Piratecat ruined my D&D game

[Ashy]

I kept trying to tell him, that, but he kept standing up and saying "but THESE are assless!"

I think he just likes saying assless.

I mean, com'on! Who *doesn't*?

 

[Harm]

I've played for years with a group in which character death occurs very rarely. We only recently had our first character death in a number of years, and that occurred only because we're playing in the Eberron setting and raising/resurrecting characters is so much more difficult in that setting.

I'm not familiar with Eberron, but I thought magic was more common, healing more available and clerics more powerful. How is raise dead much more difficult in Eberron? Even constructs can be raised and the only problem I see is when the land of the dead is coterminus your spell might bring the party some bonus XP.

 

[Aeric]

I'm not familiar with Eberron, but I thought magic was more common, healing more available and clerics more powerful. How is raise dead much more difficult in Eberron? Even constructs can be raised and the only problem I see is when the land of the dead is coterminus your spell might bring the party some bonus XP.

Eberron has a lot more magic, but all of it is low-level stuff. Eberron is supposed to be a low-powered world, if you can believe it...most of the movers and shakers in the world are 12th level or lower. So while there's a Continual Light lantern on every streetcorner, high-level spells such as Raise Dead are conversely rarer.

 

[Quasqueton]

although you could always dig up (contact)'s RttToEE story hour if you need an antidote to Piratecat

I’ve now read a good deal of that story hour. Wow, that’s a lot of death. And the party seems to continue mostly out of a mutual metagame acceptance rather than in-game character motivation.

Piratecat, much as I appreciate you responding to the thread, and your advice is really good for those needing help working plots, you really didn’t address my point/concern/question.

How do the PCs in your campaign manage to stay alive through all the plots and keep the campaign going for years and many levels?

For instance, Nolin died at perhaps the most climatic and spectacular and plot-perfect moment of the campaign. In my game, Nolin would have died long before, and the PCs never would have learned about the “plot” of . . . [what’s his name, the undead wizard guy with yellow text?]’s infatuation with him.

That long chase flying through the undead city cavern, with all the spectral things chasing them? Velendo would have decided to stop and try to turn/destroy their pursuers, and so the whole party would have been surrounded and TPKed, never reaching the climax and BBEG.

[undead wizard guy with yellow text] would have successfully gotten off the Mordenkainen’s Disjunction and destroyed all the party’s magic items – the party would then have postponed the adventure while they go home and re-equip.

Malachite would have died in the arena with the vampire witch – a combat completely unrelated to the campaign plot. (And then the Player would have decided that Malachite would be happy to be in Heaven, and so would decline the raise dead.)

You created that arena encounter just to give one of your Players an opportunity to just kick some butt in D&D. But that encounter turned out to totally kick the butt of the PC, instead. But the PC survived the encounter. For my game, it seems, when an encounter turns bad, a PC or two or all, dies – that PC would have died right with Malachite.

Etc.

I don’t have a [too much] problem laying the plots – my problem, (and a frustrating problem for many, it seems, judging from posts in this thread), is that the PCs DIE. (See my OP.) It’s just a fact of D&D adventuring – it’s dangerous work, and people will die. I don’t think I’d like the game as much if there wasn’t the real danger of PC death.

But then I see stories like the Defenders of Daybreak, and I see long-running campaigns, with long-running plots and stories, with long-term characters, and I realize I really want that. I hear about other campaigns in which the PCs went from 1st level to 20th+ level – I want to experience that, too. But that is not the reality I see in all my years of DMing D&D.

And even with raise dead available, there are plenty of ways for PCs to die that prevent raising – being eaten, disintegrated, dissolved, beheaded, turned to undead, etc. And I’ve even had PCs stay dead because the Player decided that the PC would accept the afterlife and not want to return.

And then of course, there’s just the inconvenience of dying – out in the wilderness, deep in the dungeon, on another plane, etc. If I ever put the PCs in an inconvenient location, I can bank on one of them dying, and potentially having to sit out a game session or two waiting for a place where I can put them back in. The whole “stranded on a desert island” adventure scenario is something I could never do, because someone would die.

When I make adventures, I have to make plans for the eventuality of PC death – because if I don’t (and often even when I do), a PC will die and leave me and other PCs and the adventure hanging in the breeze to figure out a way of bringing in a new character.

So the overall question (not just for Piratecat) is: Those of you who have had long-running games, with long-running stories, and long-running PCs, how did the PCs stay alive to get to be “long-running”? DM fudging? Totally brilliant Players? Pure luck? What? How?

