D&D General If not death, then what?

[pemerton]

No one likes to have his or her character die. No one. But having death as a consequence either for bad luck or bad tactical assertion is what primarily brought these persons to my games.

Having constant second chances for me equals to handling victory at no permanent costs. A set back? Ok. For how long? At what costs? If none of these set backs have any permanent effects, how can they be set backs? For me they are just minor inconveniences.

I am assuming that, when a player in one of your D&D game suffers the death of their PC, they (the player) are allowed to keep playing at the table.

How long do they have to wait before they start playing again? Are they allowed to bring a new PC into the same adventuring party? (I am inferring from your posts that the adventuring party is a feature of your D&D games.) Is there a rule that the new PC must be mechanically weaker in some fashion? Or must have a more disadvantageous fictional position than the PC who died?

I'm asking these questions because I'm trying to work out what you see as the difference between a permanent cost and a minor inconvenience.

 

[Chaosmancer]

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.

This combined with

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.

This. Is part of the confusion I'm getting from you.

Fail states come from the player's "poor choices" but now you admit that you are analyzing the player and not the DM's choices, and admit that the DMs choices can lead to the player "fail state". Though, oddly, it isn't that the DM makes "poor choices" it is that they are "out of line" or "miscalculate"

And this is the narrative that frustrates me. And I also wonder how much of your experience of the character's death being the fault of the player's "poor choices" comes from when you were DMing. Because in my expeirence, it is often a result of the dice going bad, or miscalculations on the part of the DM (Me)

How do you know 95% of the time it would succeed?

Because that thread of the discussion was about "they should have known that being critted was possible". IE it was the 5% chance of the critical which led to their death, that being their "poor decision". Which since they only "failed" 5% of the time, means they would have succeeded 95% of the time when they were not critted.

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.

Maybe I won't convince you, but I seriously do not understand this insistence, except as part of this idea of "skilled play" and this idea that death only happens if you make the wrong call. Because in my expeirence, players rarely make such obviously poor decisions.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Character death isn't losing D&D. You make a new character and keep playing. I can't tell you the number of PCs I've lost, and for my part I don't get distraught over it. I'm sorry if my position wasn't clear on this.

So... your rebuttal to the analogy then makes no sense. Your response was "Those games have winners and losers, and if you lose you are absolutely out of the game. I don't see the comparison." But DnD doesn't have winners and losers, because character death isn't losing. So, in Poker when you lose a hand and get a new hand... that's not losing the game, that's not a permanent loss in anyway, it can be recovered from, yet there is still tension in losing the hand. Even though losing the and isn't losing the game. Which was the analogy.

And in fact, you seem to make character death seem rather meaningless. You just make a new character and keep playing the game. But, also

Very true. But to me "You have Died" has to be in the mix.

Character death MUST be on the table, or nothing, no loss, no consequence, no story can possibly have meaning. It is something you don't get distraught over, something that you speak of in some pretty casual terms since you can just... make a new character.

I just don't get it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So... your rebuttal to the analogy then makes no sense. Your response was "Those games have winners and losers, and if you lose you are absolutely out of the game. I don't see the comparison." But DnD doesn't have winners and losers, because character death isn't losing. So, in Poker when you lose a hand and get a new hand... that's not losing the game, that's not a permanent loss in anyway, it can be recovered from, yet there is still tension in losing the hand. Even though losing the and isn't losing the game. Which was the analogy.

And in fact, you seem to make character death seem rather meaningless. You just make a new character and keep playing the game. But, also



Character death MUST be on the table, or nothing, no loss, no consequence, no story can possibly have meaning. It is something you don't get distraught over, something that you speak of in some pretty casual terms since you can just... make a new character.

I just don't get it.

Having your character die is a known possible consequence of playing Dungeons & Dragons. I've played and DMd every edition since BECMI for over 30 years, and I've made many, many PCs over that time. I've enjoyed most of them, played them as hard as I could, relished their time under my care. Some lasted a long while, while others much less (i once had a character killed by another PC in their first session. Very wrong choice of PC for that group). Some had awesome, meaningful deaths, and many others didn't. Almost everything happens if you play long enough.

The one thing I have never done is get legitimately upset when my character dies. For me, always, the players and the campaign matter more than the PC. Every character enters the story and plays their part for as long as they have, at which point they bow out and other PCs take up the tale.

