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

[Snarf Zagyg]

Point of order! Ear Seekers! Rot Grubs were to F you over for searching corpses.

In fairness, I was remembering a particular encounter with an older door infested with rot grubs.* The conundrum with that encounter is that only the application of flame would save you... and flame to the head has certain lasting disadvantages. Usually, it is only considered a remedy for an infestation of bards.

But yes, ear seeker would have been a better example! And before we forget, the Monster Manual was 1977. KHAAAAAAAAN! was 1982. Jus' Sayin'.


*ETA- or perhaps it was a "trapped" door. Eh, it was a long time ago.

 

[Krachek]

I take a look into the 1ed DM guide.

Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things passasthe playerswill kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizing to the players to lose a cared-for-player character when they have played well. When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may!

The assumption of harsh and blind lethality of 1ed was not coming from Gygax.

 

[jmartkdr2]

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.

The shift happened early, if anything I think TSR tried to resist it: a lot of people looked at DnD not as a way to expand their wargame or as a game about dungeon-crawling, but as a way to play out their favorite fantasy stories (novels, comics, etc.)

A highly lethal game is not good for telling epic stories, so people made houserules to de-lethalize the game. This had the beneficial side effect of making epic actions (like diving into a mob of orcs and slaying them all) more likely.

5e especially embraces this style of play over the OSR sensibilities, and I think that's a key part of the edition's success in the market. Traditional is more popular than Old-School. While I can't prove it, I'd guess it always has been.

 

[nevin]

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

I think there is some conflation going on between the rules and designers pushing deadly play and DM's pushing deadly play.
Any version can be deadly if the DM decides to make it so.
But to argue that dnd 5e the dnd that literally has short rest and long rest to let the characters recover is more deadly than any version of DND is like arguing that Oranges are more sour than lemons. It's just not true.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Good example of how we played different games. We rarely had hirelings, we were a pretty bloodthirsty lot back then and so on. The game wasn't particularly deadly because we had fun playing our PCs for a long time.

I don't know if this was a regional thing or just the groups I played with. Between only a handful of DMs or Living City (AL'S equivalent back then)different people talk like they played a different game. Which, in many ways they did.

It's not that PCs, especially any elf I played, never died. It was just not the grindhouse some people experienced.

In all the discussions in which I've participated regarding playing BitD, the one constant is the acknowledgement that there was no consistency. Few people played completely by the book, nor how the devs intended/expected people to play (which, honestly, do not perfectly overlap). It almost had to be the case. Dave and Gary successfully intuited that the exploration, encounter-resolution, and reward structures which people would find engaging; but all the rest (not just lethality, but pace, novelty, realism, and how much role-play alongside treasure-hunting) is going to be wildly divergent across a large player base.

Spoiler: spoilered for size

I'm not so sure it is "many people". There have always been some players that did not like character death. But, by in large, the massive whole of the Old School gamers accepted Character Death as just part of the game. Death was part of the game, same way it's part of life. An Old School gamer was more piratical, more down to Earth and more real. And it's not that all classic characters were toss away characters: plenty of players made massive investments into self insert characters they held very dear.

Of course, the players that wanted the super duper immortal characters were much more vocal with their whines and cries and complaints. Worse was the Bully aspect, as some many of this type of player would attack, threaten or do worse things to a DM that did not "bring back" the players "special character".

The larger, live and let live group of gamers accepted character death....but they were mostly silent.

And as time passes, people grow up and get jobs....sometimes working for gaming companies. And, sadly, many of those people come from that smaller group of anti character death players. And sure, THEY, take it upon themselves to "change and fix" the game....."to make it better". That is....to better fit their vision of the game. And a couple years of all that rolling on and you get 5E. The Soft Players Dream, where they never have to worry about Character Death and can just have great fun on an adventure and always win.

This can be seen in the wider world too. As a kid and teen, my generation played normal group competition games....that is we kept score and one team own the game, and one team lost the game. By the time I had a kid playing such games, the OFFICIAL Rec Center Policy was: For all games BOTH teams got the points from ANY play. Or, in other words, the game was an Automatic Tie...even before they played the game. And if a parent dared to keep a "real score" and be vocal about it, they could be Banned For Life from the Rec Center. And, this too, was on top of the Zero Tolerance Policy of absolutely no cheering for any player on the team...even your own kid(s). Spectators had to sit in total silence, with Rec Watchdogs alert for people making any sounds.

