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

[Sulicius]

Not really. Because in many games, death has always been a speed bump if the other PCs could recover the body. With revivify, the downtime for the PC is just shortened. Death, with the exception of revivify because the soul hasn't moved on yet, is almost always permanent in my games to the point I don't remember anyone ever casting Raise Dead on a PC.

Only recently have I come to understand that a PC dying is a very important moment. Nothing makes the drama land more than having the PC enter the afterlife for a brief moment. I ask them who they see, what their PC feels like. And then when returned, what do they see now? Have they hardened in their convictions? Have they spoke to a lost loved one and want to return?

There is SO much drama possible with this event that hightens the stakes, that I am surprised I didn't realize it sooner. The 2024 DMG chapter on Death has more great advice.

 

[Oofta]

Only recently have I come to understand that a PC dying is a very important moment. Nothing makes the drama land more than having the PC enter the afterlife for a brief moment. I ask them who they see, what their PC feels like. And then when returned, what do they see now? Have they hardened in their convictions? Have they spoke to a lost loved one and want to return?

There is SO much drama possible with this event that hightens the stakes, that I am surprised I didn't realize it sooner. The 2024 DMG chapter on Death has more great advice.

PC death is fairly rare in my games based on player preference (I ask about lethality rate in session 0 even if it's never off the table), but when it does happen it's up to the player if they want to come back. So far, no one has taken me up on it.

In the few cases where the spell has been cast, it opens up a portal into the Shadowfell because in my mythology the soul goes there first before moving on to their final destination. If they linger too long in the Shadowfell they forget most of what they were when alive and become ghosts. So in order to raise someone from the dead people have to travel to the Shadowfell and retrieve the soul; if the soul has already gone to their final resting place the portal doesn't open.

Which means that if we ever cast raise dead on a PC, the entire party would have to help bring them back. For NPCs that has always included defeating visions that haunt the dead person. Those visions can include any number of things, bad memories, failures perceived and real, dead enemies slain in battle and so on. I keep hoping that someday we'll get to go through the scenario for a PC, I think it could be fun.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But if fudging occurs, it isn't the dice saying anymore. The DM chose. By the standard given, the DM can't do that without violating the sanctity of in-world causation. Same goes for a wide variety of DMing tools, like quantum ogres, locations which just happen to be near whatever direction you decided to go, or anything else that arises from the DM deciding that this would be a better experience. I'm just not seeing how this uncompromising "it MUST be diegetic, it MUST be derived only from known information or the processes of the rules when said rules are invoked" stance can incorporate even a single instance of fudging without becoming self-contradictory.

"It must be diegetic and derived from known info or rules-processes, unless the DM feels different" is much, much too porous a standard for what you've articulated here and elsewhere.

Didn't we just have a conversation where you convinced me that a play preference doesn't have to be held to in every circumstance, and in fact can't be for practical purposes? Aren't you trying to do that right now with your refutation of my story/game stand? Whether or not you allow fudging doesn't have to be an absolute either, and you can still have feelings about it even if you sometimes don't follow those feelings.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Because despite WotC's best attempts to the contrary D&D, at least the way I (and others?) see it, is not at its heart a "supers" game and isn't intended to be.

In a supers game you're playing the fully-developed super-powered character right from the start and go on playing it that way throughout. In D&D you're playing the journey towards maybe - or maybe not - becoming a super-powered character, and on characters achieving that status* the game generally ends.

* - generally seen as "name level" in the TSR editions and "capstone level" in the WotC ones.

Yeah, that's basically it. I see D&D-like games as a different thing from other RPGs.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But if fudging occurs, it isn't the dice saying anymore. The DM chose. By the standard given, the DM can't do that without violating the sanctity of in-world causation. Same goes for a wide variety of DMing tools, like quantum ogres, locations which just happen to be near whatever direction you decided to go, or anything else that arises from the DM deciding that this would be a better experience. I'm just not seeing how this uncompromising "it MUST be diegetic, it MUST be derived only from known information or the processes of the rules when said rules are invoked" stance can incorporate even a single instance of fudging without becoming self-contradictory.

"It must be diegetic and derived from known info or rules-processes, unless the DM feels different" is much, much too porous a standard for what you've articulated here and elsewhere.

