New WotC Article - Deadly Dice

[KidSnide]

Death as "uncommon" is probably a good default, although I prefer a game where failure is uncommon and yet death is rare.

In a highly character-centric game, you want death to be relatively permanent (to maintain its narrative value) but you don't want to kill PCs randomly or especially often. In that kind of game, death should be the result of some mixture of error and back luck when the player puts the PC's life on the line to accomplish a worthwhile goal. That combination leads to a decidedly non-old-school low-lethality game, but -- a the same time -- the game generates a better narrative if the PCs sometimes have to deal with failure.

Creating a situation where failure can occur without a TPK is more about adventure design than it is about combat mechanics. However, at the same time, guidelines for flight and evasion can make it easier to run encounters where the PCs can choose to forfeit a chance of victory for an improved chance of survival. I suspect flight and evasion rules are also really useful in making a high-lethality sandbox-style game more fun for players who sometimes make mistakes in their selection of opponents.

-KS

 

[Iron Sky]

I briefly played a Facebook game called "The Company." In it, each of your characters has certain traits that evolve through random events, some of which have a (small) chance of outright killing the soldier for good if you take the high-risk, high-reward option I.E. become a magical badass with a chance of being pulled into another dimension.

Combat itself has a chance of wounding your soldiers and soldiers that are already wounded are killed, but as long as you patch up your soldiers between combats, they have only a miniscule chance of dying (I'd guess <1%) so when they do - especially a veteran of fifty or a hundred missions - it's pretty shocking. Once your soldiers get old enough, they become "Mature" and when they would normally be wounded there's a chance they'll die instead.

It has a nice balance - death is always a chance, rare enough that it's shocking, but common enough that every mission you worry that you might lose someone, especially with your most elite troops which are usually aged veterans - your best troops but also the most likely to die.

 

[kitsune9]

For my own personal preference, there needs to be a serious risk. At low levels, if I die, I roll up a new character because I'm not going to afford the sums to get raised. At medium levels, if I die, I get raised, but it will be costly to my character both mechanically and economically. My personal preference in this regard is a permanent level loss or something like that. I also like the risk of resurrection or system shock preventing even a successful raise from occurring.

I think at high levels, raise magics don't work on high level characters so you're character is adventuring on "borrowed time". If you die at high levels, that's it unless you got a clone lying around.

I know my view is extreme, but that's me. I play Pathfinder and it's not that bloodthirsty so I don't mind whatever mechanics are instituted in the game.

 

[Serendipity]

I would be perfectly happy if raise dead and the like were simply unavailable at levels below 7th-9th, depending on how the game's levels scale. There's just something about some low level scrub being brought back from the dead that trivializes it as a story element for me.
Of course, I tend to prefer high (or at least, higher) lethality games both as player and GM, so I'm already kind of in the minority here.

 

[mach1.9pants]

I voted for "uncommon, but the threat is always there".

Me too but (in DND) I would lean further towards the common scale (especially at lower levels).

 

[MortalPlague]

I would be perfectly happy if raise dead and the like were simply unavailable at levels below 7th-9th

In my 4th Ed game, there's no such thing as resurrection for heroic tier. It's rare into mid paragon, as well.

 

[am181d]

It may be that I was just reading the "why can't PCs lose fights?" thread, but I think D&D would be better off if there were more space for characters to be TPKO'd (total party knocked out) rather than TPK'd.

Per that other thread, D&D doesn't have great rules to facilitate surrender or retreat. Rules for KO and capture would be another helpful arrow in the DM quiver.

Everything being "too the death" may seem exciting at first, but just seems nonsensical in a lot of cases.

 

[Sunseeker]

It may be that I was just reading the "why can't PCs lose fights?" thread, but I think D&D would be better off if there were more space for characters to be TPKO'd (total party knocked out) rather than TPK'd.

The range in which "knocked out" is a fairly narrow one. Either a creature is non-intelligent enough to stop attacking when the foe is down, or a creature is intelligent enough to have a better use for the players than food. Plus players are usually "knocked out" by the same damage that will put them into "dying", and non-lethal damage is again mostly the domain of a limited number of usually intelligent creatures who can exercise such discretion over their powers.

Further furthermore, there's the issue of a lot of intelligent predators and non-intelligent creatures carrying diseases such as lycanthropy or a zombie plague. The zombie may stop attacking when your character is unconcious, but when you wake your flesh might be mostly green and you've got a craving for human flesh. Likewise under the next full moon you might find yourself hairier than usual!

While I wouldn't mind some rules on how to handle TPKO, I think no matter which way you cut it, the range of space for TPKO is very narrow and runs a high risk of leading to "worse than death" situations afterward.

 

[Mattachine]

Rare.

For me, common death means characters matter less--people don't get as involved with creating backstory and personality. That's great for some gaming groups, but not the campaign I am running right now. In this campaign, the players are heavily invested in characterization, as well as adventure. I want death only to come through as the result of a series of bad choices, or perhaps a purposeful choice, but not the result of randomness.

In this same campaign, though, characters do flee from tough encounters (semi-sandbox campaign), fail when bad guys get away, fail when time runs out on a task, fail when they displease an employer, and so on. Plenty of other failure options are in play.

 

[Andor]

I'm a big proponent of "threaten the quest" style games, which Monte doesn't bring up in his blog post. Death is one of maaaany failure scenarios. IMHO the best DMs only need to use the threat of death rarely. Most of the time it's more exciting when failure has some truly unique consequences.

True, but this wasn't about reward/punishment goals in campaign design. This was probably about some preliminary tuning of the combat numbers for the playtests. They're jiggering about with the char HP vs monster damage.