And.....it's all a trap. Really only the same small group wants no character death. And they make the RPG, so what they say is offical. But, as usual they get many to follow them and fall into the trap.

Ask a typical player "Would you want to play a hard nitty gritty grim realism game with random character death Or a super silly easy dream game where your character is an immortal super self insert of you?" And, well, a LOT of players will go for that second option. The same way a LOT of parents think that "all games are Automatic Tie Scores" are a great idea as then their kid will "never loose".

And, for most, the illusion can work for a bit. The player can be in hundreds of games. Happily having their character hop around from encounter to encounter, under the safe comfort that not only will their character never die, but also that they will automatically "win" the game(that is "complete the quest/mission"). The player does not even really have to try much, and sure does not need to pay attention: they have already one. And for some, they could not be happier: they will happily tell you how they did every Adventure Path and killed every foe in the Monster Manual.

For most the illusion wears off after a bit. A game with no sense or chance of loss or defeat is not fun. With the automatic outcome of a "win for all" or a "tie" or "quest success", it can feel pointless to play. They thought it would be "so much fun" to play a "super human immortal character", but the fun wore off quick.

But 5E is a game of it's time.....and it's unlikely "not 5.5E" will go back to the Old School way.......but it's possible The Big Company has signed the D&D Death Warrant, just in time for the 50th anniversary.

5E, of course, has very little "negative" anything. And even should a PC get effected by anything, there is a quick easy button fix. And few players feel the need to be careful in 5E, and they can dance through any encounter and not fear character death, any negative effects or any type of loss.

Look, I'm not going to come down too hard on this because, honestly, we've all been this guy (so much so that it's a trope and an SNL fixture). That said, no -- I fundamentally dispute the whole tropish 'kids these days with their bike helmets and participation trophies' middle-aged self-congratulatory-ism. Likewise, I have never found an issue where it is only one side of a position that is the one that "whines and cries."

Everyone plays the game differently. Some prefer higher or lower lethality. However, in a game where death means you roll up a new character and are back to playing within the hour, one style is not more... correct, adult, manly*, badass, whatever positive spin term one wishes to use... than another. I think we're a long way from the days where the notion that playing elfgames makes you some kind of wuss**, but at the same time playing elfgames -- much less how one plays them -- also isn't how one shows oneself to be a cut above.
*or gender neutral equivalent. I'm still looking for the perfect term for this.
** I'm the only non-VFW member of one of my gaming groups, or example.

As to new generations, I manage a mid-sized team inside a ridiculously large corporation. I have watched careers develop from entry level programmers to principal positions. Kids these days just entering the workforce are honestly coming off as real badasses. They are doing more, with less, with unbounded energy and ambition and honestly a whole lot less whining over their life situation than previous generations despite objectively worse projected prospects. They took those participation trophies home and threw them in a box and treated them like we might a polaroid picture of a prior event ('proof I was there,' as opposed to, 'I got an award, yay me!'). More to the point, they knew they would be on point to adult right out the gate and under incredible scrutiny to perform (and any sign of weakness or prevarication seen as proof that they were lessor). I've noted that movies and books about how hard it is to grow up (with aimless characters that maybe blame the previous generation too much instead of actually do something, Holden) don't seem as prevalent in this crowd, despite them having every reason to do so. No, the kids are alright, watch them go out and do things we could only imagine.

Anyways, yes, I think TSR-era D&D was, by the book (minus things like reaction tables and morale checks and such), quite a bit more lethal. I don't think it is true that people generally (at a general and demographic level) played them all that much more lethally. At least in terms on unrecoverable lethality (resurrection magic throws a wrench in all of this). People kitbashed the heck out of A/D&D, and raised or lowered the threat as they saw fit, just like today. I certainly do not know of any real evidence that modern players are more likely to object to character death (when it does happen) moreso than BitD gaming. Complaining about the potential for absurd, arbitrary, or out-of-nowhere character death in TSR-era A/D&D was so common that various comics made it their bread and butter. The more things change, the more they stay the same; and there were people who played in all sorts of ways back then, and similarly now. Likewise there were sore and gracious losers at all times, whiners and non-whiners on all sides of all issues, and so on.

 

[nevin]

I take a look into the 1ed DM guide.

Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things passasthe playerswill kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizing to the players to lose a cared-for-player character when they have played well. When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may!

The assumption of harsh and blind lethality of 1ed was not coming from Gygax.

fair enough but 1e had that PF2e expectation that the party would play like a well oiled team or die. If the party didnt' protect the wizard they died. If the rogue didn't do his job with traps etc he died. If the half elves and elves got too dependent on thier infravision they died. There were no extra rolls when went unconcious to prevent character death. You either got healed by someone else or you died. When you got hit by harsh enough fire, lightning or any other destructive force, magical or otherwise you rolled for every item you where wearing, and if they weren't metal or magical they probably got destroyed. Assasins got to roll percentile dice on even PC's if they got surprise. On the surprise round by straight rules you got one full round of attacks for every point of surprise you won by. If the orc raiding party got surprise by 2 points they got two full combat rounds on your party with no reaction at all allowed from your party. It was a very deadly game, especially at low levels unless the DM actively fudged the rules. For instance most DM's I knew after a few total party wipes with a bad surprise roll dumped the mechanic completely or simply allowed one combat round. There is nothing in 5e short of the DM that is anywhere near that deady if you stick to the rules and recommended encounter levels.

 

[nevin]

In all the discussions in which I've participated regarding playing BitD, the one constant is the acknowledgement that there was no consistency. Few people played completely by the book, nor how the devs intended/expected people to play (which, honestly, do not perfectly overlap). It almost had to be the case. Dave and Gary successfully intuited that the exploration, encounter-resolution, and reward structures which people would find engaging; but all the rest (not just lethality, but pace, novelty, realism, and how much role-play alongside treasure-hunting) is going to be wildly divergent across a large player base.


Look, I'm not going to come down too hard on this because, honestly, we've all been this guy (so much so that it's a trope and an SNL fixture). That said, no -- I fundamentally dispute the whole tropish 'kids these days with their bike helmets and participation trophies' middle-aged self-congratulatory-ism. Likewise, I have never found an issue where it is only one side of a position that is that one that "whines and cries."

Everyone plays the game differently. Some prefer higher or lower lethality. However, in a game where death means you roll up a new character and are back to playing within the hour, one style is not a more... correct, adult, manly*, badass, whatever positive spin term one wishes to use... than another. I think we're a long way from the days where the notion that playing elfgames makes you some kind of wuss**, but at the same time playing elfgames -- much less how one plays them -- also isn't how one shows oneself to be a cut above.
*or gender neutral equivalent. I'm still looking for the perfect term for this.
** I'm the only non-VFW member of one of my gaming groups, or example.

As to new generations, I manage a mid-sized team inside a ridiculously large corporation. I have watched careers develop from entry level programmers to principle positions. Kids these days just entering the workforce are honestly coming off as real badasses. They are doing more, with less, with unbounded energy and ambition and honestly a whole lot less whining over their life situation than previous generations despite objectively worse projected prospects. They took those participation trophies home and threw them in a box and treated them like we might a polaroid picture of a prior event ('proof I was there,' as opposed to, 'I got an award, yay me!'). More to the point, they knew they would be on point to adult right out the gate and under incredible scrutiny to perform (and any sign of weakness or prevarication seen as proof that they were lessor). I've noted that movies and books about how hard it is to grow up (with aimless characters that maybe blame the previous generation too much) don't seem as prevalent in this crowd, despite them having every reason to do so. No, the kids are alright, watch them do things we could only imagine.

Anyways, yes, I think TSR-era D&D was, by the book (minus things like reaction tables and morale checks and such), quite a bit more lethal. I don't think it is true that people generally (at a general and demographic level) played them all that much more lethally. At least in terms on unrecoverable lethality (resurrection magic throws a wrench in all of this). People kitbashed the heck out of A/D&D, and raised or lowered the threat as they saw fit, just like today. I certainly do not know of any real evidence that modern players are more likely to object to character death (when it does happen) moreso than BitD gaming. Complaining about the potential for absurd, arbitrary, or out-of-nowhere character death in TSR-era A/D&D was so common that various comics made it their bread and butter. The more things change, the more they stay the same; and there were people who played in all sorts of ways back then, and similarly now. Likewise there were sore and gracious losers at all times, whiners and non-whiners on all sides of all issues, and so on.

