D&D 5E [+] Questions for zero character death players and DMs…

[Vaalingrade]

Oh, really?

Sure looks that way to me.

Two days of discussion, plus other people coming in an clarifying and you posting a summary of the difference including how it can feel like a punishment just flushed down the toilet to defend 'hurr, hurr, yur playing Candyland'? Seriously.

 

[Charlaquin]

Two days of discussion, plus other people coming in an clarifying and you posting a summary of the difference including how it can feel like a punishment just flushed down the toilet to defend 'hurr, hurr, yur playing Candyland'? Seriously.

I’m not defending the Candyland comment (and I think it’s pretty clear Max and I don’t see eye to eye on the whole analogy I was making), it just seemed like a bit of a pot calling the kettle black situation to call out his comment like that.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I’m not defending the Candyland comment (and I think it’s pretty clear Max and I don’t see eye to eye on the whole analogy I was making), it just seemed like a bit of a pot calling the kettle black situation to call out his comment like that.

Dude, you had just gotten through showing you knew where I was coming from. I felt the matter was settled.

 

[Charlaquin]

Dude, you had just gotten through showing you knew where I was coming from. I felt the matter was settled.

Ok. It’s settled. This isn’t worth arguing about.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

o/

So, I think I’ve made a realization about where our disconnect lies. One way to define a game is that you have a goal, and you impose restrictions on yourself to make the pursuit of that goal more interesting. In a simple example like Candyland, your goal is to move your piece the end of the board, but you’re restricted in how you’re allowed to move your piece - you have to draw a card and move to the nearest square of that color. Nothing really stops you from just ignoring the cards and moving your piece to the end, except that if you did so, you wouldn’t really be playing a game. Getting the piece to the end of the board has no intrinsic value, the value comes from trying to overcome the restrictions that you voluntarily agree to, that’s what makes it a game.

So, to me and many others, part of the goal when playing D&D is keeping the character alive (perhaps in pursuit of some larger goal like achieving maximum level, or completing a satisfying narrative arc for the character or something). All the things in the game that can kill the character are part of the restrictions that we voluntarily agree to, to make the character’s survival meaningful. To us, making character death strictly voluntarily feels like just ignoring the cards and moving the piece to the end of the board. By removing the restrictions, it robs the achievement of its value. The struggle was, for us, the point, or at least a significant part of it.

I suspect that you and many others are playing for a different goal, and the risk of character death isn’t what restricts your pursuit of that goal, so it isn’t really adding any value to your game. It may, in fact, be detracting from your game, because while not directly restricting the pursuit of your goal, it’s still inconvenient (characters take a big investment of time and creative energy after all). So what to me is one of the main sources of value in the game, to you feels like a punishment for playing the wrong way, because we’re functionally playing entirely different games with the same (or very similar) rules.

This post right here. chef's kiss

100%

I do not play an RPG to try to keep my character alive through a series of challenges to see the story that emerges. I have board games for that that do a better job of keeping things interesting for me during the combat.

I play RPGs because I want to create a shared work of fiction that weaves into a story I will remember 30 years from now. The combat and challenges serve as a way to direct that fiction towards either a "you beat the ogre and save the prince" or a "" you lost to the ogre and it ate the prince and your beloved pony Bill" fork in the story.

Losing a character in the boardgame means I lose the game and try again with the knowledge I learned.

Losing a character in an RPG means I take the threads specific to my character being weaved into the story and just snip them off, never to see how the design turned out.

That's why I want my death to be for either a dramatic purpose (finishing the last stich of a design but with the bad ending) or a result of my deliberately risky actions (I will wager losing the ability to add to some threads in order to do something extraordinary with another).

 

[Maxperson]

95% of all media involves the protagonist reaching their goal in the end.

We aren't playing other kinds of media. Movies, TV, books, Anime, plays, etc. are all very, very different than RPGs. They achieve their goals, because they are written with a beginning, middle and end in mind from the get go, unlike RPGs.

If you are thinking RPGs should involve always reaching their goal because of those other media types, you are engaging in a rather massive False Equivalence.

They are always going to reach their goal. Adrian Monk from the show Monk is going to catch the killer. Deku from My Hero Academia is going to defeat the villains. The Fellowship of the Ring is going to destroy the Ring of Power.

And House will always nearly kill someone 3 times before miraculously curing them. So what. Those sorts of media are apples to RPG oranges.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

This... boggles me. Why is the "referee" so excited that they can kill characters again? If they wanted to do that in 5e, it isn't hard.

And, again, I fully reject this idea that 5e is "easy mode". It just.. it leaves a foul taste in my mouth. It makes it seem like all the time I spent playing doesn't matter, because I wasn't playing a "real game". I know you didn't say that, but that's the feeling I always get when someone starts calling 5e "easy mode" because supposedly it is so hard to kill characters.

Killing characters isn't the point. It isn't the goal. To me, as the DM, it is the opposite of the goal. Because when PCs die too often and too close together, people stop caring about the game. It isn't a matter of "playing stupid" or "playing smart" I can make a death trap that is highly likely to kill you no matter how you play, and I can make three of them that will certainly kill someone by the time everyone is through it.

But I don't want to do that, it is utterly boring to me. I don't want to play a game where the main goal is this adversarial relationship where we see who is smarter than who.

Id imagine if the players had an old school "Do anything to keep my character alive as long as possible" mindset it would be challenging to kill off a large number of PCs. I never create a character with that as a design goal, so conversely I think I've lost 4 or 5 5e characters as a result.

