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<blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 8259620" data-attributes="member: 50987">Back in the earlier editions, this was quite a problem.&nbsp; Fail a save vs. poison, roll up a new character.&nbsp; But I think this is a rare problem nowadays, and it gets conflated and overstated in D&amp;D discussion forums.In 5th Edition D&amp;D, character death is a multi-step process involving several dice rolls, and most of them weighted heavily in the player's favor with bonuses and rerolls.&nbsp; Playing the rules as written, a player character is never* in a situation where they will &quot;roll a 1&quot; and die from it.Most often, character death involves compounding consequences of several bad decisions.&nbsp; The Sunk-Cost Fallacy (&quot;But I've used all my high-level spell slots! We can't flee now, all those spell slots will be wasted!&quot;), or the Gambler's Fallacy (&quot;The dice are going to turn around.&nbsp; I've rolled less than 10 for the last eight rolls...the odds of rolling low nine times in a row are impossible!!!&quot;) have killed more characters at my table than anything else, including luck.--------------------------------*I realize that maxims like &quot;always&quot; and &quot;never&quot; are problematic in a tabletop RPG.&nbsp; I mean, there are DMs out there who will do anything they can to kill a character so that the player &quot;loses.&quot;&nbsp; There are players out there who will do anything they can to break the game so that they can &quot;win.&quot;&nbsp; But for the sake of this discussion, I'm considering both to be statistical outliers (and jerks who wouldn't be welcome at my table).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="CleverNickName, post: 8259620, member: 50987"] Back in the earlier editions, this was quite a problem. Fail a save vs. poison, roll up a new character. But I think this is a rare problem nowadays, and it gets conflated and overstated in D&D discussion forums. In 5th Edition D&D, character death is a multi-step process involving several dice rolls, and most of them weighted heavily in the player's favor with bonuses and rerolls. Playing the rules as written, a player character is never* in a situation where they will "roll a 1" and die from it. Most often, character death involves compounding consequences of several bad decisions. The Sunk-Cost Fallacy ("But I've used all my high-level spell slots! We can't flee now, all those spell slots will be wasted!"), or the Gambler's Fallacy ("The dice are going to turn around. I've rolled less than 10 for the last eight rolls...the odds of rolling low [I]nine times in a row[/I] are impossible!!!") have killed more characters at my table than anything else, including luck. [SIZE=3]-------------------------------- *I realize that maxims like "always" and "never" are problematic in a tabletop RPG. I mean, there are DMs out there who will do anything they can to kill a character so that the player "loses." There are players out there who will do anything they can to break the game so that they can "win." But for the sake of this discussion, I'm considering both to be statistical outliers (and jerks who wouldn't be welcome at my table).[/SIZE] [/QUOTE]

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