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

[Desdichado]

Depends on the character. Some of them need to die every session

 

[Chaosmancer]

That all sounds fine, but how can you have that fear, that threat, if it is never backed up because death is "disappointing"? I don't see a way for the fear of death to work if actual death can't.

Why do rollercoasters trigger fight or flight responses and fear-based adrenaline if no one is decapitated riding them?

Because you don't need the thing to happen to have the excitement.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Why do rollercoasters trigger fight or flight responses and fear-based adrenaline if no one is decapitated riding them?

Because you don't need the thing to happen to have the excitement.

Agreed. Same goes for things like jumpscares in video games.

One can feel genuine fear even if the actual threat of death was never real.

And, as I have said over and over and over and over and over and over, but which somehow keeps getting forgotten or overlooked or just plain "nuh-uh!!" dismissed: I don't want to get rid of all deaths. The one, and only, type of death I want to address is RPI death.

As some (non-exhaustive) examples of what is NOT an RPI death:

• Since this comes up so, so often: Player intentionally being stupidly reckless and foolhardy and taking a deadly risk
• PC going into deadly danger, player knowing it is deadly danger, and expressly accepting that consequence
• PC dies in a way that can be realistically fixed (healed, raised, whatever) within a reasonable amount of time (different people have different standards of what is "reasonable"--I would personally say, don't make folks wait more than 2 full sessions).
• PC dies, but player continues to play in some form of afterlife or the like, while the other PCs try to figure out a way to fix it
• PC dies like how Westley does in The Princess Bride, e.g. "mostly dead" is still "slightly alive"
• PC dies and player decides they're cool with that result and will build a new character instead
• PC would die, but gets saved by a powerful force (which may now expect some tit-for-tat)
• PC dies, other PCs make a desperate gamble, temporarily restoring them so they can try to find a permanent solution
• PC knows they have a get-out-of-death-free card, e.g. a brooch with a diamond in it to pay for a resurrection
• All of the PCs die (TPK!), but they are then revived sometime later, perhaps much later, in a Much Worse world than before
• PC was actually knocked unconscious and captured, now the party must rescue them
• PC dies, and meets Death or some other entity, which offers a bargain in exchange for survival, which PC may refuse
• PC dies taking down their nemesis, a BBEG-type, or some other powerful foe, leading to a celebrated end
• PC should have died, everyone knows they should have died...but they didn't. What the hell is going on?! (Adventure to find out)

I'm absolutely certain there are many more examples that I can't think of off the top of my head. (Considering I've extended this list two times already just while typing out these sentences, I feel quite confident this is true.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Why do rollercoasters trigger fight or flight responses and fear-based adrenaline if no one is decapitated riding them?

Because you don't need the thing to happen to have the excitement.

To be fair, people die on roller coasters. It can happen. But not in a game, on your couch with your friends, with a beer and a bowl of pretzels, when you've decided nothing can kill you if you don't want it to.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

As some (non-exhaustive) examples of what is NOT an RPI death:

• Since this comes up so, so often: Player intentionally being stupidly reckless and foolhardy and taking a deadly risk
• PC going into deadly danger, player knowing it is deadly danger, and expressly accepting that consequence

Again, these seem like default assumption of being a D&D adventurer for most people.

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm not saying that a character I play should never die, just that I wouldn't want it to happen. If it does, then it does. No issue there.

I also thought that your original post came off feeling a little at odds with itself because of how you used "want" and "but could" for the as a player then switches to just want for the as a gm bit. In most threads that's probably not going to cause any confusion, but this one started from a disagreement over if PCs plausibly could with rules as written 5e and there have been a couple extremely vocal advocates for some flavor of "PC death should only be possible if the player approves" on top of the new dmg doing away with basically all of the optional/variant rules except for a new one granting just that.

 

[DragonLancer]

I also thought that your original post came off feeling a little at odds with itself because of how you used "want" and "but could" for the as a player then switches to just want for the as a gm bit. In most threads that's probably not going to cause any confusion, but this one started from a disagreement over if PCs plausibly could with rules as written 5e and there have been a couple extremely vocal advocates for some flavor of "PC death should only be possible if the player approves" on top of the new dmg doing away with basically all of the optional/variant rules except for a new one granting just that.

I'm not the greatest at wording things in a written forum style, so apologies if it wasn't as clear as it should have been.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Again, these seem like default assumption of being a D&D adventurer for most people.

And yet, whenever this conversation comes up, I am told point-blank that if this one very specific, very narrow type of death, one that results from stupid crap that happened out of the blue without any ability to address it or any hope of recovery, if that kind of death isn't present, I've somehow destroyed all possiblity of stakes and challenge and meaning and turned the game into a rubber-stamp automatic win society where nothing difficult or interesting ever happens.

Perhaps you can now see why I get so annoyed by these accusations, if you think that many of the things that I'm perfectly comfortable with are, in fact, normal events that would happen in the course of a campaign.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And yet, whenever this conversation comes up, I am told point-blank that if this one very specific, very narrow type of death, one that results from stupid crap that happened out of the blue without any ability to address it or any hope of recovery, if that kind of death isn't present, I've somehow destroyed all possiblity of stakes and challenge and meaning and turned the game into a rubber-stamp automatic win society where nothing difficult or interesting ever happens.

Perhaps you can now see why I get so annoyed by these accusations, if you think that many of the things that I'm perfectly comfortable with are, in fact, normal events that would happen in the course of a campaign.

What sort of stupid out of the blue crap? Do you mean old school untelegraphed instakill traps and stuff like that? Because I'm not a fan of that sort of a thing either.

 

[Chaosmancer]

To be fair, people die on roller coasters. It can happen. But not in a game, on your couch with your friends, with a beer and a bowl of pretzels, when you've decided nothing can kill you if you don't want it to.

To be equally pendantic, plenty of people have died sitting at home.

Any rollercoaster deaths are either because 1) The Rollercoaster was damaged, poorly designed, or otherwise not working as intended (just like a game designed not to kill people out of nowhere leading to a death) 2) They had an extreme medical condition they were unaware of and should not have been on the ride in the first place.

And honestly, this whole thing seems to come down to an unsubstantiated claim you keep making (Well, two since no one has actually said that they want to completely remove and prevent all death under all circumstances). That you would be able to tell. You keep jumping to that conclusion, that the moment you "figured it out" everything would come crashing down. But... how would that happen?

See, there is this odd little thing that keeps happening in these discussions. To "prove" that a game without death cannot work, people insist on PCs taking suicidal actions, basically daring the DM to kill them (which, again, all of us advocating on the other side have said we would not find that behavior acceptable). But, if that's what it takes to "prove" the game isn't going to kill your character... when do you decide to do those suicidally dumb things? In Lanefan's game, for an example, I doubt I would enter a room without a half page checklist of things to do or confirm just to avoid instant death traps. I'd never end up running towards a dragon in nothing but my night shirt, to "prove" he wouldn't kill the character. So you start from the premise that you would know, then add in that you would intentionally sabotage the game to "prove it" which if you were wrong (or we just didn't feel like dealing with) ...would end with your character dead and the theory unproven.