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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6486761" data-attributes="member: 4937">I try to blend low/high lethality.In the past 4 years of 3.Xe play, from a party of 6 players, I've lost 9 PCs.  I consider that too high of death rate to be ideal.  However, in 8 of the 9 cases, the cause of death was simply 'splitting the party' and death would not have occurred if the party had stayed together and played well.   I consider that the ideal situation, in as much as death is an ever present possibility but all but the worst run of luck allows death to be reliably avoided by skillful play.  So despite the fact that we've lost more PCs than is ideal - in fact, I'd be happy with zero deaths - I consider the system working as designed.I build in pretty heavy safeguards against bad luck.  In addition to D&D's standard 'death recovery mechanisms' for high level play (Resurrection, Wish, etc.), these include higher starting hit points (similar to but slightly different than the 4e methodology), recoverable destiny point resources which can be used to reroll saving throws, avert critical hits, and otherwise give 1 time luck mitigation, mechanically defined 'Divine Intervention' chances with a small chance a deity will intervene in some mechanically definable way, and character resources that allow for death recovery mechanisms in narrowly defined circumstances even from low level (such as the Feat 'Master Physician').   Destiny points have probably prevented as much as a dozen deaths from occurring due to bad luck from ill timed critical hits or fumbled saving throws.  Low level recovery mechanism have prevented two additional deaths.  Divine Intervention has prevented 3 additional deaths (via deities casting Sanctuary, Dispel Magic, and Monster Summoning V on the pleading players behalf).    And that's to not even get into the question of how many deaths at lower levels were prevented by having a larger cushion of hit points mitigating against enemy lucky sequences of hits or unavoidable damage bursts.The large number of averted 'unfair deaths' suggests to me, that as I suspected, 3rd edition D&D has too few means of mitigating bad luck (too much 'Save or Die') when played RAW, leading to an unhealthy dependency in optimization, broken builds, exploiting oversights, and full immunities if you wanted to persist a character in play.  Even beyond that, I'm still encountering problems in encounter design in balancing risk due to the large potentials for burst damage and continual 'save or die' risks leading to potentials for 'unfair' deaths while on the other hand actually challenging the PC's when this threats are not on the table.  I could almost entirely avoid any risk of deaths in a coherent party if I kept the EL down deliberately, but doing so risks continual 'cake walks'.   One prevalent problem I have that I don't believe has a solution is that as party size increases, the chance that burst damage from any encounter that challenges the party as a whole will overwhelm a single unfortunate character increases.   I've fond myself ad-hocing area of effect attacks (such as trample) on several occasions to distribute damage more equitably than the usual claw/claw/bite or similar attack routine, which suggests some likely changes in the monster rules when I get around to writing my version of the Monster Manual.  Right now I'm having a huge problem with 'Swallow Whole' in simulated play that I think is going to require immediate changes in the grappling rules.So, while on the one hand I agree that the designers of 4e and 5e were facing problems that needed to be fixed, I'm not entirely sure the particular techniques being used actually maintain drama during play.  That said, I don't think the problem of lethality in either 4e or 5e is as large as some of the detractors state, but rather both systems require changes from the 1e/3e mindset if you are to achieve either high lethality or great tension and the sense of impending and continual risk.  If I had to guess from reading the rules where the real problem lies, it's not with the lethality rules, but overcompensating with the rest rules to try to produce encounters that play out predictably for a given challenge level.  I think the biggest problem with 4e/5e lethality is that it removes the attrition of resources play style that was particularly indicative of TSR era D&D.</blockquote>

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