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%

Yes it's extremely odd unless you had just started playing or are deliberately seeking out something like an open table AL game and going out of your way to avoid any sort of continuity in gm or players you were playing with. Almost every gm would develop a group of regulars and do things like ask if other GM's can take a newbie if they were full up when I was running AL twice a week for years.

It's such an unusual thing that I might consider a player saying it to be waving a red flag in ways that justify reevaluating everything they had said or done at my table/pregame chat in a new light.
I'm sorry, what? Why would this have anything to do with waving a red flag? This is incredibly confusing.
 

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I think a lot of the divide about gaming is how we experience the game. I've almost always had people in my games that I know. If I have a new player then he or she is the singular new player. Most of the time I have veterans.

With this sort of play as your norm, I can see why we are like people from entirely different planets.
Every long-running game I've been in has either been like this...where I am the single new player, or a group formed from people who applied to join and thus have no pre-existing friendship.
 

Every long-running game I've been in has either been like this...where I am the single new player, or a group formed from people who applied to join and thus have no pre-existing friendship.
This kind of makes me sad. Don't you at least develop friendships from gaming? I can see starting out when you just happen to not know anyone but after you play for a bit don't you develop some friendships and try to game with those people next time?
 

This kind of makes me sad. Don't you at least develop friendships from gaming? I can see starting out when you just happen to not know anyone but after you play for a bit don't you develop some friendships and try to game with those people next time?
Sometimes, sure. But my point was to note how there are plenty of people like me, who find games through ads on websites or in their FLGS or on forums or via Discord. There's no way those people know almost everyone at almost every game they join, that's just not feasible. To suggest that nearly everyone who plays D&D does so almost exclusively with people they know very well before any dice hit the table is...I mean I can't imagine how anyone could believe that that is true. FLGS game tables would be nearly empty if that were so. Websites like Roll20 and Myth-Weavers would be ghost towns. GITP wouldn't even have a forum for LFG/LFDM stuff.
 

Sometimes, sure. But my point was to note how there are plenty of people like me, who find games through ads on websites or in their FLGS or on forums or via Discord. There's no way those people know almost everyone at almost every game they join, that's just not feasible. To suggest that nearly everyone who plays D&D does so almost exclusively with people they know very well before any dice hit the table is...I mean I can't imagine how anyone could believe that that is true. FLGS game tables would be nearly empty if that were so. Websites like Roll20 and Myth-Weavers would be ghost towns. GITP wouldn't even have a forum for LFG/LFDM stuff.
I don't doubt there are people like you but are you really a majority of players? I would have thought 80% of players still play with a group of friends but I admit I pulled that number right out of my hat. I'm sure there are those that do both so I'm counting those I suppose.

FLGS game stores unless they are running a WOTC event like adventurer's league or something could very well house local groups. There are advantages to playing in a store even if you are a home group. I do though see what I would call a lot of adventurer's league thinking when it comes to game discussions on these boards. Not necessarily you but in general.
 

I don't doubt there are people like you but are you really a majority of players? I would have thought 80% of players still play with a group of friends but I admit I pulled that number right out of my hat. I'm sure there are those that do both so I'm counting those I suppose.

FLGS game stores unless they are running a WOTC event like adventurer's league or something could very well house local groups. There are advantages to playing in a store even if you are a home group. I do though see what I would call a lot of adventurer's league thinking when it comes to game discussions on these boards. Not necessarily you but in general.
As a datum: I started two D&D 5e tables, each in a different FLGS/playspace. I specifically set out to recruit at least some players I didn't know, and I ended up with two tables of six players, half of which were new to me (the other half were old gaming friends, same three in both tables). At least the first table, we mostly ended up as like actual friends, by the time we wrapped up that campaign something like five years later.

Obviously, not a lot of people are going to specifically look to game with strangers as a way to broaden their circles some.
 

I'm sorry, what? Why would this have anything to do with waving a red flag? This is incredibly confusing.
Easy but I'll connect the dots....
IME weekly sessions are very common to the point of being normal & 4-5 sessions is about a month or two of weekly sessions. That's a very short span of commitment where sometimes even one shots span that kind of length if the group is into it or the one shot is something like LMOP/dread metrol/etc

If a player reports that every group they join breaks down that quickly it makes it hard not to look critically at the common thread across all of those groups for warning signs
 

I think a lot of the divide about gaming is how we experience the game. I've almost always had people in my games that I know. If I have a new player then he or she is the singular new player. Most of the time I have veterans.

With this sort of play as your norm, I can see why we are like people from entirely different planets.
Can D&D cater to both kinds of games??
 

Given as I'm usually at a restaurant specifically so someone else can do the cooking, I'm not sure how this maps to what we're talking about.

You're both. You're existing within and reacting to the world already created by someone else, and at the same time you're authoring something whenever you (in-character) force that world to react to you and what you do.

See below...look for the '***' mark...

Must be nice. The great majority of the contact I have with friends these days is through the games we play in or run. Even when we gather for a party, odds are someone will end up running a gonzo one-off D&D game.

This does explain some of your stances, to an extent.

Man, you'd hate my campaigns where there's almost always more than one party in the field at the same in-game time, meaning you have to have multiple characters if only because one character can't be in muptiple places at once. :)

*** That's just it: in the moment, for me it's (ideally) not pawn stance. I'd rather be as immersed in the character I'm playing as I can, while that character is alive and in play. It ain't always perfect, but good enough is good enough. And that's where the enjoyment comes from if there's to be any: that in-the-moment play of the character.

However, I'm also capable of very quickly - as in, almost immediately - pivoting out of that immersion in order to become immersed in another character if that's what's needed to keep me in the game, e.g. when my character's died and I need to roll up a replacement. I'm also capable of bouncing from character to character in the same scene and becoming at least somewhat immersed in each; this a skill learned through 40 years of DMing where one often has to characterize and roleplay numerous NPCs within a short time, and it comes in very handy when playing two characters in the same party (a common thing here).
Yup. As a player, my enjoyment of the game is more important than my connection to any one PC, and I am comfortable keeping multiples and letting go when they die or otherwise become unplayable. None of that means I don't care about my PC while I'm playing them, or don't remember them when they're gone.

I guess it's how I was raised as a gamer.
 

Is it really that weird? People put up postings looking for players or games all the time. Are they really shouting into the void so much? It just seems very strange to me that we have not just one website, but many websites (and forums, and Discord servers, and...) where people look for players and/or game-runners and seem to actually succeed a fair amount of the time. Almost all of those games are going to be ones where you know at best one or two people at the table beyond "I read their posts on a forum" level. (Which is part of what I mean by "loose acquaintances.")
I've had many experiences with gaming with strangers or loose acquaintances, but they were all one-offs or otherwise extremely short term. The vast majority of gaming I've done is with people I know, usually friends.
 

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