Players, DMs and Save or Die

[RFisher]

Save-and-reload, aka resurrection, is the traditional way of handling this impasse. IMO save-and-reload is more hokey than plot protection, and brings more problems in terms of versimi verislimi verilism suspension of disbelief. Better to replace "dead" with "defeated" as a state, and let PCs accumulate sucks-to-be-me points for being repeatedly defeated.

For whatever reason, I've seen very little resurrection.

To be precise, the way out is for the players/PCs to be more creative than the DM. Which is often hard to distinguish from "play the bad guy dumb".

I can't entirely disagree with that.

When I DM, I often find it hard to outsmart the four other people at the table simultaneously.

Explain a mistake that's so big, you can no longer be a protagonist after making it.

To qualify, it of course has to be a bigger mistake than every mistake ever made by a protagonist in a fantasy book, film or electronic game - I'll limit it to fantasy to narrow the field a bit - who remains a protagonist till the end of the story.

I don't measure face-to-face role-playing games by books, films, or electronic games. At least not always. (^_~)

&, you know, I do enjoy Toon.

I don't know. I don't think it's about any one specific mistake. After all, I'm trying to explain why I like "save or die", not why I like "just die". (^_^)

 

[Cadfan]

That's not the only way. The other way out is for the players/PCs to be creative.

When the players/PCs know something is a slim chance, that's the game's way of telling them that they either need to avoid getting in that situation or find a way to change the odds in their favor.

At least that's the way I've come to see it.

You know, people keep saying this, and I genuinely don't know what they mean. I don't know for sure that they know either. I think maybe I'm getting blown off with a meaningless, dismissive comment.

Save-or-die is pretty simple. There isn't room to "get creative." The spellcaster casts the spell, you roll a d20, and if you roll low you die. There's nothing else to do.

Maybe you're thinking of specific encounters, and specific times you creatively solved them? That's great and all, but its not a solution to the problem.

I remember this game session where we killed a spellcaster by sabotaging a dock, and dropping him into the water. He couldn't cast and swim at the same time very well, and we clubbed him in the head like a baby seal. That session was awesome.

But can everyone see that "Yeah! Do cool stuff like that!" is not an adequate answer to the basic problem that spellcasters are too dangerous to encounter regularly after certain levels? You can't assume that every encounter with a spellcaster is going to be under circumstances like that unless the DM is giving you freebies.

Its like saying that the Healer character class isn't weak in combat because this one time your healer PC pushed a boulder down a cliff and crushed a bunch of orcs and it was totally awesome. It may in fact have been totally awesome, but the exception does not disprove the general rule.

 

[Cadfan]

I don't know. I don't think it's about any one specific mistake. After all, I'm trying to explain why I like "save or die", not why I like "just die". (^_^)

Last campaign was a war campaign. Enemy spellcasters were attached to enemy squads in bulk. They made up about 1 out of ever 12 hobgoblin soldiers.

This meant that about 4 to 8 spells were cast on the PCs per day. We'll call it 6 as an average.

Lets say I played the hobgoblins intelligently, instead of fun-but-really-stupid.

Casting against the PC with the lowest save versus the chosen spell would yield about a 50/50 chance of the PC failing the save, with the odds checked about 6 times per day.

.5^6=.015625
1-.015626

That's a 98.4375% chance that at least one PC would die on a given day.

So it might as well be "just die" in the long term.

Even if I made the hobgoblins a little dumber, and had them cast against targets with strong saves instead of the perfectly available targets with weak saves, things don't get much better. A strong save often has about a 70% chance of success. That yields an 88.2351% chance of at least one PC death per day.

If I reduced the hobgoblins selection of save-or-die to every other spell, it would just mean that those same odds would be invoked... every two days.

This is all worth keeping in mind when discussing saving throws, I think.

 

[pogre]

I used to insist SoD was critical to keep the game fun. However, in the last few years when it has happened IMC, whether to PC or foe, it has been decidely anticlimactic. I would throw in disjunction as another fun-killer IMC.

I can see enjoyment in a killer campaign, but it would not suit my tastes for a long running campaign.

 

[RFisher]

But can everyone see that "Yeah! Do cool stuff like that!" is not an adequate answer to the basic problem that spellcasters are too dangerous to encounter regularly after certain levels? You can't assume that every encounter with a spellcaster is going to be under circumstances like that unless the DM is giving you freebies.

It's not about assuming anything about encounters. It's about planning & fleeing to make every encounter the best circumstance we can. Our plan doesn't always have to be that "cool", but we do need to plan.

(& honestly, I'm constantly blown away by my players ability to come up with interesting plans. They do it rather consistently.)

Yeah, you can either change the danger or figure out how to deal with it. I can enjoy either way. Since I start with the assumption that designers must've found ways of dealing with the danger because it must've worked for their games, I want to try to deal with it first & then decide whether to change it.

 

[RFisher]

That's a 98.4375% chance that at least one PC would die on a given day.

Right. In my group the question before the PCs would then be: How do we mitigate that.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Well, I'm probably in a kind of "pro save-or-die" camp but I would not go as far as this, so I find this argument unconvincing (as you do also AFAICT) (edit: to be clear, by "argument" I mean the one about the bodaks that you're objecting to, not the one you're making). In any case, just spot reading this thread I find the justification for save-or-die other than what's given here.

Well, to be precise, the argument I'm referring to isn't really an argument for SoD so much as it's a reason why SoD isn't as bad as people claim...because if you know it's coming (and you should) then you can render it harmless by casting the appropriate preparatory spells.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I believe that argument is a poor justification for SoD. Anthtriel delivers what I think is a killer blow in post #69 of this thread - it can be used to justify absolutely anything.

You could say that a class with a d20 for hit points, full BAB, spellcasting like a wizard and no drawbacks is fine because a good DM will see that it is unbalanced and introduce in-game penalties for all PCS of that class.

The 'good DM' defence is no defence at all.

Well, it's basically an application of the oberoni fallacy: there is no problem because we can fix the problem.

(as opposed to, there's a problem but we can fix the problem).

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

This right here? This is the ESSENCE of why I don't want save-or-die (or gameplay-dictated death AT ALL) in the game.

Why would I want to be the guy who dies and doesn't get a story written about him? I wouldn't read about him, I wouldn't watch a movie about him, I wouldn't play a console game about him - but for whatever reason, I would play him in an RPG, investing more time, more thought and more effort into him than in any other medium?

Even worse, why would I want to GM a game for 'that guy?' Why set up a series of events and antagonists and plot hooks - only to discover that the dice say the character those were hung on is 'that guy,' not an actual protagonist?

It makes no sense to me.

That's a good angle: from a narrative perspective, SoD turns the characters into redshirts.

"Good lord, it killed him in a glance! It must be deadly. Good thing we brought along Sergeant Getskilled. Scotty, beam us up before any important characters die!"

 

[Doug McCrae]

Mang, this post is so anime.

Hong, you've won the internet yet again.