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

[MichaelSomething]

I suspect they don't emphasize those things because WotC wants death to be a speed bump so players can keep playing their superhero PCs with little interruption, and because WotC worships at the altar of Simplicity, and those factors raise the dreaded spectre of Complexity.

It is WOTC forcing a playstyle or is it WOTC listening to the players and giving them what they want???

 

[prabe]

I honestly feel like if players want their DM to do things because it will make them happy....is a pretty good reason for them to DM themselves.

The main reason I started running games this time around was because no one else I could find was running the sorts of games I wanted to be in.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I honestly feel like if players want their DM to do things because it will make them happy....is a pretty good reason for them to DM themselves.

One reason why I DM. I don't expect the DM to cater entirely to my preferences.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It is WOTC forcing a playstyle or is it WOTC listening to the players and giving them what they want???

Who can say? Saying people want something with a big enough platform and people will accept it and stop looking for other options (if there were even aware of other options).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Dupe post

 

[prabe]

One reason why I DM. I don't expect the DM to cater entirely to my preferences.

Yeah, the problem with all those games people were running that I didn't want to be in was me.

 

[Queer Venger]

My last session was a TPK, (we've switched to the revised 5e rules) my players were shell shocked.

 

[soviet]

The real question is how many players should die and I don't think the answer is zero

 

[Lanefan]

Yep. Deaths are not created equal, so to speak.


An irrevocable but impermanent death is, as noted above, stuff like what happened to Sheridan. There was nothing any of his friends or loved ones could do to save him. As far as they were concerned, he was dead and gone. But Lorien's intervention made the death impermanent, meaning he would come back to life, it just would take time. This was represented as, effectively, Lorien gently guiding Sheridan to a profound personal epiphany, which would permit him to face death without fear, while still wanting to live. ("You're not chasing life, you're fleeing death!"/"Do you have anything worth living for?" "Delenn!") Parsed as a D&D party, something very easy to do with much of the B5 universe, JMS loves fantasy tropes in his sci-fi, this is pretty clearly the party having to struggle and suffer without a beloved and important character while the DM cooks up something suitably dramatic for that player's triumphant return a few sessions later.

Sorry, but I've no idea who or what Sheridan and-or Lorien are so this example goes completely over my head.

They may not be totally incompatible, but they are often at loggerheads. You have to want a very specific kind of story--a story that only forms after the action, not before nor during--and you have to be supremely tolerant of constant dead ends,

Well, yes, to me it goes without saying that the story forms post-hoc; particularly in a more sandbox-y game where there's little if any long-term aforethought to what happens next.

And dead ends are a fact of life. We're not writing a novel here. Repeat: we're not writing a novel here. There can and will be many plots and sub-plots, stories and sub-stories, and some of those will for any number of reasons end up going nowhere. So be it.

The problem is, for a lot of people, there is no group story without the individual stories. For them--for me!--this is like saying, "the group story of the building is more important than the individual story of any one brick, so we can just allow 90% of the bricks to be broken before we use them, the building will still be what matters!" That's where the key breakdown point comes. You see the party story as being, in a sense, wholly independent of the individual stories. I see the two as fully co-dependent. You cannot have the individual stories without a party story for them to play out within, but you cannot have a party story without the individuals who make up that party. The more you lose of that party, the more the story decoheres until it's an utter mess.

There's 4000 bricks that went into the finished building and another 5500 that were discarded or broken along the way. What matters is that the building was eventually built, and that each brick - whether used in the finished product or not - had its role.

And 40+ years of doing this tell me loud and clear that yes you can have a party story that continues and flourishes even as the membership of that party changes over time and maybe even turns over completely.

During my current campaign I ran a 5-adventure "desert" arc made up of three (modofied) published modules and two homebrew. The payoff at the end, after numerous sometimes-self-inflicted twists and turns, was that the party had to decide* whether to awaken a sleeping deity (very bad idea!), destroy that sleeping deity (very bad idea!), do nothing and leave (punting the choice down the road until someone else came along), or stay there forever and guard the deity so nobody else could ever make that choice. (in case it isn't obvious, this was very intentionally set up as a no-win scenario)

During those 5 adventures the party went through about 30 members, some very short-lived, some who lasted onger and then died or left, and a few who made it from start to finish.

This was all ten years or so ago in real time; and sure, while there's stories still told now about what some individuals did during that run, the story that matters - and that gets retold most often - is what the party did.

* - they destroyed the deity; and parties today are still dealing with the very serious downstream effects not least of which was the planet got (temporarily, now fixed) knocked out of its orbit...

And, also from personal experience? I've lost a lot of players in my game. Not just characters, I've had at least 5 different players depart the game for IRL concerns that matter a lot more than a tabletop game does. No death involved--but with the player gone, the story is necessarily at a dead end too. It wasn't too bad when we had a player leave in the first year or so. It was a little tougher when someone left in the middle of the third year. Since then, we've gained and lost another four other players, and...yeah it's really actually starting to become difficult to keep folks invested in the "party story" because they don't have any reason to be. They hear about things that other people did years ago and it just washes over them. Without the personal connection, it's just a lot of events, and that personal connection takes a long time to build.

I wasn't there for the Battle of Hastings but I can still be interested in hearing about it. If someone only wants to be in the here and now and ignore the how and why of how things got to where they are (i.e., ignore history), that's fine; but that history is still there and cannot be denied.

 

[prabe]

The real question is how many players should die and I don't think the answer is zero

Anyone who steals dice gets the chair!