D&D General Lethality, AD&D, and 5e: Looking Back at the Deadliest Edition

[nevin]

We have the opposite experience. We don't use alignment, so any encounter is potentially hostile...but also potentially not. Well, except for mindless predator types and things like zombies. But for the most part, players have more options for cleverness, not less.

Again, this does not track my personal experience of AD&D. Mostly, we wanted to kill everything and get its treasure, because that's where the experience was. It was seldom possible to get that loot without a fight - look at a typical AD&D module.

Say what? I use them regularly. I don't see how edition has anything to do with choosing to use those sorts of scenarios. They are pretty standard in every edition, in my experience.


This is definitely true. But we also had hirelings to throw in front of a lot of that stuff.

I will agree that D&D is less lethal than AD&D (hello healing word), though ultimately this comes down to the DM in any edition, but your characterization of 5e is pretty hyperbolic. Players can and do feel various types of loss, in many ways more so than AD&D because there is greater emphasis on story, and characters do die.

no not hyperbolic at all. 1e and 2e were built assuming you'd die a lot. 5e is definitely not.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Just a note that any increased lethality of BD&D was also true of OD&D. Same issues with death-on-zero, some low level brittleness, and I believe (I was on my way out when AD&D and BD&D were arriving) that at least Fighters and possibly Clerics and Thieves had smaller hit dice.

 

[MichaelSomething]

If people want to constantly be under pressure and always on the knife's egde, they go play League of Legends; not D&D.

 

[Krachek]

It‘s amazing that in all those editions I never read specific hints or rules to adjust the lethality of the game.
We have some variant for resting in the DM 5ed, but no words on lethality. Maybe it‘s a taboo subject.

 

[Krachek]

If people want to constantly be under pressure and always on the knife's egde, they go play League of Legends; not D&D.

I agree PVP is the only way to have real challenge.

 

[MGibster]

It‘s amazing that in all those editions I never read specific hints or rules to adjust the lethality of the game.
We have some variant for resting in the DM 5ed, but no words on lethality. Maybe it‘s a taboo subject.

Expectations have certainly changed over the years in regards to lethality not just in D&D but in RPGs in general. Despite the infamous example of Blackleaf from "Dark Dungeons," I think character death was a more expected and accepted part of gaming in general back in the 70s and 80s. And while I'd love to take this opportunity to take cheap shots at younger people (GET OFF MY LAWN!), there's a good argument to be made that it's not a lot of fun to lose a character so easily that you worked hard to create and advance. Admittedly, I'm a fairly lethal GM regardless of what game I'm running, but even I don't want to have too high a turnover rate in a campaign. It makes keeping a cohesive narrative difficult.

 

[Clint_L]

no not hyperbolic at all. 1e and 2e were built assuming you'd die a lot. 5e is definitely not.

I played 1e and 2e. To death, so to speak. In theory they were more lethal than in 5e. In practice, not for us. I think it really varied by campaign. But what I find hyperbolic are your claims that over-generalize, such as "More then one adventure had an "on the edge" encounter, where foes would try to knock PC off a cliff or into acid pools or such. 5E does not even come close to such encounters." That's just not true; there is nothing in 5e preventing you from building such an encounter; in fact, here is one that I built not long ago:

Room full of acid, characters trying to get across via precarious perches, and an ooze trying to drag them in. 5e.

I pretty much agree with Snarf's OP. On paper AD&D looked positively lethal by today's standards, but in practice it really depended on the group, and most folks adopted rules and play styles that ameliorated the body count. Gygax himself had many characters that he played for years. 5e is generally less deadly but again, that comes down to table culture. If my group wanted to create a hyper deadly campaign using 5e, it would not be hard to do so.

 

[Hussar]

I think the point I agree with @Snarf with the most is that it is INCREDIBLY dependent on the table. For example, he talks about adventures being full of deadly traps. Thing is, the modules generally actually weren't. Yup, there were a few. But, by and large, they really weren't.

Additionally, just as a point of order, I don't think anyone would argue that 5e is more lethal than 1e. Certainly not me. For my money, 3e was by far the deadliest edition. It was just so easy to kill PC's. When you have orcs that can quite possibly do 25-35 points of damage in a single hit (Greataxe was a x3 crit weapon, dealt d12 and orcs in 3e have an 18 Str - max damage of 36 points with a lucky hit - enough to straight up kill 3rd level PC's.

Which isn't possible in AD&D. Nothing deals that kind of damage. An ogre, from memory, dealt like a d8 points of damage per round. No strength bonus. No bonuses at all. Maybe a d12? As I said, I'm going from memory.

The point that I made was that AD&D COMBAT, not the edition as a whole, is not very lethal at all after about 3rd or 4th level. The baddies just didn't do enough damage, nor did they have any to-hit bonuses. Which meant they weren't hitting often and when they did, they didn't really do that much damage.

Add to that the impact of Unearthed Arcana - which absolutely did change how the game worked - as well as things like Dragonlance, which also played a pretty formative role in my gaming experience, and no, I don't think AD&D combat is all that lethal. Most of the lethality came from stuff that bypassed the combat rules like poisons and the like.

 

[Nikosandros]

I played 1e and 2e. To death, so to speak. In theory they were more lethal than in 5e. In practice, not for us. I think it really varied by campaign. But what I find hyperbolic are your claims that over-generalize, such as "More then one adventure had an "on the edge" encounter, where foes would try to knock PC off a cliff or into acid pools or such. 5E does not even come close to such encounters." That's just not true; there is nothing in 5e preventing you from building such an encounter; in fact, here is one that I built not long ago:

View attachment 289808

Room full of acid, characters trying to get across via precarious perches, and an ooze trying to drag them in. 5e.

I pretty much agree with Snarf's OP. On paper AD&D looked positively lethal by today's standards, but in practice it really depended on the group, and most folks adopted rules and play styles that ameliorated the body count. Gygax himself had many characters that he played for years. 5e is generally less deadly but again, that comes down to table culture. If my group wanted to create a hyper deadly campaign using 5e, it would not be hard to do so.

Yes, 100% this. The baseline was far more lethal, but in practice it totally varied from campaign to campaign, even with the same DM. I've ran plenty of very lethal games, but my longest AD&D campaing, wasn't lethal at all

 

[Oofta]

It‘s amazing that in all those editions I never read specific hints or rules to adjust the lethality of the game.
We have some variant for resting in the DM 5ed, but no words on lethality. Maybe it‘s a taboo subject.

It's come up now and then. It's not taboo, just not something people ask about all that often.

It's not that hard to kill a PC. Focus fire works well, the damage output will typically exceed any healing. When you take the target to zero, they are unconscious and every hit after that is a critical. A critical causes 2 death save failures. So someone goes down? Double tap and someone is dead after 2 hits. A lot of monsters have multiple attacks and can do it themselves.

At higher levels you may want to target the pesky cleric first and/or carry the body off so the target can't be revivified. Of course spells like disintegrate which turns targets to dust works well and there are always monsters that swallow or immediately kill when a target drops to zero. A couple sessions back I almost killed a couple of 19th level PCs because they had been paralyzed and swallowed, they only survived because they got lucky.

The DM always has infinite dragons, we just choose not to use them. Usually.