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

[Micah Sweet]

I don't see how this addresses @pemerton's complaint. The deaths are not going to occur in those urban areas, generally. They're going to occur, most of the time, in dungeons--often deep inside said dungeons. Hirelings that have no motivations or life other than sitting there in a previous dungeon room, so you can just immediately switch to playing them when a character dies, are pretty dramatically unrealistic. Hireling NPCs that stay back in town or guarding the horses at the entrance are NPCs that aren't accessible much of the time, thus leaving the player to simply sit there and wait to be allowed to participate again.

The fundamental issue remains.

Henchmen go into the dungeon with the PCs and accept a share of the danger for a share of the reward. Hirelings stay outside and guard the horses.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, it doesn't.

Because even if they move to another team, they still get to play football.

Also! I just looked up the team. They actually kept the head coach even after that second awful season, and said head coach took a LOT of flak for making things worse...but still wasn't removed. So even with your own attempts to make the analogy fit, it fails. Plenty of the people involved in making those decisions were making them for reasons that had nothing to do with fixing the problem (as in, the head coach wanted yes-men players, not experienced and skillful players), and plenty of the players "let go" were picked up by other teams.

So....yeah. The analogy still fails. Even after losing 26 consecutive games, there were players who were not let go from the team, the team didn't fold, the head coach and his preferred subordinates stayed, most if not all of the people let go got a new gig somewhere else, etc., etc. It really just isn't analogous to the sudden, unavoidable, pure-luck-of-the-draw death that I'm talking about.

Hence, the analogy simply does not convey what the person posting it wanted to convey. Even losing twenty-six consecutive games didn't result in the equivalent of a TPK. It just didn't, and no amount of massaging that can change it. Losing a football game is the equivalent of losing a combat in D&D--but this team did it twenty-six times in a row and didn't do ANYTHING like a TPK.

I wasn't referring to a TPK. I was referring to the idea of a party whose lineup fairly consistently turns over but not all at once.

And yes, some characters in a party could well last long enouugh to become "stars". This is in fact what I most often see: of a starting party of seven or so, three might die and get replaced in the first adventure, three in the second, and so on; and even still some of those original starting seven will survive and rise above the rest. They become the core of the party - the "star players on the team", to continue the sports analogy - while the fringes keep turning over (analagous to draft picks where some work out well and others don't) and occasionally a star retires or dies or whatever.

The Buccanneers experience you speak of, where the coach just wanted "yes-men", maps to a group of D&D players who either don't want to or don't know how to build a well-rounded party e.g. they keep sending all-Cleric parties into the field and wondering why things don't always go so well when they find themselves short of warriors or sneaks or mages.

Some stats from my game follow, spoiler-blocked to save those of you who might be bored by such:

Spoiler

The party in my current campaign's first adventure (Keep on the Borderlands) went through characters like a DCC funnel, and yet some of them went on to become superstars. The character's number (in sequence of introduction) is followed by the number of adventures it lasted where '0' means it didn't get out of this one and '2' or more represents the total number of adventures that character appeared in whether it surivved or not. '1' would mean it survived this adventure then retired, but there aren't any of these here.

The ones with bolded numbers were adventuring NPCs in the party, the rest were actual PCs. Same four players all the way through.

1. 2 - only original to survive the first adventure, died in the second one, revival went very wrong (rose as undead!)
2. 0* - died here but was revived years later on a lark, then retired; so technically counts as a '1'
3. 0 - died in the very first session
4. 0 - almost made it through, then died at the end
5. 0
6. 0
7. 0
8. 0
9. 0 - the first nine were the starting party, after this it's all replacements and recruits
10. 0
11. 0
12. 0 - traitor killed intentionally by the party
13. 0
14. 4
15. 15 - character is retired, player has left the game
16. 0
17. 0
18. 0
19. 16 - character is retired, player has left the game
20. 0 - killed intentionally by the party (very long story!)
21. 0 - killed intentionally by the party for supporting #20
22. 0
23. 0
24. 10 - character is retired but its player is still in the game
25. 0
26. 10 - character is retired, player has left the game
27. 19 - character is retired, player has left the game; 19 adventures is still tied-highest for this campaign
28. 2
29. 3 - killed intentionally by party during its third adventure
30. 6

The benchmark for inclusion in our Hall of Heroes is 10 adventures, meaning this disaster of a party still ended up producing five future Hall of Famers. The player of characters 15 and 26 might return someday once some health issues get sorted.

