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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 6486641" data-attributes="member: 1210">I prefer a game where death is a real possibility, but smart play will usually avoid it. (There's always the dumb luck factor when you're using dice, though- sometimes you just roll a crit that does too much damage for the pc to survive.)Since I run a sandbox, the pcs can choose their own difficulty to a great degree, so it's possible for a group to dial down the lethality by choosing easier challenges. This often results in slower accumulation of treasure and other rewards (e.g. political favors owed, land grants, etc). I don't have a real "I want a pc to die every x sessions" approach and don't twist the dials very much. However, I don't dumb monsters down (though I try to play them as their stats indicate, so stupid monsters do act stupidly), and I don't fudge the dice (well, maybe once every 6-10 sessions I'll make a minor fudge, but it's extremely rare). I don't have a problem with pcs dying, or even with a TPK; I put the integrity of the milieu itself well ahead of any one pc's survival or 'story'. Overall, in 5e so far, I've seen an average death rate of probably around 1 pc/session. This is still a low-level group, however, and there have been a number of... let's say suboptimal choices on the parts of the pcs (such as a 1st level pc with 4 hps remaining charging in at a pair of horrible monsters, one of which had already taken about 30 hp of damage and was still standing). Some sessions have been no-death, several have been one-death, and a couple included several-to-many-deaths. At least two or three pcs were killed by other pcs, too. Also, there was a stretch when part of the party fell into a slide trap in a dungeon that dropped them several levels, where about half of that part of the party died. The others emerged higher level.</blockquote>

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