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%

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 don't think it's weird. I do know we had a poll here a few months back that indicated that the majority of the poll voters were in at least one consistent group that have been together for 5+ years.

Doesn't tell you anything about the wider world, of course, but it does mean in the context of the people you talk to here on ENWorld it isn't the norm.
 

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I honestly don't know. Adventurer's League rules look like they would generate a very different play environment than I'm used to.
Do you mean it as a good thing or a bad thing?

Cause whenever someone complains that D&D can't do X, people will come out of the woodworks to say D&D can do X.

If you can change D&D to suite your desires, why can't Adventurer League do the same?
 

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.
Were not saying your experience isn't true. What most of us are saying is that we play with people that we know.
The more people you game with the bigger the pool that exists to game with those people again.

Have you tried reaching out to people from previous games to get a group together?
 

Do you mean it as a good thing or a bad thing?

Cause whenever someone complains that D&D can't do X, people will come out of the woodworks to say D&D can do X.

If you can change D&D to suite your desires, why can't Adventurer League do the same?
Dosen't AL adhere to RAW so that everyone everywhere can play with everyone else everywhere else and not have to worry about house rules and differing playstyles? I have zero experience with organized play.
 

Dosen't AL adhere to RAW so that everyone everywhere can play with everyone else everywhere else and not have to worry about house rules and differing playstyles? I have zero experience with organized play.
In theory, yes.
In practice, no.

I read of some experiences where AL was just a label and the local group just did whatever. It's like franchising in that individual owners can deviate from the rules.

Also, they have to use different treasure awarding rules to account for a large shared world.
 

Do you mean it as a good thing or a bad thing?

Cause whenever someone complains that D&D can't do X, people will come out of the woodworks to say D&D can do X.

If you can change D&D to suite your desires, why can't Adventurer League do the same?
I mean it as a bad thing, but that's just my personal opinion.
 

Dosen't AL adhere to RAW so that everyone everywhere can play with everyone else everywhere else and not have to worry about house rules and differing playstyles? I have zero experience with organized play.
Yes. There's a bit of leeway for GM judgment, but by and large they're supposed to run it by the rules.
 

Dosen't AL adhere to RAW so that everyone everywhere can play with everyone else everywhere else and not have to worry about house rules and differing playstyles? I have zero experience with organized play.
If it's really a public game open to everyone and not just people playing a private game using AL mods, yes. So if it's a games store or con, it's supposed to follow the rules fairly closely.
 

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
Again:

These are online games. With more or less complete strangers.

Do you really expect complete strangers to always click?

For the various 5e games I've been in, most of them have failed because of a TPK before level 3. Often at level 1, because so. damn. many. DMs just won't start games higher than level 1. (And it's worth noting, several of these games WERE with only people I knew!)
 

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