The best part of all this? I don't think any of us stopped laughing during that entire adventure, which took us something like 20 sessions to play. And in the end, what else really matters?

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, that's fair, but realistically, with the way people play characters today, if it takes almost five years for the character to be revived, that actually means the character never gets revived, because the campaign ends long before that. Campaigns that hit a third year are rare. We cannot design a game expecting that most groups hit that point. Because most don't.

That's something of a chicken-and-egg situation, I think. There's many tweaks that can be made to the design with the specific intent and result of making campaigns last longer provided the players and DM are willing.

My take is the game should be designed for the long haul, not to throw short-haulers under the bus but to allow both types of play to thrive.

Except that it is, if you don't start from three assumptions that are just flat not true about most games today. I already mentioned one, but I'll do both here:
1. Most campaigns run for several (3+) years, and have mostly cohesive participation across that time.
2. Most campaigns have players running several different PCs, which they rotate through regularly.
3. Creating new characters is very simple, takes very little time, and requires no special investment from the player.

The vast, vast majority of players are not interested in the second. They want to play one character at a time. Hence, if you're "handed an NPC" to play, that's effectively being told "okay, this is your character now, have fun!" And a lot of players just...aren't interested in doing that. Pregens are not well-liked, for good reason. They tell you what you WILL play, rather than allowing you to decide for yourself what you wish to play.

That's a mindset I'd like to change somewhat, not to force players to run whatever's handed to them but to be more flexible about what they're willing to play and be more ready-willing-able to quickly pivot from one character or concept to another.

It ties in with the philosophical difference in char-gen between deciding what to play after you've seen the initial rolls and going in with a preset notion of what you'll play and then using the mechanics to build it. Me, most of the time I'm all about the former, and even if-when I come in with a pre-set notion I'm ready to pivot if the dice don't co-operate.

The first, sadly, just...isn't true of most groups. Even groups run entirely with friends. I am quite well aware that my DW game is a rarity for having had a relatively stable group for so long....and even then, none of the people who started this game are still in it today, except me, the GM. I would love it if most campaigns could be expected to run multiple years. That'd be an awesome world to live in.

That's the world I - and most of the people I know who are older than college age - do live in. And good on you for staying committed to your campaign through the player turnover.

The sad fact is that we don't, and designing a rule system dependent on such things isn't going to magically change that fact.

The third hasn't been true of any edition of D&D created by Wizards of the Coast, and I would personally argue it wasn't even all that true at least by late-2e and probably a bit earlier. Blame it on Dragonlance, blame it on Tolkien fanboys pulling D&D away from the influences of Howard and Leiber, whatever--but the simple fact is that even creating a late-2e character could be quite the ordeal, and the general expectation of player investment into said character at creation, not exclusively after many campaigns, was already much higher.

Indeed, WotC-era D&D characters take far too long to roll up! Tolkein fanboys aren't the problem, though; as 0e-1e D&D was quite Tolkein-based and one could bang out a new character pretty fast.

The main cuplrits are a) chooseable feats and b) assignable skills. Skills came online in mid-late 2e, feats with 3e. Get rid of those, along with at least 3/4 of today's PC-playable species, and make everything hard-coded class abilities that come online at set levels and both char-gen and level-ups become (relatively) a breeze.

 

[Lanefan]

I have never even heard of a campaign that suffered more than one TPK. That example seems very unrealistic to me.