Quasqueton

 

[Rel]

So the overall question (not just for Piratecat) is: Those of you who have had long-running games, with long-running stories, and long-running PCs, how did the PCs stay alive to get to be “long-running”? DM fudging? Totally brilliant Players? Pure luck? What? How?

Quasqueton

This narrows the focus and now I understand that I'm unqualified to answer. The sorts of epic campaigns that PC has run are something that our group has never done. And frankly I don't think we want to.

I don't know if we could necessarily be described as having a "short attention span" but our games almost always run between 6 months and a year. We like playing a lot of different genres of game. We have multiple people who wish to GM. And we like playing a variety of characters and types of characters.

Since our weekly game night is the only campaign outlet for our gaming (some of us, mostly me, play a lot of one-shot games at Game Days and such but no other campaigns) then we like to switch things up on a fairly regular basis. I think all of us regard this as more of a feature than a bug.

I never really thought about it before but I think this also contributes to the general attitude among our group that character death is not so big a deal. Because we change settings and systems on a regular basis, we're being exposed to new material. For example, when we played Arcana Unearthed I played a Mind Witch. I loved that character. But if he'd died that was ok because it would have given me a chance to try out the idea I had for a Giant Warmain. Since I probably wasn't going to be playing AU for the next campaign then that would have been my chance to try another aspect of the system.

The one thing that relates to your question above is that the players in our group are very good at "buying in" to the setting or theme posed at the outset of the campaign. This contributes to maintaining continuity even in the face of the occasional PC death. For example I'm running a Pirates of the Caribbean game right now with a decidedly nautical theme. If one of the PC's croaks (and it's very likely that one will at some point in the campaign and there is no "Raise Dead" in Warhammer) then I have every confidence that the player in question will make a replacement PC that is ready, willing and able to join whatever the rest of the party is doing, albeit with their own slant on the situation. They won't make some landlubber type who wants to stay on shore because that would run against the grain of the whole game.

 

[KidCthulhu]

I'll try to respond, Quasqueton. We don't die in part because of the long running nature of the game. We know our own character's capabilities and the capabilities of our teammates, because we've played them for so long. Like dance partners, or a sports team, we know our steps or plays.

We're also amazingly cautious as a group. Not counting Mara. PCs game is deadly and we know it, so we tend to over prepare, to research our opponents and to have back up plans galore. We try to always have an escape, and we almost never go into anything blind if we can help it.

Death is a very real possibility in most of our encounters, and only the brilliance of my fellow players keeps us from being a greasy smear on a regular basis.

 

[Ashy]

Having the true privlidge to sit in as a guest player, I can say that what KidC says here is a major understatement - as players they are very smart, very cautious and very suspicious...although not to the point where the players override the characters.

 

[Quasqueton]

One other question, maybe I should ask of those folks who say "My campaign ran from 1st to 20th level": Did the original *PCs* go from 1st to 20th level, or was it just the campaign -- For instance, Player A's original PC went from 1-3, then died; Player A's PC #2 went from 3-7; Player A's PC #3 went from 7-14; Player A's PC #4 went from 14-20. Or did Player A's PC make it all the way from 1-20 (maybe dying and being raised along the way a few times)?

I'd like to have a campaign in which at least half the original PCs went from 1st to 20th level. As it normally is, my campaigns go from 1st to 6th level, or from 5th to 10th, or from 9th to 12th, etc. (Or 1st to 1st to 1st to 1st.

Quasqueton

 

[I'm A Banana]

Yeah, aside from immensely well-trained and cautious players who want to keep their characters from session to session, I can't see this happening by DM design (unless the rules are changed so that death is less permenant).

You can't MAKE players like that, either. My group has always been something of a mix: one or two people like their characters and want to preserve them over the course of several adventures, but the rest of the party is happy to die heroically and make a new character every session. So I wind up having long-running D&D plots with the one or two characters that stick around, and the others are just a rotating cast of helpers, extras, and et cetras.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

so, Quasqueton, it seems to come down to this, not only is pirate cat a good dm that knows the limits of his players and the characters they play, his players knows the limits of themselves as players and the characters they play. They want the game to go on, thus they do everything in thier power to stay alive. Your players may not be attached to their character as much as they should be. What this means is that their may not be a simple formula to follow to get your games like his. However, I think by starting, at least at first, to throw punches to find out your players weakness along with their characters are good at, is something to start with. That may be a good start, until you know what you can send at them that wont kill them outright, and giving their characters chances to use what they are good at to survive the encounter.

like putting them in aa encounter were they could escape using stone shape, and thier is a druid in the party with stoneshape.