I agree with most of this. I do think playing RPG's and MMO's has conditioned the younger generations to expect to be ressurected and keep playing thier chosen character rather than roll up another. That does seem to push the buttons of some of the old timers when they sense that expectation. For some reason it seems to push the buttons of some of the younger one's when you point out that older games were more lethal. They seem to conflate those statements to mean it was better. (though to be fair there are some borderline evil bastards out there that just like painful miserable games and think you get better stories that way. )

 

[Warpiglet-7]

If we are being honest…

The goal for the group was always to play more…as a groups. Dead is a dead end.

Sure you can fail a save but our group and most I saw has plenty of mulligans to keep the game found. That did not always work and I remember seeing a pained look on the DMs face when one of my characters died.

There were no reasonable mulligans.

“No man, he’s dead. It’s cool.”

But the point is playing as strictly by the rules as possible statistics means death is assured. Stastically, you would die before level 8. Whether you get raised or rescued ia the question.

Many times the DM made that possible…I say again just eating the dice as they fall you would not get to level 9 to cast raise dead…without a little help.

 

[Mannahnin]

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.

Really? Never? Both 1E and 2E have optional rules for negative hit points, which reduce the lethality of the game compared to simple death at zero HP. In the 1E DMG Gary tells you that critical hits are a foolish idea, in part because the PCs suffer much more from them than disposable monsters do. In 2e and 3e the DMGs talk about critical hits (and they're made a core rule in 3E), but they also talk about the additional danger from them. I think both of those editions also talk about how the DM should consider how easy access to Raise Dead and similar magics should be, which is a direct part of calibrating the lethality of one's campaign.

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.

An Ogre in the 1977 MM does d10 or by weapon +2 (extra +1/+2 on top of that for leaders or chieftains). It was d6+2 in the 1974 rules; Ogres always did more damage than regular baddies, enough to kill an above-average 1st level PC on an average roll. The monsters in the MM do tend to be a little on the weak side for AD&D, though, as the book was intended for use with OD&D too, and AD&D hadn't been finished yet.

No to-hit bonuses? Higher hit dice give better attack chances on the tables. Big strong monsters didn't get strength bonuses to hit, but they generally had bigger and more damage dice. Some of them (like giants) got static bonuses starting in 2E.

Remember that 6th level party I posted above? The highest HP PC is 33 on average, with most of them in the 20s and a couple of them in the mid to low teens. An encounter with Ogres on the 4th level of the dungeon per the DMG will be 2-6 in number, which hit AC2 on a 13 or better, and the soft targets in the party considerably easier. Put those PCs at 17k xp (4th level for the Fighter and M-U) and that tank Fighter and Cleric average 22HP, and no one else is out of the teens. The M-U is walking around at an average of 10hp.

IME folks consistently added house rules to AD&D to soften the lethality. Negative hit points and max hit points at first level most common among them.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I agree with most of this. I do think playing RPG's and MMO's has conditioned the younger generations to expect to be ressurected and keep playing thier chosen character rather than roll up another. That does seem to push the buttons of some of the old timers when they sense that expectation. For some reason it seems to push the buttons of some of the younger one's when you point out that older games were more lethal. They seem to conflate those statements to mean it was better. (though to be fair there are some borderline evil bastards out there that just like painful miserable games and think you get better stories that way. )

I would say this is a fair assessment. Video games certainly provide a good example of a 'checkpoint' or 'try again (with proscribed setback)' methodology (also a notion of 'artificial difficulty' where something pads the playthrough by making you play through the first 8 levels for another chance at level 9, simply because you missed a jump). Beyond that, the actual benefit of loss=starting over was never well communicated. I know plenty of early groups that also quickly switched to death meaning you brought in a new character only a few levels behind the one that died, in which case what difference does it make (except having/getting to create a new personality)? I've played it all sorts of ways (no res, res often unavailable, res usually available... heck, non-D&D games where death isn't a serious likelihood) and tend to enjoy them all (with whichever I haven't played recently being the one I want to play next, as opposed to having a static favorite).

And yes, I do think there's quite a lot of... subtle associations people impute onto these things (deadlier is more challenging, challenging is a virtue onto itself, miserable makes better stories, etc.). At the end of the day, the best games are the ones where the player feels their decisions contribute to the outcomes and the challenge of the game rises to the level against which they are challenging themselves. All the rest is details.