Is threat of death a necessary element of D&D?

[Greg K]

Let's change things a bit. You go into a game with mature players and are told it will be run under different rules. The player characters will never die outright. The only way a PC will die is if the "D&D death" situation comes up and the player decides that it's appropriate for his character to die. There will be consequences of failure, often serious permanent ones. However, if you don't want your character to die, then he won't.

Would that be a deal breaker for the campaign?

Yes

 

[Greg K]

The threat of death is an important element in the type of RPG that I enjoy running and playing in. Of course, I am of the school that says that "story" is what we tell of events after the fact, so that death never damages the story -- if death occurs, that is the story.

RC, I am in complete agreement (except for a game like Toon).

 

[Decado]

I think the possibility of a character being killed adds alot to the suspense of combat and realism of the game. I have killed several characters, never at random, and have never had a complaint from the players. My guys know that there is a possibility of death everytime they go into battle. It does not happen often, but it did not take long for them to realize this adventuring and monster slaying was dangerous business.

Decado

 

[Mallus]

Would that be a deal breaker for the campaign?

No. Not at all. It would make the campaign resemble a typical superhero game, which is fitting, seeing as D&D turns into that past mid-level.

It's also worth noting that past mid-level, death is basically reduced to a speedbump, a "resource and XP hit". The core rules go a long way towards removing the chance for permanent character death from the game. Which leads back into my point upthread about player enjoyment being closely tied to investment in long-term characters. The whole "easier rezzing" aspect of 3.x is an obvious acknowledgment of this on the part of the designers.

 

[Glyfair]

The whole "easier rezzing" aspect of 3.x is an obvious acknowledgment of this on the part of the designers.

In fact, in a game with those "house rules" you can eliminate or greatly reduce the appearance of Raise Dead type spells. With players only dying when dramatically appropriate, there is no need for it for PCs. Now you just have to decide whether it makes sense for the sense of your world (i.e. do NPCs ever get raised).

 

[Korgoth]

Let's change things a bit. You go into a game with mature players and are told it will be run under different rules. The player characters will never die outright. The only way a PC will die is if the "D&D death" situation comes up and the player decides that it's appropriate for his character to die. There will be consequences of failure, often serious permanent ones. However, if you don't want your character to die, then he won't.

Would that be a deal breaker for the campaign?

Absolutely a deal-breaker.

I would also get mad if I found out the DM was fudging the dice.

And yes, I've tried "collaborative storytelling" or whatever you want to call it. I find it to be a useless, uninteresting activity (YMMV blah blah). If we're playing a game, let's play a game. If it's a game about "dungeoneering" then that implies the threat of death. If you were playing a board game about WWII, would you want it to have a rule that says that your soldiers never die... they just drop their weapons and run away if they're shot at enough (like the A Team)? Would that really seem genuine and worthwhile?

And who are these people who burst into tears when their character gets killed? It's just a piece in the game. Do these folks freak out when they lose a horsie in Chess, or when their scottie dog busts out in Monopoly? Maybe some folks should lighten up about their characters, if that's the case. It's not that big a deal. The point of playing the game is not to have a 'connection' to your fictional alter-ego... the point of playing the game is to "play".

 

[Raven Crowking]

Absolutely a deal-breaker.

I would also get mad if I found out the DM was fudging the dice.

Me too.

The game says, in effect, "Here are the possible risks, here are the possible rewards, what risks do you want to take to try to earn the rewards?". If the DM is fudging the dice, then I am not in fact deciding what risks I want to take. Half the meaning of my input into the game (if you accept that choice is based upon understanding of circumstances, and accepting the consequences of choice) is nerfed.

RC

 

[mmadsen]

It's hard for me to imagine a D&D game -- or an action movie or novel -- without the threat of death and dismemberment, but that doesn't mean the game system should make it easy to die when there are so many other ways to suffer a setback that's just as interesting.

D&D has developed a number of kludges for tracking setbacks. It uses a highly abstract hit point system, then treats those seemingly abstract hit points as oddly tangible, with explicit magical healing to recover them.

It makes disabling easy at low levels, since most characters have enough hit points to take only one or two hits, but it makes permanent death difficult, since only -10 hit points means death. But then at higher levels disabling might become difficult, but scaled up damage makes that -10 buffer trivial.

Then it bypasses the entire ablative hit point mechanic when it comes to save-or-die spells, since those don't do "damage".

I'd much rather see a Ref Save to dodge, a Fort Save to endure, and Drama Points to sidestep failures. Drama Points would be managed like Hit Points, but they wouldn't reflect anything tangible, and they'd apply to more things than simple damage.

 

[mmadsen]

If you were playing a board game about WWII, would you want it to have a rule that says that your soldiers never die... they just drop their weapons and run away if they're shot at enough (like the A Team)? Would that really seem genuine and worthwhile?

It would actually be pretty realistic -- not that no one dies, but that most people run long before many people die.

 

[mmadsen]

Tweet's There Is No Try might be appropriate here:

In classic Trek, Captain Kirk is unlikely to try to escape from a villain that has him under the gun and fail to do so. Sometimes he tries and succeeds. Other times he doesn't try at all, being led around by goons, defeated. (It's incongruous when this happens because we've all seen him get out from under the gun at other times.) How would this dichotomy translate into RPGs?

[This question is tangentially related to the recent issue of whether action movies, or other media in general, are good models for RPG mechanics.]

Most roleplaying games follow a simulationist model for determining whether a PC can get the better of a villain holding a gun on them. The player decides that the PC will go for it, and only then do the dice roll. Star Trek does not look like that. The Star Trek model would go something like this:

Player: I try to take out the guy who's holding the phaser on me.

GM: Roll for it.

Player: [rolls & fails]

GM: He's too alert. You know that if you tried it you'd almost certainly get disintegrated.

Player: Dang. OK, I go through the door like he's telling me to.

The player has tried to get the PC out from under the gun, but the PC hasn't actually tried (just like Kirk doesn't try—he either does it or doesn't do it).

Now if the player's roll had succeeded, the PC would have taken out the villain with the phaser. Maybe if the player has failed badly, then the PC would have tried to take out the guy with the phaser and gotten beaten into unconsciousness, or maybe disintegrated. The less Kirk-like the PC is, the worse you can do to them with a bad roll.

Why would one want to use such a system? It would be to make the PC's more Kirk-like. That is, there's something base and demeaning about trying to do something and failing (especially trying to get the better of some mook and failing). Of course, whether Kirk takes out his captors or gets led meekly around depends on the needs of the plot, not dice rolls. But at least a system like this would let you look like Kirk while still using the roleplaying convention of dicing for success.

I'm not saying that having Kirk-like PCs is a good thing, or that I want to play that way. I'm just exploring how you'd handle Kirkliness in an RPG.​