Also worth noting that none of us are perfect and sometimes we succumb to temptation. Seems a little harsh to essentially call someone a hypocrite because they don't always follow their beliefs.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Except in my original point to which you were responding, the abilities were in theory the same: I was talking about the potential death rate of an all-NPC adventuring group doing mission-X and suggesting the potential death rate of a PC group doing the same mission should be similar.

In other words, yes I am trying to compare apples to apples.

And if they're lucky then they just might end up with Rambo; but if they're not lucky they'll end up as someone who died trying to become Rambo. And that's the whole point: it's not the being Rambo that counts, it's the attempt to become Rambo.

Once I've made it to Rambo status my journey's pretty much over. Time to start a new character.

I've never watched a Rambo movie but if he's like any other "action hero" he probably should have died a dozen times or more; and I personally find it jarring when they survive when they really shouldn't.

Yup. The truth is I just don't want to play D&D that way. Plenty of non-D&D games for that.

And yes, the only RPG where I like story as much entwined with game as some people here seem to prefer is superhero.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Because despite WotC's best attempts to the contrary D&D, at least the way I (and others?) see it, is not at its heart a "supers" game and isn't intended to be.

In a supers game you're playing the fully-developed super-powered character right from the start and go on playing it that way throughout. In D&D you're playing the journey towards maybe - or maybe not - becoming a super-powered character, and on characters achieving that status* the game generally ends.

* - generally seen as "name level" in the TSR editions and "capstone level" in the WotC ones.

I was not saying that D&D is a supers game.

I was saying that the existence of superhero RPGs proves that story is perfectly achievable as part and parcel of gaming.

This then implies that, unless Micah can show that there's something special about D&D-alike gaming, which excludes it from this effect, or something special about supers which makes it uniquely different from all other TTRPGs, the argument that TTRPG story-ing cannot be gaming is inadequate. I have given a counterexample; that counterexample must either be shown unrepresentative (the latter path mentioned), or must be shown to be inapplicable to this case (the former path). As noted elsewhere, there are multiple other TTRPGs that clearly make story part of the gameplay experience (I didn't even mention the White Wolf games, where dealing with the monstrous force eating your soul is a common gameplay thing that specifically is telling some kind of story), so I'm extremely skeptical that the "supers is utterly unique in that, no other games work that way" argument holds any water. Hence, it would be more productive in my eyes to try to show that D&D is the unique one, where some quirk of what it is or what it does somehow excludes the possibility of story-as-gameplay.

The popularity of the game in the early 1980s would suggest a lot more than just one table made this "degenerate" method work just fine.

A degenerate triangle is still degenerate even if it shows up in real physical situations. 0 and 1 are frequently degenerate solutions to math stuff. As an example, most mathematics teachers will lie to you and say that f(x)=e^x is the only function that equals its own derivative at every point. This is false. It is the only nontrivial function with this property. There is one other function that has this property: the zero function, the degenerate case of f(x)=0. The zero function appears all over the place in nature. That doesn't make it any less a degenerate case of "a function that equals its own derivative."

Can't speak to Odysseus or Atalanta but Hercules was never an ordinary Greek. He was half-god, which in game terms would make him as a PC way too powerful for anything but the highest-level of parties.

So? We tell the story about him and not about a bazillion other Greeks with divine parentage. The point remains that "hero" in the classical sense meant anyone who was capable of incredible feats and changing the world, for good or for ill, and you absolutely did not need to be a divine nepo baby to be a hero. And even if you were a divine nepo baby, your inheritance could be absolute crap, e.g. Bellerophon was a son of Poseidon who...was a really good horseman. Not immortal, not massively strong, not superspeed. Just a mortal who could horse real real good. But I brought up Atalanta and Odysseus because they really were understood as ordinary mortal people who were still classical Heroes who did amazing, sometimes even "impossible" things (note quotes).

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Regarding Greek heroes and such, I think the difference is that some people want to play games where we find out whether the characters manage to become such heroes, whilst others want to play games where the characters are destined for greatness.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Didn't we just have a conversation where you convinced me that a play preference doesn't have to be held to in every circumstance, and in fact can't be for practical purposes? Aren't you trying to do that right now with your refutation of my story/game stand? Whether or not you allow fudging doesn't have to be an absolute either, and you can still have feelings about it even if you sometimes don't follow those feelings.