I know of one, that I wasn't personally in. One of my ex-players tried his hand at DMing (can't remember if he was using 3.5e or Pathfinder but that was the era) and whacked his party twice in the first five sessions he ever ran. After that he learned, and that campaign went on for three or four more years.

I do get your point, however. At some point the motivation to keep going along with the plot will change in an unfavorable way or disappear altogether. If you're playing the game as a story, that would be a real problem.

When it's early enough in the campaign that neither the story nor the characters have really got going yet, it's not as bad I don't think.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In what way does that make them protagonists in a story? Seems to me that the PCs are just people going through the world and making choices based on what they find there. That isn't a story until someone puts it together after the fact and tells it.

Because...the act of playing IS the act of telling a story? That's how PbtA games work. Gameplay is protagonism. That's the whole point of the ruleset. It is very, very carefully designed specifically for that purpose. It has been rigorously tested, to ensure that its rules do in fact fulfill that purpose. This is the big reason why the book tells you, straight up, to not break the rules--because doing so is nearly always going to be worse for telling an enjoyable fantastical-adventure story.

Maybe the issue is that I haven't (here) spelled out the"you have to do it to do it" and "if you do it, you do it" requirements? That is, in DW, it is against the rules (explicitly!) to do the equivalent of "I roll for Diplomacy to persuade the guard to let us through." (There is no direct equivalent, but the closest match is Parley.) Likewise, it is against the rules to do the things required to trigger a move and then not do that move.

"You have to do it to do it" means the character must actually do whatever it is the player wants to make happen. If you want to persuade the guard to let you through...you have to actually SAY something. It doesn't have to be a lot, and for uncomfortable players I'm willing to accept a relatively abstract description. But they do in fact have to do something. Only once they've done something, is it permissible to roll for a move.

"If you do it, you do it" is the other half of the bidirectional. The first is the "only if" part, and this is the "if" part. Now, this does not mean that the DM necessarily needs to ask for a roll, if the fiction says that success is impossible (or, conversely, if it's reasonable for success to be guaranteed). But the move itself must trigger, if the player does what is needed to trigger it.

If, and only if, the character performs the triggering action, then the move is invoked.

I have never even heard of a campaign that suffered more than one TPK. That example seems very unrealistic to me.

I do get your point, however. At some point the motivation to keep going along with the plot will change in an unfavorable way or disappear altogether. If you're playing the game as a story, that would be a real problem.

I mean, all you asked for was an example where "excessive" death derailed a story entirely.

As for whether it is unrealistic, just ask @Lanefan; he has more than once mentioned that, for his playstyle, it is purely the "group" story that matters, so even if every single character in the group dies (usually serially, not all at once), it's never a problem. So with the slight tweak that it isn't multiple TPKs, but rather full group turnover two or three times, we get an example that at least Lanefan thinks is both realistic and acceptable, but which would be pretty badly story-derailing from my perspective.

It might not be absolute, utterly-inarguable definitely derailed story. But there's definitely more than a little bit of "story getting away from us" when you have lots of turnover. I've already had some of that affecting my game, even though no PCs have outright died, because player turnover has led to character disappearance. My new players sometimes feel overwhelmed by the established context of the world. I've been pursuing many different avenues to try to help with that, but it's still an issue. Having it happen with character deaths, rather than players leaving, would only very slightly lessen the issue, since the players would again be re-investing in a new group.

Ultimately, most stories are going to face a Ship of Theseus problem if you have a serial breakdown of character-investment. There may not be any specific, single change that suddenly flips the switch from "definitely still the same ship" to "definitely not the same ship", but if anything that just makes the problem more likely to occur. Because it means different players will lose their connection at different times, and it may be very hard to actually get every player as invested as they were before. And if that effect compounds....

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's something of a chicken-and-egg situation, I think. There's many tweaks that can be made to the design with the specific intent and result of making campaigns last longer provided the players and DM are willing.

