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

[prabe]

I don't think that this whole thing boils down to a disagreement over "what if d&d could" so much as "some players like this better so here's why you the gm and only you the GM should step way up to make it work" vrs ""uhh no that's on the players to make it happen by setting that stage through the actions their PC's take"

I think any comment/s I make about how D&D could be run are probably better understood as applying to all the people at the table, though in any game where the GM is responsible for establishing the situations, and for establishing how elements of those situations react to the PCs, it seems as though if everything always tried to kill the PCs no matter what they do, that just might be mostly the GM's doing; and I think that's probably at least in part because the GM (and maybe the players) thinks death is the only worthwhile consequence.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Maybe you're not supposed to use those monsters in a game with no PC death.

Perhaps? But it is a lot of monsters though. I'd genuinely like to hear from "no death" people how they feel about this. Like how does it work in practice?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And that's where understanding that the rules are for PCs and not a physics book comes in clutch!

I don't think "rules are physics" but I also do not think the PCs are unique mutants with capabilities not connected to the rest of the setting. Like if every PC who tries (takes levels in appropriate class) can learn to bring people back from dead, then it would feel implausible to me that no one else could.

 

[prabe]

Death of a PC in d&d is the equivalent of loss(of a game/season/etc) in sports. In both you can pick back up & continue on after the setback but no matter what other elements you add to the game it's a universally relevant setback to die in d&d or lose in sports.

That analogy shouldn't leap to death & career ending injury in sports, it should loop back to how removing the universally relevant loss condition impacts play or the workload involved in filling the gaps created in play by removing that loss condition.

If resurrection is available, this isn't wildly unreasonable. If "death" means "make a new character," the metaphor isn't so much losing a game, or even having a bad season, as it is the team going bankrupt and ceasing to exist. I'm pretty sure that at least @EzekielRaiden is very specifically talking about "make a new character" death as a thing they, in their games, at least make very much a thing the player chooses.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I don't think "rules are physics" but I also do not think the PCs are unique mutants with capabilities not connected to the rest of the setting. Like if every PC who tries (takes levels in appropriate class) can learn to bring people back from dead, then it would feel implausible to me that no one else could.

It's not about implausible, it's about what's happening in-universe an in-narrative.

In-universe, just to many people reach the same level of power and make the choice to bring people back to life. Maybe they're just as in love with the concept of death and insistent on going against 50,000 years of human history to insist we just have toa accept it to the point of propagandizing death as we are and PCs are just the only sane people.

In-narrative (and if everyone can just assume I know they don't like narratives in this game of collaborative storytelling and not waste thread space telling me for the thousandth time, I'd appreciate it), resurrection is only available as needed for the story being told.

 

[Maxperson]

Which then brings up a question. If there are "specific ways" the genre deviates from reality, we can ask: Why those ways, and not others?

If we have a stack of thing that are all "realistic", and we discard three-quarters of them, the differentiator between what we keep and what we throw away is not "realism". So, the reason we keep death in is not actually realism. There's some other reason we keep it, and throw away the other realistic things.

The question is then what is that reason?

Realism. Realism is the reason or at the very least one of the reasons.

Realism isn't all or nothing. It's not formless unknowable void or absolute mirrors reality exactly. It's a spectrum. And our preferences can fall at different points on that spectrum depending on what we are discussing.

The percentages I'm giving are completely arbitrary to illustrate my point. The game has many different components to it and so combat can be 60% realistic, weapons and armor 75% realistic, the world(has atmosphere, land, water, etc.) 78% realistic, and races 50% realistic.

If I look at those numbers and my preferences for those categories are at least 50% for combat, at least 65% for weapons and armor, at least 84% for the world, and at least 65% for races, I will have issues with the last two categories, but not the first two. And my reasons are realism.

That's not to say that there can't be or aren't other reasons, but just that when someone says realism we can't just discount it and start looking for some other reason(s). We aren't going to have those exact percentages to go off of, but I can look at something and say that it is or isn't realistic enough for me.

And, by the way, it is a crummy accusation - I mostly run games. Death is the least interesting complication for PCs, but is it also the simplest and easiest for the GM to implement! So, if I was doing what was most convenient for ME, then I'd be eliminating a whole lot of other things before I avoided death as a consequence.

Death doesn't have to be the most interesting. For me(and a lot of other folks going by the posts), permanent death just has to be a possibility. It doesn't have too happen every fight or even every campaign, but we need to know that it is a possibility or none of the other complications for losing a fight mean much.

For me combat is going to be ho hum boring if I know that if I lose all that will happen is the mission fails, or we get captured, or something. Those other things only really hold interest for me if the ultimate failure is one of the possibilities.

 

[prabe]

Indeed. In RAW 5e, it is pretty much impossible for anyone to "permanently and irrevocably" die.

Which I find ludicrous, drama destroying, and if assumed to be the common way the reality in the setting works, would totally change how people in the world view death.

The near-TPKs I've run recently have all been in situations where that would likely have been permanent, and we would have had to figure out what happened next. And one of them would have wiped a 19th-level party. If you think it's "pretty much impossible" to kill--even permanently--PCs in 5e, you're not trying.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Had to be said.

Especially since like a lot of things, this was not the actual intent of that ruleset, but something that emerged in the world that has been hampering their intended design.

An intended design they finally stated in the book, so at least there's that. Makes it even easier to move away from when they're clear they support a game philosophy I don't care for.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The near-TPKs I've run recently have all been in situations where that would likely have been permanent, and we would have had to figure out what happened next. And one of them would have wiped a 19th-level party. If you think it's "pretty much impossible" to kill--even permanently--PCs in 5e, you're not trying.

I mean what does "permanent and irrevocable" actually mean? Why cannot someone, perhaps another PC, bring these characters back via magic? At least in theory it should be possible. Granted, it might be much later, but still.

 

[prabe]

I mean what does "permanent and irrevocable" actually mean? Why cannot someone, perhaps another PC, bring these characters back via magic? At least in theory it should be possible. Granted, it might be much later, but still.

@EzekielRaiden has explained his meaning/s enough times that I have the explanation memorized: "Permanent" means it won't go away on its own and "irrevocable" means the players can't change it once it happens; I think it's a different way of getting to my point that it's "make a new character" as a consequence; and probably also consistent with my approach in the games I run that the fights the PCs stumble into/over very probably won't kill them but the fights they go looking for just might (in my case, I'm treating "looking for a fight" as "accepting that death is on the table"). In the games I was running this month where the parties nearly wiped, they were in places where other people didn't know where they were, fighting things that would probably have destroyed the bodied one way or another. Handwaving an NPC bringing them back to life somewhere would have been ... not really a sustainable choice, in the narrative. But the PCs didn't die, even the 19th-level party after both healers got dropped.