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

[Maxperson]

Which is fair, but brings up an obvious question: how else are the players to learn how to play more defensively?

And you know what? That's a fair question. Good food for thought at this end.

See my response to Vaalingrade just upthread re the difference between in-story failure and game-mechanical failure, as I could type the same thing here.

There's no mechanical cost or penalty for in-story failure, which means the only "heft" is carries is emotional; which while noteworthy for some players (of whom you would certainly seem to be one) is IMO and IME not that big a deal for most.

My game might be a middle ground, since I don't know how often PCs die in your game.

When I run things, deaths happen between 0-1 times a campaign, which runs for a year to a year and a half. Once in a while I have 2, 3 or once 4 deaths in a campaign.

In my early days of D&D I played with MANY players and DMs, but in the last 15 or 20 years, I primarily play with the same 4 guys. As a result, they have seen permanent death happen, so the fact that happens so infrequently doesn't cause them feel invincible. The KNOW that this fight could be the time someone's PC dies and doesn't come back.

When I describe a huge creature, especially one new to the players, coming out and backhanding a rock outcropping, knocking the top off and into the chasm, they sit forward very intently and take that fight VERY seriously. This happens even when I know from the monster stats and the PC abilities that death is only likely if things go so far sideways that it disappears from sight due to the curvature of the planet.

The point is that you don't have to kill off a lot of PCs and destroy player investment in other things than survival in order to cultivate that sense of preservation. My players both invest heavily in their characters, because the odds are that the character won't die, while at the same time being worried about survival because permanent death is on the table and they know it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

@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.

Right. To me "permanent" implied more flexible temporality. The thing is, as true resurrection exist, no death is really "permanent and irrevocable," in a sense that it could be never reversed. Now if the players do not pursue resurrecting the dead PCs, because it would be difficult, then that is a choice; it doesn't mean it could not be be done if they put their mind to it.

 

[DarkCrisis]

His entire thing is about the heroes knowing they're not going to die, not the player.

But I'm not getting caught in another semantic slog with you so this is the end get your last shot in and I'm just not going to reply.

I could have worded it better. "The players" instead of "The heroes".

 

[prabe]

Right. To me "permanent" implied more flexible temporality. The thing is, as true resurrection exist, no death is really "permanent and irrevocable," in a sense that it could be never reversed. Now if the players do not pursue resurrecting the dead PCs, because it would be difficult, then that is a choice; it doesn't mean it could not be be done if they put their mind to it.

If something destroys--or even captures--the soul, it is not free to return (a requirement even for true resurrection, I believe). In my settings, that's beyond what even wish can mend, and in the case of "capture" it requires some effort in the narrative; when I had PCs involved with rescuing a captured soul, it was on behalf of an NPC, and much of the legwork was done for them, and it was still pretty epic and very high-stakes.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If something destroys--or even captures--the soul, it is not free to return (a requirement even for true resurrection, I believe). In my settings, that's beyond what even wish can mend, and in the case of "capture" it requires some effort in the narrative; when I had PCs involved with rescuing a captured soul, it was on behalf of an NPC, and much of the legwork was done for them, and it was still pretty epic and very high-stakes.

To my mind, this is further proof that D&D needs some house-ruling to make death meaningful, by making it harder (but not impossible) to reverse.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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, so much as 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.

Correct. That would be why I used examples earlier where a team had a horrible season, or even a pair of horrible seasons, and yet the team still kept going. Indeed, I used the example of one where the very first two seasons the team played were utterly terrible, 26 consecutive games without a victory! Yet they kept playing and the team still exists today, almost 50 years later.

If the player doesn't want to make a new character, there are things both they and I can do to address that.

I can't know what specific classes people will play, nor how quickly they'll advance, nor what resources they'll encounter. Hence, it behooves me to prepare for the possibility that something they genuinely couldn't do anything about happens. Those preparations will continue to serve even after there's something the players CAN do about a death, so they aren't wasted, they're just another tool left in the toolbox.

Naturally, as part of this, I expect the players to meet me halfway. Treating this as "oh, so I can just do whatever wild insane crap I want and never ever suffer for it?! AWESOME!!" is one of the most efficient ways to piss me off royally. As I said before, I don't like being used, and I absolutely consider such behavior a form of being used. This is a gesture of goodwill from DM to player, ensuring that even if there are serious, permanent, unpleasant consequences, they can continue playing their PCs.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If something destroys--or even captures--the soul, it is not free to return (a requirement even for true resurrection, I believe). In my settings, that's beyond what even wish can mend, and in the case of "capture" it requires some effort in the narrative; when I had PCs involved with rescuing a captured soul, it was on behalf of an NPC, and much of the legwork was done for them, and it was still pretty epic and very high-stakes.

This seems like a narrative the GM needs to specifically to set up in order to make resurrection harder.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This seems like a narrative the GM needs to specifically to set up in order to make resurrection harder.

IMO the game should make coming back to life harder, or at least provide solid suggestions on how to do so.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

IMO the game should make coming back to life harder, or at least provide solid suggestions on how to do so.

Yes, absolutely. But doing so is super easy, barely an inconvenience. I just banned all resurrection magic apart revivify. Done.

What I don't particularly like, is for the GM leave the magic to be, but then invent various reasons why it actually cannot be used. Now rare exceptions can of course happen, but if the GM intentionally contrives ways to make the spells weaker than the players would expect them to be, then that might be frustrating to the players and I think it is fairer to just not allow those spells in the first place. Then everyone is on the same page about what is possible and what is not.

 

[prabe]

To my mind, this is further proof that D&D needs some house-ruling to make death meaningful, by making it harder (but not impossible) to reverse.

The fact the soul must be "free to return" is in the mechanics, but really I think meaning is far more likely to be found in the narrative than in the rules. I know that will kinda run counter to your preferences, but I don't mean necessarily that it needs to be some sort of climactic storybeat; I just mean that if you want "make a new character" to be available as a consequence, you can shape the situation so it's there. Granted, it's harder to make it so the other PCs can't bring back someone who dies, presuming any of them survive, but I'm not convinced that's exactly a flaw or a problem.