My take is the game should be designed for the long haul, not to throw short-haulers under the bus but to allow both types of play to thrive.

That's a mindset I'd like to change somewhat, not to force players to run whatever's handed to them but to be more flexible about what they're willing to play and be more ready-willing-able to quickly pivot from one character or concept to another.

It ties in with the philosophical difference in char-gen between deciding what to play after you've seen the initial rolls and going in with a preset notion of what you'll play and then using the mechanics to build it. Me, most of the time I'm all about the former, and even if-when I come in with a pre-set notion I'm ready to pivot if the dice don't co-operate.

That's the world I - and most of the people I know who are older than college age - do live in. And good on you for staying committed to your campaign through the player turnover.

Indeed, WotC-era D&D characters take far too long to roll up! Tolkein fanboys aren't the problem, though; as 0e-1e D&D was quite Tolkein-based and one could bang out a new character pretty fast.

The main cuplrits are a) chooseable feats and b) assignable skills. Skills came online in mid-late 2e, feats with 3e. Get rid of those, along with at least 3/4 of today's PC-playable species, and make everything hard-coded class abilities that come online at set levels and both char-gen and level-ups become (relatively) a breeze.

My favorite OSR game works exactly like this, and even the ones that don't follow a similar philosophy.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Because...the act of playing IS the act of telling a story? That's how PbtA games work. Gameplay is protagonism. That's the whole point of the ruleset. It is very, very carefully designed specifically for that purpose. It has been rigorously tested, to ensure that its rules do in fact fulfill that purpose. This is the big reason why the book tells you, straight up, to not break the rules--because doing so is nearly always going to be worse for telling an enjoyable fantastical-adventure story.

Maybe the issue is that I haven't (here) spelled out the"you have to do it to do it" and "if you do it, you do it" requirements? That is, in DW, it is against the rules (explicitly!) to do the equivalent of "I roll for Diplomacy to persuade the guard to let us through." (There is no direct equivalent, but the closest match is Parley.) Likewise, it is against the rules to do the things required to trigger a move and then not do that move.

"You have to do it to do it" means the character must actually do whatever it is the player wants to make happen. If you want to persuade the guard to let you through...you have to actually SAY something. It doesn't have to be a lot, and for uncomfortable players I'm willing to accept a relatively abstract description. But they do in fact have to do something. Only once they've done something, is it permissible to roll for a move.

"If you do it, you do it" is the other half of the bidirectional. The first is the "only if" part, and this is the "if" part. Now, this does not mean that the DM necessarily needs to ask for a roll, if the fiction says that success is impossible (or, conversely, if it's reasonable for success to be guaranteed). But the move itself must trigger, if the player does what is needed to trigger it.

If, and only if, the character performs the triggering action, then the move is invoked.


I mean, all you asked for was an example where "excessive" death derailed a story entirely.

As for whether it is unrealistic, just ask @Lanefan; he has more than once mentioned that, for his playstyle, it is purely the "group" story that matters, so even if every single character in the group dies (usually serially, not all at once), it's never a problem. So with the slight tweak that it isn't multiple TPKs, but rather full group turnover two or three times, we get an example that at least Lanefan thinks is both realistic and acceptable, but which would be pretty badly story-derailing from my perspective.

It might not be absolute, utterly-inarguable definitely derailed story. But there's definitely more than a little bit of "story getting away from us" when you have lots of turnover. I've already had some of that affecting my game, even though no PCs have outright died, because player turnover has led to character disappearance. My new players sometimes feel overwhelmed by the established context of the world. I've been pursuing many different avenues to try to help with that, but it's still an issue. Having it happen with character deaths, rather than players leaving, would only very slightly lessen the issue, since the players would again be re-investing in a new group.