A game this is fundamentally about getting into deadly situations and trying to survive while accomplishing your goals as a team makes zero sense to me if survival is guaranteed, even if accomplishing your goals isn't. As @overgeeked said above, I would bow out of any D&D game the first time a PC should have died according to the rules but didn't because their player didn't want them to. Life and death means life and death for the PC. I can do this partly because verisimilitude matters a lot to me, and if your PC should die because the situation demands death then that is that, but also because a PC death isn't even the end of the adventure, let alone the end of my fun. Its just a thing that sometimes happens.

I don't analyze it any deeper than that.

 

[James Gasik]

So... your rebuttal to the analogy then makes no sense. Your response was "Those games have winners and losers, and if you lose you are absolutely out of the game. I don't see the comparison." But DnD doesn't have winners and losers, because character death isn't losing. So, in Poker when you lose a hand and get a new hand... that's not losing the game, that's not a permanent loss in anyway, it can be recovered from, yet there is still tension in losing the hand. Even though losing the and isn't losing the game. Which was the analogy.

And in fact, you seem to make character death seem rather meaningless. You just make a new character and keep playing the game. But, also



Character death MUST be on the table, or nothing, no loss, no consequence, no story can possibly have meaning. It is something you don't get distraught over, something that you speak of in some pretty casual terms since you can just... make a new character.

I just don't get it.

There is a good point here. If we know that the players can just grab a new character and continue playing, what exactly was lost by dying? I'm sure there must be something- perhaps you don't get to come back at the same level, or don't have magic items, but doesn't the threat of death at every turn, with the knowledge that "oh well, I'll get to keep playing" bring the risk of people being less invested in their individual characters?

 

[gnarlygninja]

The only times I've played in games where death was completely off the table we didn't replace it with anything, every time it's happened has been because one or more players get really...squirrelly about it and basically force the game to adopt that style. Those players are usually only slightly less hostile to any other fail state so the best the DM can do is go along with it until the game falls apart from weird group dynamics.
But that's just my experience with it and is definitely not a universal one.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There is a good point here. If we know that the players can just grab a new character and continue playing, what exactly was lost by dying? I'm sure there must be something- perhaps you don't get to come back at the same level, or don't have magic items, but doesn't the threat of death at every turn, with the knowledge that "oh well, I'll get to keep playing" bring the risk of people being less invested in their individual characters?

I don't consider being less invested in my individual characters a risk. The campaign and the players are what's important.

 

[James Gasik]

I don't consider being less invested in my individual characters a risk. The campaign and the players are what's important.

Right but in that case, what does dying mean? If nothing is lost, then that doesn't seem much different than not being able to die at all.

EDIT: and if what is ultimately lost is gold, magic, your sense of personal accomplishment, your in character goals and ambition, or xp, isn't that just....a setback other than death?

 

[Helldritch]

Often does not equal always, remember?

Sure, there have been good NPCs. Many of them weren't adventurers. Some of them had bad character flaws, some didn't. But the point wasn't "there is no NPC ever who has been shown in a positive light" it is "taking over the roleplay of an existing character with character traits may not always work, because they have a character and have been being role-played by the DM"

Have you ever attempted to swap people's character sheets and have people role-play as the other members of the party? It never quite works, because they aren't those people. This was my point.

This is mandatory at my table. You have to be able to play at least one other character (and its followers if any). Case being that if a player misses a session, that character is still available for play. This is the reason why there is a copy of all characters at my house.

And remember, I do not play the NPC accompanying the players. The players take that responsibility. I do not want to play "GOTCHA" moments with trusted NPCs. Been there, done that and no thanks. Not ever again since 1984.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I don't consider being less invested in my individual characters a risk. The campaign and the players are what's important.

To you. Other players like getting attached to their characters. They like the experience of fully realizing an entirely separate personality and growing to know them over multiple years. That's why Critical Role is so popular. Because you get to be another person and truly feel something when they die, other than "oh well, that happens all the time. Now to make my 5th character this campaign".

Note: I am not saying that it's wrong for you to like the hyper-deadly, emotionally detached style of play, just like it isn't wrong for people to grow emotionally invested in their PC and their story. I'm just explaining why some people don't enjoy the style of play that you do.