escape? At some point it just becomes silly for the characters to survive, so you need to carefully construct the situations so that such silliness does not occur. (Probably easier if you're willing to bend and mould the fiction and use illusionism etc.)

No one has said this cannot be done, merely that it is understandable that the default state of the game does not rely solely on this.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Point of order: You have shown that the rules of the game cannot be written such that they expect only-and-exclusively narrative loss conditions. This is perfectly true and I have never said otherwise.

Cool.

But there's an implication here: every game must have both mechanical loss conditions and narrative loss conditions, indeed, most if not all of the mechanical loss conditions that the rules support must always be present.

There is no such implication. If the GM is very good at crafting narrative defeat conditions and uses them effectively, they can be sufficient. I am just saying that the default state of the game cannot assume that to be the case.

It doesn't require that. Instead, it requires either:
1. A modicum of preparation, as I explained earlier. I've almost certainly over-prepared for this, especially given the low lethality of my game, but it really doesn't take that much forethought. Having one ally NPC who would have a vested interest in their survival is all you really need.
2. Improvisational flexibility, where you set it as a mystery, you don't know why this effect has occurred, but the group can work to learn why, how, and (oftentimes) from whom, and possibly learn to intentionally harness some of that power.
3. Systems already in place (as you noted already) that mitigate the issue directly, though I would try to avoid ham-fisted uses thereof. Subtlety is valuable.

Yes, you can do this. And the GM is in control of most of the fiction, so of course they can make it so that such events make certain amount of sense. But like I said before, powerful NPCs miraculously saving you and other such deus exes are often not well received by the players. Sometimes it works better, and people are different so some players might tolerate it more, but I'm just saying there are reasons why many GMs are somewhat hesitant to use such tools.

You can still have situations where lethal danger is present. The only difference is that, barring intentional effort on the player's part (be that "no I want the character to die", "I accept the risk and try anyway", or intentionally going for "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" or whatever else), there will always be some kind of way for the player to continue participating as that character, if they wish to. There may be horrendous costs that the player is not willing to pay, or to ask others to pay; there may be horrible downstream effects from this event; there may be a lingering scar, debt, or sacrifice; etc., etc.

I mean, to a lot of people "I accept the risk and try anyway" is the default state of being a D&D adventurer.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

I'm also perfectly happy to push my characters into interesting situations. The fact that I am upset if they die randomly, with no purpose, and are permanently removed from the story does not mean that I treat them like a porcelain doll. Too precious to put into danger. It means I would like them to be like a Nokia phone, able to handle a heck of a lot of punishment.

I want to focus on this word for a moment: "randomly"

By "randomly" do you (at least partly) mean "at the whim of the DM"? Meaning certain "gotcha" traps or ambushes where the DM has not telegraphed any sense of the danger in the area but merely has introduced a seemingly random - and pretty much unavoidable - HP penalty that could lead to character death? If that's your definition of "randomly", I'm with you and I would be upset by that as well. Primarily because there is no game there, no sense of shared narrative, it's just "tragic story hour" authored by the DM.

 

[Chaosmancer]

That seems like a non sequitur given that no one has suggested that.

Then why, as part of dimissing the strength of narrative losses, do you mention that they are "hard"? If it isn't to dismiss them and point to death being easier for the DM to do without needing to put any work in, why start talking about how hard it is to make narrative consequences for the group?

Sure, But you need to build the fiction specifically to allow that. Like you cannot have ravenous zombies that eat the brains of everything they defeat etc. And being dragged off to the nest, (presumably to be eaten later,) what if you're defeated again, when you try to escape? At some point it just becomes silly for the characters to survive, so you need to carefully construct the situations so that such silliness does not occur. (Probably easier if you're willing to bend and mould the fiction and use illusionism etc.)

No one has said this cannot be done, merely that it is understandable that the default state of the game does not rely solely on this.

Yes, you need to have the fiction in place to allow for it. So, no, you don't have the murder zombies that eat everyone drag off the TPK'd party. You have something else happen. What? Well, that depends on the fiction, doesn't it?

Hmm, someone dying a violent death in a graveyard full of necromantic energies... hey Paul, what do you think about your fighter coming back as a Reborn, some sort of revenant like creature caught between life and death?

Am I breaking the fiction? No, not at all. In fact, people coming back as undead is a bedrock part of the fiction of a DnD world where UNDEAD are what you are fighting. "Well, why is Paul's character not a mindless zombie devouring the flesh of the living?". Hmm, that is interesting. Why might they not be that? That might be something worth exploring.

And if you were Paul, and you were like, "No, that is stupid, I'd rather you kill my character and I make a new one."... GREAT! Then we kill your character and make you a new one. But the point is making it an option. Maybe when your character is dying, a Devil offers you a deal to survive, and now you have that problem to deal with. The point isn't to break the fiction into useless chunks of nonsense, all to preserve the almighty character, the point is that DnD is such a fantastical game full of hundreds of ways to preserve a character's life that there is no reason NOT to give the option.

Edit: Looking over EzekielRaiden's post, you seem to be putting a lot of emphasis on what the "Default state" of the game assumes. That is not my point at all. I don't care that the default state of the game assumes character death. My responses are crafted towards the people who keep claiming that by largely removing death without the player consenting to that death, I have ruined the game, made it hollow, or otherwise removed all point in playing the game. If your response is largely "but the game cannot assume a DM will do this" that isn't a counter -argument.