D&D General If not death, then what?

[Art Waring]

Unfortunately the players most prone to those sorts of problems IME are also the ones least likely to care about anything beyond their character sheet

Agreed, this can be troublesome, I recently had one player like this and its not easy. Hopefully you can ride it out until you find another solution or a new player for your group.

 

[Art Waring]

I do not "punish" anyone. It is something everyone agreed upon. We all expect it to happen. What we want, is the epic story of heroes that died or lived through hardship and that overcame them. Or see how the heroes died and how the new group will try to surpass the achievements of the previous one. We have a blast playing that way because we have no less emotional involvement in the character than any table. But the spice is there. The adrenaline is really there with each toss of the dice.

And truly, most death happen before level 5 with fewer and fewer true death after that unless very rare circumstances. Last TPK before the one a few weeks ago was almost 5 years. Not bad for such a horrible DM that I am to put what my players want. A possibility to make epic stories!

Well it sounds like your games would be fun to sit in on. Thankfully I have played at so many tables with a variety of games and playstyles so I have a healthy respect for varied points of view.

I like for character deaths to be meaningful, and for players to feel the risk and the thrill in the moment (sometime i will write a post about the most fun i had running a recent game for my players), but this does have to be tempered with player expectations of having meaningful play experiences at the table. Do I have the solutions? Probably not... just my own way of seeing things.

 

[Helldritch]

Agreed, this can be troublesome, I recently had one player like this and its not easy. Hopefully you can ride it out until you find another solution or a new player for your group.

God am I happy that I do not have such a player. But it is a player problem that should be addressed with a beer and some pretzels and a nice talk. Not everyone is for every tables.

 

[Helldritch]

Well it sounds like your games would be fun to sit in on. Thankfully I have played at so many tables with a variety of games and playstyles so I have a healthy respect for varied points of view.

I like for character deaths to be meaningful, and for players to feel the risk and the thrill in the moment (sometime i will write a post about the most fun i had running a recent game for my players), but this does have to be tempered with player expectations of having meaningful play experiences at the table. Do I have the solutions? Probably not... just my own way of seeing things.

The only advice for you that I have is this one: "Talk with your players. Have them participate in meaningful ways to the game. But most of all, talk with your players. All of them together!"

I hold a very democratic game table. I can get my decision challenged but it happens very rarely. Last time was last week with a relatively new player that thought that I was getting "soft" with the monk's death by putting a scroll of revivify in the treasure chest. I showed him the printed page and it was really there. Pure luck to die with such a scroll at hand. Before that? Maybe it was in 4th edition and I had to bow down to the player that was right. I was wrong and I am not afraid to admit it. Heck we even vote on which optional rules we should put on each campaigns. And I am the one usually trying to put easier rules on resting but the players keep insisting on playing with grim rules because this is really what they like. And I get hosed because I defend their prefered style of play. I happen to like it too. It does not make me a monster. But hey, my advice still stands. Talk with your players. Nothing beats that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Then why are you in this thread? From what I've seen, there's one group of posters in this argument are the ones saying "the superior way to play D&D is permanent character death", and "this is how you should play D&D", and other ways saying/dog-whistling that the other side is badwrongfun, and the other group of people is just explaining that you don't need to have PC death in the campaign in order for the game to be meaningful. Because if you want people to accept that your style of play is valid, that's done already. People get that. What other people aren't getting is that it's also valid to play without permanent character death. If you get that, we have no beef. But if you don't and agree with the people that profess that it's "superior/better" to play with permanent character death, that's where I take issue.

Its certainly better for me.

I dont think anyone is saying that it isn't valid to play without permanent character death. This is all explaining preferences, and people futility trying to change other people's minds for some reason.

If I'm wrong, sound off if you're here for some other reason.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Lose a limb: Regeneration. If you have Eberron, replacement limbs.

"Regeneration" doesn't exist in my game, so...that's not relevant. Even if I did allow "replacement limbs," such things always come with their own weaknesses. That's still a permanent consequence. You've found something to address it. That doesn't mean the issue is gone.

This is straight-up Oberoni Fallacy. Just because you can patch over the problem, doesn't mean the problem isn't there!

Lose a kingdom: Take back the kingdom, if you really want it. You might get a who cares?

I'm sorry, what? Losing a kingdom is a devastating loss. It almost always results in massive deaths, and if the PCs are actually decent folks, the people taking over are almost certainly going to inflict terrible harm. You can't bring those dead people back. Stolen resources or national treasures, damaged land...these are things that can take generations to restore.

The Trojans lost a kingdom. The story of that loss--and their centuries-long recovery--forms one of the greatest epic cycles in Western literature. Are you really going to write off the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid as a "who cares?" story? How about the Mahabharata, or perhaps the Shahnameh, or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms? Stories where a kingdom is lost are quite often about the permanent scars that such losses leave behind on the people, the country, the land itself.