Ultimately, most stories are going to face a Ship of Theseus problem if you have a serial breakdown of character-investment. There may not be any specific, single change that suddenly flips the switch from "definitely still the same ship" to "definitely not the same ship", but if anything that just makes the problem more likely to occur. Because it means different players will lose their connection at different times, and it may be very hard to actually get every player as invested as they were before. And if that effect compounds....

I actually forgot in the heat of the moment that you play Dungeon World. My apologies. Your position makes perfect sense from that perspective.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I wasn't referring to a TPK. I was referring to the idea of a party whose lineup fairly consistently turns over but not all at once.

And yes, some characters in a party could well last long enouugh to become "stars". This is in fact what I most often see: of a starting party of seven or so, three might die and get replaced in the first adventure, three in the second, and so on; and even still some of those original starting seven will survive and rise above the rest. They become the core of the party - the "star players on the team", to continue the sports analogy - while the fringes keep turning over (analagous to draft picks where some work out well and others don't) and occasionally a star retires or dies or whatever.

The Buccanneers experience you speak of, where the coach just wanted "yes-men", maps to a group of D&D players who either don't want to or don't know how to build a well-rounded party e.g. they keep sending all-Cleric parties into the field and wondering why things don't always go so well when they find themselves short of warriors or sneaks or mages.

Some stats from my game follow, spoiler-blocked to save those of you who might be bored by such:

Spoiler

The party in my current campaign's first adventure (Keep on the Borderlands) went through characters like a DCC funnel, and yet some of them went on to become superstars. The character's number (in sequence of introduction) is followed by the number of adventures it lasted where '0' means it didn't get out of this one and '2' or more represents the total number of adventures that character appeared in whether it surivved or not. '1' would mean it survived this adventure then retired, but there aren't any of these here.

The ones with bolded numbers were adventuring NPCs in the party, the rest were actual PCs. Same four players all the way through.

1. 2 - only original to survive the first adventure, died in the second one, revival went very wrong (rose as undead!)
2. 0* - died here but was revived years later on a lark, then retired; so technically counts as a '1'
3. 0 - died in the very first session
4. 0 - almost made it through, then died at the end
5. 0
6. 0
7. 0
8. 0
9. 0 - the first nine were the starting party, after this it's all replacements and recruits
10. 0
11. 0
12. 0 - traitor killed intentionally by the party
13. 0
14. 4
15. 15 - character is retired, player has left the game
16. 0
17. 0
18. 0
19. 16 - character is retired, player has left the game
20. 0 - killed intentionally by the party (very long story!)
21. 0 - killed intentionally by the party for supporting #20
22. 0
23. 0
24. 10 - character is retired but its player is still in the game
25. 0
26. 10 - character is retired, player has left the game
27. 19 - character is retired, player has left the game; 19 adventures is still tied-highest for this campaign
28. 2
29. 3 - killed intentionally by party during its third adventure
30. 6

The benchmark for inclusion in our Hall of Heroes is 10 adventures, meaning this disaster of a party still ended up producing five future Hall of Famers. The player of characters 15 and 26 might return someday once some health issues get sorted.

The best part of all this? I don't think any of us stopped laughing during that entire adventure, which took us something like 20 sessions to play. And in the end, what else really matters?

I'm sorry Lanefan, but you seem to have lost the thread of the conversation here. The reason the sport-game thing was brought up was very specifically because someone made the claim that:

1. Sports TTRPGs exist
2. Sports TTRPGs allow the sport team you're running to lose matches
3. Losing a match is equivalent to having a character die†
4. Therefore, removing the ability to lose matches in a sport RPG is equivalent to removing death† as an obstacle in D&D-alike games
5. Removing the ability to lose matches in a sport RPG would make playing them pointless
6. Therefore, removing death† as an obstacle in D&D-alikes would make them pointless

(Note, I have used "death†"/"die†" instead of just "death" for reasons explained below.)

