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<blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 7924840" data-attributes="member: 6796661">Personally, I find that the rules matter less the lethality than the changing expectations of adventure design.5e campaigns tend to be story driven with the expectation that there is a good chance that most characters will survive to the end giving a satisfying story arc. Sure there is a chance of death, which keeps the stakes high enough to care, but character death just becomes part of the party's story arc.&nbsp; TPKs are less common and less accepted it seems. But run your 5e game in a sandboxy or old-school dungeon crawl manner and it can very deadly. My players have been playing D&amp;D and other games for decades. So even though I'm running them through Rappan Athuk, they have had a high survival rate. But that is more to running away from and avoiding threats than encounters being too easy. When I play with newer players, I realize very quickly that I tend to run 5e very deadly. Not because I'm running it with &quot;gritty&quot; alternative rules, but just because I (1) let players encounter threats well beyond their ability to defeat and (2) play my intelligent monsters like beings who care about their lives and who have fought in battles before.&nbsp; Not every encounter. There are easy wins. But you the party always needs to be on its toes. But newer players, esp. those who've only played organized play games, expect encounters to be scaled to their level and party size. They also are used to DMs who pull punches and get upset when the bad guys gang up on the cleric, or when an unconscious player gets hit again taking auto death-save fails, or when weaker creatures like goblins or kobolds rely on ambushes from areas with lots of cover and traps or environmental hazards.If 5e is less deadly is because of the way the official adventures and organized-play modules are written. One exception is Curse of Strahd. That could be very deadly for most of the levels the party would play in.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="MNblockhead, post: 7924840, member: 6796661"] Personally, I find that the rules matter less the lethality than the changing expectations of adventure design. 5e campaigns tend to be story driven with the expectation that there is a good chance that most characters will survive to the end giving a satisfying story arc. Sure there is a chance of death, which keeps the stakes high enough to care, but character death just becomes part of the party's story arc. TPKs are less common and less accepted it seems. But run your 5e game in a sandboxy or old-school dungeon crawl manner and it can very deadly. My players have been playing D&D and other games for decades. So even though I'm running them through Rappan Athuk, they have had a high survival rate. But that is more to running away from and avoiding threats than encounters being too easy. When I play with newer players, I realize very quickly that I tend to run 5e very deadly. Not because I'm running it with "gritty" alternative rules, but just because I (1) let players encounter threats well beyond their ability to defeat and (2) play my intelligent monsters like beings who care about their lives and who have fought in battles before. Not every encounter. There are easy wins. But you the party always needs to be on its toes. But newer players, esp. those who've only played organized play games, expect encounters to be scaled to their level and party size. They also are used to DMs who pull punches and get upset when the bad guys gang up on the cleric, or when an unconscious player gets hit again taking auto death-save fails, or when weaker creatures like goblins or kobolds rely on ambushes from areas with lots of cover and traps or environmental hazards. If 5e is less deadly is because of the way the official adventures and organized-play modules are written. One exception is Curse of Strahd. That could be very deadly for most of the levels the party would play in. [/QUOTE]

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