New Article: Death and Dying

[Lonely Tylenol]

Abusive to the DM, maybe.

Yes. That's the point. How many fallen characters does a player have to track? One. How many does the DM need to track? Hundreds. Why should he?

 

[Loincloth of Armour]

If it truly was the goal of the 4.0 team to simplify the rules to make them easier to run, then the first thing you is build an elegant and simple ruleset that all players adhere to; ...

All players do adhere to this rule.

NPCs are not players. It's in their name: "Non-Player Character."

The DM is a unique class of player. DM's have always opperated under special rules. Nothing new here.

 

[JohnSnow]

Yes, I did, and not just in D&D. Every game I run, everyone plays the same game and adheres to the same rules. This makes system mastery easier to attain, since you need only do it once, and since I record what NPCs I create for later reference I never encounter the phantom menace of "excessive stats". (For everything else, there's print and online resources such as the d20 NPC Wiki that I can access as I require.) Once you know the patterns, everything becomes easy.

And in games like that, as I said above, I shelve my preferred playstyle of "gloss over the problem" and just go around and coup de grace every NPC until he's D-E-A-D. If the DM insists that I roll, I'll roll, and keep rolling until I do enough damage to know the bastards won't come back.

It's a pain in the neck, but it's a lot less troublesome than worrying if goblin #5 will become a serious threat later.

I'd rather gloss over it, but if the DM is going to insist on a silly adherence to rules designed to enable PC survival being applied to NPCs, one has to be thorough.

 

[Reynard]

Interesting article.

On the one hand, it certainly frees up the Dm from feeling guilty (if he suffers from that tragic flaw) from going all out with the enemies. Given lower damage outputs and bigger buffers and better healing, PCs that buy it bought it on sale and they deserve it.

On the other hand, it sure seems to enforce one particular playstyle over any others -- "action movie" getting bandied about in this thread is a good indicator of that -- and I don't much like being told how to have fun.

Then there's the fact that no mention is made of what the actual consequences of death are -- which I was really hoping they would clarify, given the indications in W&M -- because those consequences should have a major impact on how death/dying rules are received.

 

[Professor Phobos]

Yes. That's the point. How many fallen characters does a player have to track? One. How many does the DM need to track? Hundreds. Why should he?

Yep. One of my biggest problems with the idea that "Everyone plays by the same rules" is that not everyone has the same obligations, responsibilities and requirements.

Players have to run one character. That character (for D&D purposes) has all kinds of options and tricks and stuff to make running one character interesting.

Now, most players, like most DMs, could probably keep track of PC-level complexity characters in numbers greater than one. But not by a very large number.

Many posters here argue that if NPCs aren't run by the same rules as PCs, it is unfair. I would argue that it is unfair if they are. A GM has so many demands on his time and attention already, refusing to allow him time-saving options with regard to the mechanics is downright cruel.

Part of the reason there are more players than there are DMs is because DMing is hard and time-consuming. You're often in charge of managing, scheduling and hosting the game sessions. You've got to know the rules and world well enough to explain it to new players. You've got to prepare adventures. You've got to run adventures. You've got to make sure everyone has fun.

If you put a lot of work into an adventure, the PCs can (and will) go completely outside the bounds of what you thought likely to occur you won't have anything prepared, and they'll hate you for it. Or you rail-road them back to stuff you have prepared, and they hate you for it. Or you try and improvise, and they hate you for it because your stories or characters aren't consistent and you're obviously making stuff up as you go.

The more complex the rules, and the more rigidly the DM is expected to adhere to them in matters not directly pertaining to the PCs, the more work he has to do.

And I, and many other players my age, do not have the time. We get maybe four spare hours a week to game. We want a lot to occur in that time- multiple combats, multiple scenes, lots of stuff happening. We don't want to have to do a lot of prep work to get ready for it, because we don't have the time.

I will take "simple and fast, but requires discretion" over "slow and complex, but has all the answers for you" any day of the week.

 

[MerricB]

I would love to see a citation for it being in the 1e DMG. I ran the game for years. I never saw it. I never played BECMI until after 3e came out.

It's definitely in the 1e DMG. Alas, I don't have my copy at me at present, but it's around page 80, IIRC.

Cheers!

 

[kennew142]

Since I didn't have my books handy, I did some quick perusing on the internet with a Google search. I turned up a legal document filed by TSR against Games Workshop that mentions negative hit points. Here's the relevant part of the text, which included page number citations:

I haven't had time to check the page numbers myself, but I imagine they're accurate.

That proof enough?

When you're (or in this case I) wrong, you're wrong. I could have sworn that the rule about -10 hp had come from a Dragon article, but it is there in black letter on page 82 of the DMG.

I don't think that I, or anyone I knew, ever used the rules about long term incapacity.

 

[kennew142]

And in games like that, as I said above, I shelve my preferred playstyle of "gloss over the problem" and just go around and coup de grace every NPC until he's D-E-A-D. If the DM insists that I roll, I'll roll, and keep rolling until I do enough damage to know the bastards won't come back.

It's a pain in the neck, but it's a lot less troublesome than worrying if goblin #5 will become a serious threat later.

I'd rather gloss over it, but if the DM is going to insist on a silly adherence to rules designed to enable PC survival being applied to NPCs, one has to be thorough.

I agree completely. I've been in games where the GM insisted that these unsavory details be played out in excruciating detail. They were not games I chose to return to.

IMO, PCs are the main characters of the story. Since a good story should be constructed around the PCs (their wants, desires, reputations, history, backgrounds, successes, failures, etc...), it can be a campaign killer to have them dying off with great frequency. A story written around the PCs will fall apart, if the PCs die. The hooks and backgrounds of the story no longer have relevance.

The system as presented for 4e will limit death by happenstance, but will still allow for characters to die in dramatic ways (such as when fighting climactic battles). The former will not be ruled out. Players can still be unlucky. Dying characters can still be caught in area of effect spells, or eaten by ghouls while unconscious, dragged off by animals or monsters, etc... This rule simply makes it less likely.

IMO, the nice thing about limiting the frequency of character death is that it makes Raise Dead (and similar magics) less necessary. Death, when it occurs, can be more permanent. Players whose characters aren't dying constantly due to happenstance, are often more sanguine about character death when it occurs.

 

[Corinth]

All players do adhere to this rule.

NPCs are not players. It's in their name: "Non-Player Character."

The DM is a unique class of player. DM's have always operated under special rules. Nothing new here.

That's the problem. The GM should be held to the same standard as the other players at the table. It's one of the biggest turn-offs for outsiders because it's seen as sanctioned cheating; the solution isn't to make special cases for the GM, but to make the standard ruleset universally fair and elegant. It's not like it hasn't been done.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Although if you get a bonus to Saves (which I imagine are rare, but extremely significant when they show up), that makes a character much tougher.

Hey, here's an idea. What if there are feats that provide you with bonuses to saves, but only against certain things? Like a Dwarven racial feat that provides a +2 bonus to saves to recover from poison, or a Hard to Kill feat that gives you a +2 bonus on saves to stabilize.

Man. I was a little wary of the new save mechanic at first, but I'm really liking it the more I think about it.

Probably already been said, but this is already present in the Pit Fiend stats: he has +2 to "saving throws," IIRC, which is presumably this roll.