5e in and of itself isn't easy mode DnD, but perhaps it's the edition where it's the hardest to kill optimized, minmaxed, or overly cautious characters???

 

[Charlaquin]

This post right here. chef's kiss

100%

I do not play an RPG to try to keep my character alive through a series of challenges to see the story that emerges. I have board games for that that do a better job of keeping things interesting for me during the combat.

Bit of an aside here, but I think for most people who play for this challenge-focused type of experience, it’s not just combat that provides the challenge (otherwise, yeah, there are lots of board games that deliver that better). The entire dungeon or other adventure environment is part of the challenge. It’s not just tactical combat, it’s strategic planning, orienteering, resource management, risk assessment… the game is like a whole ecosystem of challenge, constantly pushing you to make tough decisions, which in turn reveal interesting things about the characters and leave everyone with an exciting, memorable story.

I play RPGs because I want to create a shared work of fiction that weaves into a story I will remember 30 years from now. The combat and challenges serve as a way to direct that fiction towards either a "you beat the ogre and save the prince" or a "" you lost to the ogre and it ate the prince and your beloved pony Bill" fork in the story.

It kinda sounds like the story is actually intrinsically valuable to you, then. Or… not exactly I guess, because if that was the case you could just read a novel. Clearly it’s the process of creating the story that you value, but like… you’re clearly not placing restrictions on yourself to make telling a story more challenging. There’s something else going on there that I’m struggling to describe.

Losing a character in the boardgame means I lose the game and try again with the knowledge I learned.

Losing a character in an RPG means I take the threads specific to my character being weaved into the story and just snip them off, never to see how the design turned out.

That's why I want my death to be for either a dramatic purpose (finishing the last stich of a design but with the bad ending) or a result of my deliberately risky actions (I will wager losing the ability to add to some threads in order to do something extraordinary with another).

So, this gets at what I’ve been trying to say about deaths not really being random. To me, just about everything a PC does while adventuring is a deliberately risky action. And as a DM I strive to insure that’s the case, by telling the players the DCs and consequences their characters could anticipate before expecting them to commit to rolling. PCs are constantly gambling with their lives, so to me, character death basically always feels like the result of a deliberately risky action. The only time it feels truly random and unfair are times when the player lacks the information or ability to make a deliberate decision, like the example someone posted a while back of their rogue dying because a behind-the-screen roll apparently told the DM they didn’t see the untelegraphed trap.

 

[Charlaquin]

Id imagine if the players had an old school "Do anything to keep my character alive as long as possible" mindset it would be challenging to kill off a large number of PCs. I never create a character with that as a design goal, so conversely I think I've lost 4 or 5 5e characters as a result.

5e in and of itself isn't easy mode DnD, but perhaps it's the edition where it's the hardest to kill optimized, minmaxed, or overly cautious characters???

A DM can always kill characters if they want to. I think what people are generally trying to express when they call 5e “easy mode” is that the game is built to generally favor the players to win more often than they lose, if run according to all the guidelines in the books.

Old-school play is often more geared towards encouraging players to try and circumvent challenges via their own clever thinking, rather than to use their stats to try and overcome challenges directly. And 5e… isn’t really built with that as the assumed mode of play. The game balance is deliberately tilted in the player’s favor with things like the target 65% success rate, and “medium” encounters being ones that a party is expected to be able to win with no deaths, even if they don’t use any limited resources.

None of this to say 5e can’t be challenging. Again, the DM can always ramp up the challenge to whatever degree they wish. But, the way the guidelines are written suggests that the design intent is for players to reliably be able to use their stats to directly overcome most challenges they face. To someone who is used to or prefers that more challenge-circumvention model of gameplay, that can feel like “easy mode” because you basically never have to look for ways to circumvent a challenge.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Bit of an aside here, but I think for most people who play for this challenge-focused type of experience, it’s not just combat that provides the challenge (otherwise, yeah, there are lots of board games that deliver that better). The entire dungeon or other adventure environment is part of the challenge. It’s not just tactical combat, it’s strategic planning, orienteering, resource management, risk assessment… the game is like a whole ecosystem of challenge, constantly pushing you to make tough decisions, which in turn reveal interesting things about the characters and leave everyone with an exciting, memorable story.

It kinda sounds like the story is actually intrinsically valuable to you, then. Or… not exactly I guess, because if that was the case you could just read a novel. Clearly it’s the process of creating the story that you value, but like… you’re clearly not placing restrictions on yourself to make telling a story more challenging. There’s something else going on there that I’m struggling to describe.

So, this gets at what I’ve been trying to say about deaths not really being random. To me, just about everything a PC does while adventuring is a deliberately risky action. And as a DM I strive to insure that’s the case, by telling the players the DCs and consequences their characters could anticipate before expecting them to commit to rolling. PCs are constantly gambling with their lives, so to me, character death basically always feels like the result of a deliberately risky action. The only time it feels truly random and unfair are times when the player lacks the information or ability to make a deliberate decision, like the example someone posted a while back of their rogue dying because a behind-the-screen roll apparently told the DM they didn’t see the telegraphed trap.

The rogue was my character. At no time at my table has anything been said about expectations more than "this is harder than normal" for a particular adventure. The adventure the rogue died on wasn't harder than normal, it was just a series of bad rolls on my characters part followed by a good roll by the GM for the trap damage. You could probably crunch numbers and say how likely or unlikely a death was, but it seems like your stance is even if the math showed I only had a .1% chance of dying to the trap it's still on me as a player for choosing to go on the adventure the GM set before me.