Potential Player to DM: "What Is Your Mortality Rate?"

[Falcon]

It sounds like you're way too soft on the PCs. Never in any real danger? What's the challenge? Do the enemy fighters all decide to attack with pillows rather than axes? Do the enemy wizards think 'damn I can cast disintergrate, they might fail their save"?

Wuss!

Geoff.

Ummmm...thanks for your insightful commentary. It certainly has cleared things up for me.

Where did I state in my post your idiotic rhetorical questions? PCs live in and die in my campaigns--they have since I began playing D&D, 26 years ago. If you'd bother to read my post, you'd see I was asking some questions as to what others think about the theme I presented; I wasn't seeking input from putzes.

Thanks to everyone else for presenting their viewpoints.

 

[Undead Pete]

Generally a PC death is very infrequent in my world....maybe 1 in every 15-20 runs.

Most likely this is due to 2 house rules I use
a) Death occurs when a PC passes negative CON, not -10. It just makes sense to me that hardier individuals would cling to life longer.
b)If a player is at EXACTLY 0 HP, they may attempt partial actions....i.e. crawl away at 1/4 movement rate, pop open a potion, curl up in a fetal position and play dead (a very common choice)

On the other hand, Resurrection and Raise dead spells are extremely expensive and very rare. I offer the Reincarnate option as well, with a extremely lengthy list of creatures.

 

[Xarlen]

As said, I stand by what I said earlier.

On the other note, of my year of DMing, not one of my characters has died (one wanted to change characters, so I don't count that). I had several deaths in a campaign I did at school, but the players killed eachother, and I didn't much care for that one either.

I have saved a PC and NPC at the same time from instant Death; they failed a save vs. an Unholy Blight, and were about to die. I changed my mind, though I think I did it poorly.

If a PC dies by accident, it's a bad death. If they die during an important battle, or verses a hard foe, then more to it.

 

[Bonedagger]

My mortality rate?

That depends on the player. But I do tend to keep the minimum prize on Raise Dead at 950 gp. The players actually have their characters save up for this

 

[Davelozzi]

Mortality rate: 6.66% (two PC deaths out of 30 PCs played in my long running campaigns)

One other character has died in a one shot adventure but I have no idea how many PCs I've run in one-shots so I get accurate stats there.

I used to fudge a bit more to keep characters alive, but sometimes, character death is inevitable. I'm tending to let the dice fall as they may nowadays as I'd like the campaign to see dangerous, but I don't want characters dying left and right or it would encourage players not put the effort into their characters.

The last death, coincidentally, was of a character that was supposed to be temporary anyway, and the player had already rolled up its permanent replacement. That didn't have anything to do with the death, but it worked out nicely

 

[James McMurray]

Bonedagger: My group has all saved up for Raises too. They carry the diamonds on them for them most part.

 

[Rackhir]

I understand the desire to "tell a story" and the resultant need to not kill PCs, but I find there is something missing from a campaign, where only rank stupidity can get you killed.

A large part of that I guess is that I like desperate battles where the PCs only survive by the skin of their teeth. If you know the DM is going to be pulling punches, it robs things of a certain amount of tension.

It's like watching a movie where you know Arnold isn't going to die in situation X, because he's the hero and after paying him $20 mill, they are going to use him until the end of the film. Ultimately, if there is no risk, there's no heroism.

 

[Psion]

In my campaigns, character death isn't exaclty frequent. In fact, in my current campaign, there has never been a permanent character death -- and out of 9 or so PCs at various times, only two characters killed and raised.

But a little death goes a long ways. If your players ever get to the point that they can say to themselves "the DM won't kill us...", well then, you have just sucked a lot of the tension out of combats and other situations that are supposed to be dangerous.

The D&D HP mechanic tends to minimize the threat that an idle encounter will actually kill anyone; deaths tend to occur in big knock-out battles. And players tend to respect opponents who have killed characters. But the players won't dismiss combats so idly so long as they know you will let the dice fall where they may.

I tweak D&D combat so it is mildly less deadly at low levels, but is more deadly over the life of the campaign. I don't even want players to enter combat without considering the risk to the characters. Games without risk are boring, IMO.

Character continuity is one concern you should have in mind when deciding how lethal to make combats. But so is the mood of the campaign. You make it too easy to get away with risks, the game feels less challenging and daunting, IMO.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I have quite a high mortality rate in my campaign - if you care to check out my storyhour you will see the details. Sometimes characters die through bad luck (e.g. three critical hits in a row against them), sometimes through their bad tactics (not knowing when to retreat) and sometimes (especially in the early days) through me getting the balance of an encounter wrong.

I dislike it when characters die, because it closes off so many excellent plot threats which I was hoping to develop, and which would be cheezy if attached to anyone else.

Interestingly though - some of my players have complained that the penalty for dying doesn't seem harsh enough! Some have been raised and taken the exp loss, normally a new character is brought it at one level lower and with no magical equipment... yet because it is the third or fourth "go" at creating a character there is somewhat more finess in the new one... plus the artefact that a character can be created directly at "xth" level... it is much easier to bring a sorcerer in as a 6th level character than it is to drag him up the long way round, especially through the desert of 2nd level!!

Cheers

 

[Feliath]

PC Death

First things first: My current campaign Mortality Rate is precisely ((1/3)*100)%.

Secondly, I tend to handle character death by this simple rule of thumb - close to one previously mentioned, by the way:

Never kill a character unless:
1) He/she does something really, really stupid. Like decide to shoot an arrow at the leader of a band of 14 hobgoblins surrounding the party - at level 2 (this example is used because this actually happened in the campaign, and is responsible for the two deaths in my rating).
2) It is dramatically correct, and the player finds it agreeable.


Other than that, PCs NEVER die. There are other kinds of loss one might experience - like NPCs the PCs and/or players like (I've taken out raising spells too), money, magic items (magic is horribly scarce IMC).
On that note, a lot of people seem to first state "it's boring if they don't die, it takes away the suspense" and then go on to state that you can resurrect anyway. How, I ask HOW is this separate in any way from the PC getting beaten into a pulp by a wraith, gaining a negative level (or in the case of more powerful resurrecting spells, just fighting a [whatever] and getting no negative level) and having [whatever sum] of GP stolen from them while out cold?

Y'know what? I'll answer the question myself: it isnt!
If all the repercussion there is to death is that you need to pay to get resurrected, then the tension inherent in dying doesn't exist. It's exchanged for the tension of losing money - something easily done even if you don't play with random character death. So I just do away with the "1-up!"framework and hit PCs hard with other things. They know they'll only get killed by their own stupidity, but that doesn't make them incautious (at least not generally; see above ): they also know that Bad Things will happen to them anyway.

Summary for the patience-impaired : The ability to resurrect the dead takes away the tension of possible PC death just as effectively as doing away with most PC death.

/Feliath

Edit - fixed an incomplete sentence inside a parenthesis