I understand you are having a discussion, and I apologize if I'm coming across as hostile, but this is something that I feel needs to be at least partially addressed. Because the narrative of "it is almost always the player's decision that led to their death" then doesn't understand the reasoning many of us remove or mitigate death in our games. This is what leads to ridiculous statements like what Micah Sweet declared of "if I know I can't die, nothing matters, because my choices don't matter". Because the death is always seen as "well, because you as the player did X" with seeming little regard to other factors.
A bit hostile IMO, but if I am overreacting I apologize as well.
If you remove death from your game (no problem there if you do!) then the other fail states become to result of the same poor choices, etc. I outlined before. So, yes, I agree bad dice rolls can lead to your "ultimate fail state", but IME most often that is not the case.
Take this for example. You have determined that the Druid should have more health. Do you know their Con score? No. Do you know if they roll for hp and are therefore below average? No.
I said the
average 10th-level druid would have sufficient HP to handle 52 damage and survive. Which, the math proves me out, at 53...
Did they dump CON? Maybe, that is the only way (on average) unless they did roll. And no, I don't
know, I never claimed to know, I'm working off of averages and assumptions based on the experiences I've had and seen. We know from the CON/ HP poll that the vast majority of PCs have CON 12, 14, or 16.
But I am asking about these things, not just saying "this is the way it should be and you're wrong if it isn't."
You then state that since they should have more health, they must have entered the fight injured which is a "tactical error" unless they had no choice. Well, do you know how many fights they had that day? No. Do you know what healing options that they had available to them? No. You may assume the druid had spell slots left and could have maybe healed them... but you don't know if the druid has healing spells prepared. You may say that was a tactical error, but maybe they had a stock of healing potions and simply burnt through them before the fight.
You don't acknowledge that maybe before the druid cast Heat Metal and hid, that they may have been injured by an earlier spell or attack. That would also account for their hp, and in which case they didn't make a tactical error, they went in to the fight fully prepared.
You don't know, and cannot know, so many factors of this fight. But at every turn in your responses you have put forth theory after theory of how Sabathius misplayed his druid and that led to the death.
Again, I am not saying they should have done this or should have done that. I am asking
why that was the case? If you are going into what you suspect is a BBEG fight, yes, you should be as fully prepared, healed up, etc. as possible. Otherwise, you are courting defeat IMO.
I even told Sabathius I saw no point in discussing this further because unless they want to provide a play-by-play of the encounter and the state which they entered it, there are too many variables, too many unknowns.
So, my "theories" have been challenges and questions to gain more information, nothing more, nothing less.
And here is another factor I've never seen you even touch. There is one more tactical decision that could have saved the Druid's life.
What if the DM didn't cast Sunburst? What if the DM had cut the Giant Zombie's hp by half? What if the DM had drawn the map differently? All of these decisions could also have saved the player's character. We can only speculate, but it is awfully strange that "your decisions as the player led to your death" is such a common refrain, while unless the DM is egregiously out of line like in Oofta's example, they aren't even part of the discussion.
I don't mean this as blaming DMs, I don't want to blame anyone, because I know that there are so many factors involved that it is frankly impossible to decide why it happened. But that's why this idea that it happened because the player made the wrong decision drives me nuts.
If the DM hadn't cast
sunburst, he wouldn't have died, sure. But I am speculating on what happened that
might have been responsible for his death on HIS part, not the DM's.
I have discussed the DM being out of line. I've mentioned how the DM can miscalculate a fight and cause a PC death without intending to. In fact, it was one of my earlier posts in this thread (or maybe the other one...) IIRC.
Yes, at times you can't pinpoint one choice or decision or factor that led to a PC death, but IME I can pick it out more often than not. In the example we're discussing there are a lot of unknowns, certainly, but splitting up is one of them. With four PCs they could have moved in teams of two, instead of spreading out so they were each alone. Two teams, assaulting from different angles, could have accomplished their goal most likely and would have protected any individual from a "bad luck death".
So, they should have known that their plan would fail, because 95% of the time their plan would succeed. Do you bring an umbrella with you on days with a 5% chance of rain?
How do you know 95% of the time it would succeed? If a party splits up like that in my games, I can almost guarantee a PC will be seriously injured or killed. Going alone is almost
always a bad choice IME. Even when scouts go ahead, they often do it in a team of two for this very reason.
You seem very put out by this whole line of discussion, so I am not really sure why you want to continue it. You won't convince me that I am wrong when I say the vast majority of the time PC death is cause by poor choices because that has never been my experience (at least in 5E). Does bad luck/dice rolls kill sometimes? Certainly! But there are usually underlying causes as well.