You have gone WAY, WAY far away from the argument originally made. I don't really have any desire to continue debating it with you as a result, because you're now arguing a completely different point, for completely different reasons, on a completely different analysis, where the one and only thing that is the same is the fact that you happen to be talking about sports RPGs. You aren't talking about losing games, you're talking about losing individual players from the team; you aren't talking about people ceasing to be able to participate, but rather identification or affiliation with the franchise; and you aren't talking about this in any way "proving" that removing (a very specific form of) death as a consequence, but rather trying to show that your perspective on things maps nicely to a view of building a football team (or whatever) and its management staff.

My claims, WRT sport TTRPGs, have always been that #3 is blatantly false, hence why I brought up real-world sports teams that have lost almost to entire seasons' worth of games back-to-back, and yet the franchise continued. This proves via real-world counterexample that the comparison to death in D&D-alike TTRPGs does not hold in the way the person arguing claimed that it did. As a result, points #4 and #6 are also incorrect (the removal of "death†")

And, again, because I apparently have to mention this every single time, I'm not talking about removing ALL death as a consequence. I'm removing one very specific form of death: that which is all three of random AND permanent AND irrevocable. Further, I am not (and have never been) suggesting that everyone should do this. Some people would benefit greatly from doing it. Some would absolutely hate it. My criticism is, and has always been, that it is the general problem with those who agree with you (not necessarily you yourself) that they want to force everyone to work by their standard, and yet disparage me (and those who agree with me) for trying to do that to them. I have never, not once, said this. I have, in one thread, tried to advocate that this would be helpful to a lot of people who believe it would instead be harmful to them. But I've never, not once, said that it would be universally better for all people. I would prefer, in the future, if your arguments thus didn't say or imply that I was trying to make a universal requirement for all D&D(-alike) players, but instead advocating for one playstyle among many.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That's something of a chicken-and-egg situation, I think. There's many tweaks that can be made to the design with the specific intent and result of making campaigns last longer provided the players and DM are willing.

My take is the game should be designed for the long haul, not to throw short-haulers under the bus but to allow both types of play to thrive.

I disagree that this would actually "allow both types of play to thrive." I'm quite confident that it would simply throw those who play short campaigns under the bus, as you put it. Note that I don't think there's any preference for shorter-term play.

Instead, the game needs to be designed in such a way that both things are supported. Some things, you are correct that supporting one side really does actually allow both. Well-structured game balance is one example there, where it's a one-way function (you can break existing balance easily, just ignore all guidelines; it is very hard to create interesting, well-structured balance from a jumbled mess). I don't think actively biasing the rules exclusively in favor of long-run campaigns is such a one-way function. Instead, I think a basic core can exist which supports both minimally, and then opt-in rules can help refine that on either end. Something vaguely like the original proposal of "rules modules" from the D&D Next playtest, a proposal which actual 5e completely and horrendously failed to achieve.

That's a mindset I'd like to change somewhat, not to force players to run whatever's handed to them but to be more flexible about what they're willing to play and be more ready-willing-able to quickly pivot from one character or concept to another.

Honestly? I don't think you're ever going to achieve what you want. People can be remarkably glued to specific preferences. And when we're talking about very deep, fundamental preferences--like how much or how little they get attached to specific characters--it's going to be a much more monumental task. I just don't see it happening, especially not if you're trying to do it through the medium of writing different rules for the game. Because a significant chunk of players absolutely will see it as trying "to force players to run whatever's handed to them".

It ties in with the philosophical difference in char-gen between deciding what to play after you've seen the initial rolls and going in with a preset notion of what you'll play and then using the mechanics to build it. Me, most of the time I'm all about the former, and even if-when I come in with a pre-set notion I'm ready to pivot if the dice don't co-operate.

It's cool you can do that. I can't, and I'm not interested in becoming like that. I don't think I would actually enjoy TTRPGs if I had to play them that way. I would just disengage from the hobby entirely. I very much doubt I'm alone in that. Whether or not it is a reasonable or warranted desire, a lot of people view TTRPG characters very similarly to beloved characters in fiction (books, TV, films, etc.), and become VERY attached to them. Telling them, "No, stop doing that, do this instead" isn't going to make them like doing "this instead" very much.

