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

How Often Should PC Death Happen in a D&D 5e Campaign?

  • I prefer a game where a character death happens about once every 12-14 levels

    Votes: 0 0.0%

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.

Yes I mean in part that. That is not the entire definition of what I mean though.
 

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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.

Have I done that?* You will ruin it to some people. If those people are no present at your table, then that's hardly a problem.

(* It has been over 170 pages, so maybe I did! Who knows anymore!)
 

Sparhawk is probably the only Eddings I've never read.
That's too bad. He shows how paladins can be not lawful stupid, and get stuff done. And it's one of the few books where the main character starts in the high teens or 20th level, rather than zero to hero. Fun read.
 

Have I done that?* You will ruin it to some people. If those people are no present at your table, then that's hardly a problem.

(* It has been over 170 pages, so maybe I did! Who knows anymore!)

Actually, it can be a problem. Because if any time I make a point based on the way I run the game, and I get told I'm a horrible terrible no good DM who is ruining the game for it... then that does kind of matter. It shapes the spaces we talk it, it shapes the conversations we can participate in. Heck, we cannot discuss scenarios and plans for dealing with this narratively, without people coming out and derailing the conversation by insisting that the very idea being proposed ruins the game.

So yes, it does matter when talking to people who claim that I am ruining DND and leading us towards a future of boring pointless games, unlike the golden age they played in, that I can respond to them. If this was solely about what the people at my table liked I wouldn't be talking to you, I would be talking to them. Because you have no idea what they like.

Heck, I just had a near emergency because in my one non-death game, I had a player who felt that the combat was so difficult they could only act in the most optimal way possible, with no room for RP. That was in part a miscommunication between us (playing via discord posts is hard) but I can't be working with a player on how my game is presenting incredibly difficult challenges while also being told that my game is baby's first RPG without any hint of challenge because I didn't murder a PC in the past few years.
 

I mean, to a lot of people "I accept the risk and try anyway" is the default state of being a D&D adventurer.
Now you understand part of why I get so tetchy when people get all up in my face over "destroying" the game. Yes, that was in fact the exact word used in prior threads.

Have I done that?* You will ruin it to some people. If those people are no present at your table, then that's hardly a problem.

(* It has been over 170 pages, so maybe I did! Who knows anymore!)
If you haven't, so, so many others have already. I have been straight-up told that, because I take steps to mitigate just this one, narrow, specific form of death, I've totally deleted all possible stakes and value and made the game an instant-win, always-win experience. I've had people tell me that in this very thread. I don't recall you taking much issue with that hyper-extreme strawman of my position then, even if you weren't the person to actually say it. It'd be nice to have some backup in the future when folks accuse me of such things, because if I were a betting man, I'd bet good money it's gonna happen again. (Sadly, I am not, so no easy money for me on this one.) We're already getting a more-sophisticated, less-accusatory version of this argument from Lanefan right now: if you have any death at all (and don't accept fudging), you absolutely must have all possible forms of death everpresent, which he alleges means I have to be against all forms of death just because I prefer to mitigate one narrowly specific type.
 

I have to report that today, on the 43th session of my campaign we had our first character death. Granted, it was not a proper death as it was promptly remedied with a revivify. This looked a tad grim for the characters for a moment though and I got to describe a nice scene where Belet Ummur, the Goddess of Death arrived to collect the slain character's soul, only for him to be called back to life by his comrade.

The characters (a party of four) were on eleventh level. The death was caused by Sphinx of Judgement. (CR 11, the sphinx had somewhat boosted HP, but no flight, as Artran sphinxes do not have wings.) It was part of an encounter with a Solar Bastion Knight (CR 9) and 12 Veterans (CR 3.)

The party had had one encounter previously, but they had taken a short rest after it so were almost in full resources.

This was a CR 23 encounter by 5.0 rules so about 4.5 times the deadly difficulty, and by 5.5 rules a CR 18 encounter, 1.25 times the high difficulty. (The enemies had also four commoners on their side, but I did not count them for the encounter budget, and all of them died of AoE before doing anything useful.)

I think it shows how massively the encounter difficulty maths is changed with the 5.5. update. I made these calculations only after the game, I had just eyeballed it like usually do, and it was supposed to be a really tough fight. I am actually surprised how close to 5.5 recommendations my guessing ended up. But yeah, it seems WotC agrees with my assessment that the encounters can be way harder than they were and have adjusted the maths accordingly.
 
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It wasn't a film. It was a British person who talks about Britain, reporting on an article published in Britain, about this exact thing. Possible I could have misunderstood them, but it was a 60 second short talking about a news article.
It is correct that the PM regularly meets with the monarch to discuss/explain policy. It is incorrect to suggest that the monarch has any control over policy, or would ever reject "advice" to assent to a bill.

(I put "advice" in inverted commas because that term is a euphemism - it describes a particular type of instruction in a Westminster constitutional monarchy, namely, the instruction given from the political leadership of the government to the monarch or the governor-general.)
 


I can claim it is bad because it objectively punishes players for doing the thing they are encouraged to do. A ball covered in razors is objectively bad for Football, as it would discourage people from catching and holding the ball.

A monster whose only purpose is to punish listening at doors and information gathering, in a game where that behavior is VITAL to your success, is just objectively a bad monster to use. Especially since the punishment is harsh, and the solution trivial and simply a matter of having thought about worms that burrow out of doors and into your ears ahead of time. Which is not something you should expect, because unlike things like "large spiders" or "sneaky monsters" or "traps" those sort of ear worm monsters are not a common part of fantasy that could be reasonably expected.
I don't personally know the history of the ear-seeker as a monster.

But to me it seems to resemble a host of other monsters that make no sense except as part of a dungeoneering "arms race" between GM and players. Trappers, mimics, lurkers above, piercers, many of the moulds and jellies, gelatinous cubes, rot grubs, etc are all in this category. As I've already posted, I think it is a weakness of classic D&D to include all these monsters in the monster roster without any discussion of their rationale, how and why they were invented, etc.

Being used in the appropriate context makes them no more degenerate than covered pits are. The latter are easily defeated/circumvented by prodding with a pole. So they are fun/interesting/challenging once or twice, but then lose their charm. Ear seekers or rot grubs are much the same: they are rather easily defeated/circumvented by inspection, use of mesh-covered ear trumpets, etc. So after the first one or two times they also lose their charm.

What this really brings home, to me, is that the replay value of simple dungeoneering, in D&D, is not all that high. Gygax himself seems to have recognised this, in his DMG discussions of the level at which experienced players should start the game (p 111).
 

It is correct that the PM regularly meets with the monarch to discuss/explain policy. It is incorrect to suggest that the monarch has any control over policy, or would ever reject "advice" to assent to a bill.

(I put "advice" in inverted commas because that term is a euphemism - it describes a particular type of instruction in a Westminster constitutional monarchy, namely, the instruction given from the political leadership of the government to the monarch or the governor-general.)

Coming in at page 172 of a discussion about character death and finding people talking about the British prime minister is almost surreal.

As for my answer to the OP I feel a character should die (in 5E) any time they reach 0 hp and fail three death saves. How often this happens would entirely depend on the campaign and the decisions of those involved in it.
 

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