Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Trickster Spirit" data-source="post: 6486503" data-attributes="member: 6701829">I'd say my preferred level of lethality is a tug-of-war between both those extremes - 1), I want death to always be a legitimate threat to the PCs, as that supports both willing-suspension-of-disbelief and the kind of stories I want to tell, and 2) I want any given character to have good odds of making it all the way through a campaign (i.e. while I expect some characters to die along the way, I want to avoid TPKs and am always rooting for the PCs to survive). This probably puts me squarely in the middle ground you say you can't tolerate, heh.I've not experienced higher level 5E play yet and I fully expect player life expectancy to climb, but at lower levels 5E seems to fulfill my needs pretty squarely - in our first session with the system I had them face a home-brewed coin dragon as the final encounter (basically re-fluffing the animated armor from the MM as an animated treasure horde shaped like a dragon and giving it a rechargable coin-spewing blunt damage breath weapon). The opening breath weapon attack dropped 3 out of 5 PCs in the first round, one of whom was the cleric - I was sweating bullets too, as I was pretty sure I'd just ensured a TPK with my half-baked rules tinkering. Fortunately the survivors managed to split up and drag their downed comrades to cover on opposite sides of the room (I ruled they moved at half-speed while dragging and even still one still had enough leftover movement to go back for the druid) and get the cleric up with a healing potion. I never had to pull any punches as they made short work of the monster, but it was an edge-of-your-seat encounter - it very much felt like character death was a very real possibility the whole time.I'd agree with what others have said around here, that with the death rules as written it's a lot easier to down characters in 5E than it is to kill them, and that suits me just fine - it satisfies #2) above while at least giving the illusion of #1). That said if you prefer higher lethality games I think that's easily achievable by making the monsters finish off fallen PCs (advantage on attack roll, automatic critical, two failed death saves for criticals) and turning down the healing dials with the options in the DMG.</blockquote>

Verification