That's the world I - and most of the people I know who are older than college age - do live in. And good on you for staying committed to your campaign through the player turnover.

Indeed, WotC-era D&D characters take far too long to roll up! Tolkein fanboys aren't the problem, though; as 0e-1e D&D was quite Tolkein-based and one could bang out a new character pretty fast.

My experience is that 1e was much, much more Howard and Leiber influenced. Gygax's initial law-and-chaos setup isn't anything like the clear baseline morality of the LotR universe, the whole delving-into-murder-holes-for-riches thing is VERY much not in keeping with Tolkien's interests, and the fact that it, from Tolkien's perspective, devalues dragons into being mere treasure-guardians rather than being both structural and thematic expressions of the work they're part of would have annoyed him to no end. (He had very strong ideas about what a true, proper dragon should be, and explicitly said that he felt there were only two in all of literature up to that point: Fafnir and the dragon from Beowulf. His two named dragons, Smaug and Ancalagon, both fit into this, as each is structurally important to the story being told, and each both advances and exemplifies the themes Tolkien wished to explore through his work, though obviously Ancalagon is rather less developed since he only appears in the Silmarillion.)

There are certainly Tolkien influences (elves and dwarves as beings who are roughly human-sized was definitely not typical of fiction before Tolkien, amongst other innovations directly due to him), but it's not for nothing that Gygax kinda rejected Tolkienesque influences, and why they only really took off after he was no longer in charge.

Another way of saying this is that the things you mention below (which get their own response) only occurred because the Tolkien influences had grown. Those things didn't cause people to view the story like their own table's LotR, but rather those things got added because people had started to view D&D as a way to produce their own table's LotR, and wanted that feeling to actually be backed up by mechanics. (The fact that this also meant the game had bigger design space and could both ask and answer more complicated questions was certainly also a factor.)

The main cuplrits are a) chooseable feats and b) assignable skills. Skills came online in mid-late 2e, feats with 3e. Get rid of those, along with at least 3/4 of today's PC-playable species, and make everything hard-coded class abilities that come online at set levels and both char-gen and level-ups become (relatively) a breeze.

Problem: People like being able to customize their characters and express themselves through character-building. This is an extremely strong appeal of role-playing games in general, not just the tabletop versions. It's the reason why "roleplaying mechanics" (meaning, choose-able character advancement based on levels, skills, etc.) have so egregiously proliferated through the video game space. Hell, these days even basic shooters tend to have elements of "RPG" to them, again meaning "experience" and "levels" and advancement and picks etc., etc., because that's a huge way to increase the number of people who are interested in playing your game.

So....how can we square this circle? Your position is that the only way to get things back to the format that you believe would work is one that, demonstrably, removes one of the most popular elements of play in RPGs-in-general, a thing which video game RPGs derived directly from D&D. If we do in fact do as you say, it's going to make a LOT of fans, including a lot of the ones picked up by 5e, very unhappy. It may even drive them away from D&D entirely, into other games' hands, which is a pretty significant threat now as a result of the SRD debacle.

How do we simplify character creation without taking away the customizability that many fans demonstrably love?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Henchmen go into the dungeon with the PCs and accept a share of the danger for a share of the reward. Hirelings stay outside and guard the horses.

I find this distinction pedantic, particularly because I know I have heard people use both terms for the other alleged definition, and others who have used one term or the other for both uses without distinction.

Regardless: what you call "henchmen" are effectively already-made secondary PCs, so the argument has again become circular, you are already requiring that the players have a stable of playable PCs at the ready. And if you don't have henchmen, thus removing the circularity, you are thus put into the other problem, where the only people you can draw on to replace a dead PC are meaningfully inaccessible.