Losing a loved one: Happens all time. So what? Revenge? Been there done that.

I genuinely cannot understand how someone could become so jaded that losing the people they love is a routine occurrence, something to be shrugged off. If you actually valued the lost person as a person, their loss is a permanent thing. As I quoted, IIRC earlier in this thread, "Your absence has gone through me/Like thread through a needle/Everything I do is stitched with its color."

Losing all prized items: Find new ones! Yeah! More adventures. Or find the thief and get them back.

Some items carry sentimental value. That cannot be replaced. Are you truly so jaded that this has no meaning to you?

And I could go on and on and on and on with every consequences. All but death are temporary. And at high level, even death might not be that permanent. This is why it is important that death be something, especially at low levels.

It enables the wall of remembrance. Let us remember those who fell before us so that we too shall not be forget. To the memories of unsung sacrifices and death! May we all be remembered!

You can have that without having character death.

Remembrance does not require character death. It requires losses that cannot be restored to what they were before--losses that leave a mark, even long after whatever recovery.

Again, you have not actually SHOWN that character death is the only permanent loss. And you have been rather blithe about all the other sorts of losses, and what permanent impact they can have.

You say I must have had bad experiences such that I cannot see the good in people. I hear what you say here and think the same thing--who hurt you so much that you can shrug off such things so blithely? Who stole from you, not only the joy of these things, but also the pain of their loss?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I dont think anyone is saying that it isn't valid to play without permanent character death.

It sure as heck seems Helldritch thinks so.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It sure as heck seems Helldritch thinks so.

Well, I left an open invitation. If that's what he thinks, he is welcome to reply.

 

[tetrasodium]

"Regeneration" doesn't exist in my game, so...that's not relevant. Even if I did allow "replacement limbs," such things always come with their own weaknesses. That's still a permanent consequence. You've found something to address it. That doesn't mean the issue is gone.

This is straight-up Oberoni Fallacy. Just because you can patch over the problem, doesn't mean the problem isn't there!


I'm sorry, what? Losing a kingdom is a devastating loss. It almost always results in massive deaths, and if the PCs are actually decent folks, the people taking over are almost certainly going to inflict terrible harm. You can't bring those dead people back. Stolen resources or national treasures, damaged land...these are things that can take generations to restore.

The Trojans lost a kingdom. The story of that loss--and their centuries-long recovery--forms one of the greatest epic cycles in Western literature. Are you really going to write off the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid as a "who cares?" story? How about the Mahabharata, or perhaps the Shahnameh, or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms? Stories where a kingdom is lost are quite often about the permanent scars that such losses leave behind on the people, the country, the land itself.


I genuinely cannot understand how someone could become so jaded that losing the people they love is a routine occurrence, something to be shrugged off. If you actually valued the lost person as a person, their loss is a permanent thing. As I quoted, IIRC earlier in this thread, "Your absence has gone through me/Like thread through a needle/Everything I do is stitched with its color."


Some items carry sentimental value. That cannot be replaced. Are you truly so jaded that this has no meaning to you?


You can have that without having character death.

Remembrance does not require character death. It requires losses that cannot be restored to what they were before--losses that leave a mark, even long after whatever recovery.

Again, you have not actually SHOWN that character death is the only permanent loss. And you have been rather blithe about all the other sorts of losses, and what permanent impact they can have.

You say I must have had bad experiences such that I cannot see the good in people. I hear what you say here and think the same thing--who hurt you so much that you can shrug off such things so blithely? Who stole from you, not only the joy of these things, but also the pain of their loss?

huh?.... regeneration is literally a spell in the core rules as are most if not all of the raise dead type spells. I believe they might even be part of the OLG SRD stuff.... That's hardly an oberoni fallacy patch over problem.

 

[pemerton]

In essence, if a character dies, the player can either roll up a new one (about 5 minutes) if no henchmen are available. If a henchmen is available, then the player takes the role of that henchmen. Henchmen are usually a level or two lower than the players

<snip>

But this also means that the player now have a character that is one level lower than all the others. The sooner the death, the less it will impact high level play. And around level 9, almost no death are permanent unless very rare circumstances.

So at low levels, it's a minor inconvenience (because of scaling XP requirements). And at high levels it's typically a minor inconvenience (because not permanent). So why are you asserting this very stark contrast with @EzekielRaiden's approach?

In D&D there are no fate worse than death.

This is a strong claim! In my 4e D&D campaign, I think that several of the PCs could think of outcomes worse than their own deaths. Whether or not the PCs survive is not typically the main thing at stake in a conflict.