I...don't recall doing so, but perhaps I did. Were you meaning the economy-of-verisimilitude thing? I don't consider that a play preference violated. Instead, I consider it one where even someone who highly prizes verisimilitude, like yourself, understands that it is not a totally unalloyed good. Sort of like medicine. One could conduct medicine purely as an optimization of number of days alive, but few doctors would ever pursue such a thing, because, to riff on a quote from Aslan, “But length of days with[out joy or fulfillment] is only length of misery” (from The Magician's Nephew). Instead, at least the way I see it, on the subject of verisimilitude I have (successfully?) persuaded you that it is a means seeking an end, rather than an end in itself, and that there are times (rare ones, but times nonetheless) where a different means produces a slightly superior end.

Also worth noting that none of us are perfect and sometimes we succumb to temptation. Seems a little harsh to essentially call someone a hypocrite because they don't always follow their beliefs.

Is it? You are the one who has made a blanket provision: nothing except what the dice say can be permitted. You specifically cited even the DM overriding the dice as being an unacceptable intrusion. But now it's okay, whenever the DM feels like it? That's the contradiction I'm seeing here.

You already know how much I dislike fudging. I'm not criticizing an anti-fudging stance. I'm just deeply confused, because you have made such a strong and absolute stance against anything interfering with, for lack of a better term, the "procedure engine" of the world. So to then not only back away from that--despite using its absoluteness as the argument in more than one case--but to do so in a way that so casually says, "Yeah, DM can kinda do whatever they want" is just flabbergasting to me. It would be like if I, with my own absolute stance against fudging (I don't do it, I don't want any of my DMs to do it, and I argue against its use pretty much anywhere I talk about D&D stuff), said "but DMs can alter monster stats on the fly, that's fine." Like...that's no longer at all an absolute stance! You are, it seems, completely okay with people interfering with the procedure engine of the world, so long as it's done where you can't directly see it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Regarding Greek heroes and such, I think the difference is that some people want to play games where we find out whether the characters manage to become such heroes, whilst others want to play games where the characters destined to greatness.

I want to play characters who already are going to do great (and possibly terrible) things, but who still have uncertain futures within that space. I want to find out what those great-and/or-terrible things will be, what costs will be paid, what triumphs and sufferings these exciting people will experience. I don't want "destined to greatness"--I want destined to interestingness. The fake "Chinese" curse, "may you live in interesting times", or the two additional, allegedly worse, "curses" that Terry Pratchett added to make a trilogy: "may you come to the attention of those in authority" and "may the gods give you everything you ask for."

There's a reason I keep making comparisons to things like Babylon 5. We don't watch TV shows about random nobodies with lives of quiet desperation doing mundane drudgery until they die for complicated but uninteresting reasons. We watch for characters like Londo and G'kar, people who start out as jerks you love to hate, and who end with the audience in tears, wishing there were some other way. We don't read novels about Seamus Finnigan and Lavender Brown, even though we are meant to understand that they are just as much real people in the world of Harry Potter as Harry, Ron, and Hermione. We read to hear about The Boy Who Lived and what other cool things he gets up to--and then we stop paying attention as soon as he settles into a relatively pedestrian, if still adventurous, job at the Ministry as an Auror.

D&D arose from two roots. The first, as we all know, was wargaming. But the second--the thing that was inserted into wargaming--was telling the story of a Fighting-Man or a Magic-User, and clearly inspired directly by characters like Fafhrd, Conan, Doc Savage, and Aragorn. Many of the early influences were gritty and pulpy, but I don't think there's really any room to argue that Fafhrd or Conan is anything but a classical hero doing classical hero things and being larger-than-life. Nobody mistakes Conan for a random Joe Shmoe.

Now, not one word of that means people can't enjoy playing Random Joe Shmoe, nor enjoy the process of discovering whether a character will ever amount to anything exciting, or will die in obscurity. Personally, I see the latter as not just dying in obscurity, but having an 80%-90% chance of dying for stupid, pointless, depressing reasons in the middle of nowhere whiel accomplishing absolutely nothing and being instantly forgotten. I find that experience soul-crushing. That's why I avoid it like the plague.