NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8706938" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Firstly: just want to say, thank you for making a [+] thread on this. It's very easy for people to come in and basically straight-up just dismiss this style completely, and follow that with rather disparaging comments.As a disclaimer, I don't actually play 5e, so "death saves" proper aren't a thing, but I figure Dungeon World is close enough on this front--there is the Last Breath move, which functions something like having a single "death save" rather than multiple. I also don't technically run a truly "no death" game, but again I think the spirit is close enough, as I have done some things to try to avoid particular deaths and, as stated in the other thread, no player character death in my game is absolutely permanent unless the player wishes it to be so. That's the "not random" part of my policy regarding PC death: such things are not random, not permanent, and/or not irrevocable. Or, in positive terms, a death we agree upon (non-random), a death that is quickly or naturally reversed (non-permanent), or a death that adventure can undo (non-irrevocable), is acceptable to me, and thus could happen at my table. No such death has occurred, but that doesn't mean it couldn't occur.Tracking HP and "death saves"(/equivalents) is still relevant because:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Even if you don't die, being at 0 HP can prevent you from participating in combat, which can allow bad consequences that cannot be easily undone, if they can be undone at all</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Someone in the party is, in part, specialized in healing, so being able to allow that character to shine by saving someone's butt is nice</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">There is still tension present because, as I said, death is not totally off the table, it's just never going to be the end of a character's story unless the player wishes it to be--and because often combats have stakes other than death (corruption, competition, damage to important infrastructure or items, revealing the party's presence, etc.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">My players just want to. Doesn't need to be more complicated, IMO!</li> </ul>Dungeon World keeps such things pretty light, so there's not too much bookkeeping involved. Food is in units of rations--which can matter, so we keep numbers, but we usually check what they are. Ammo is very simple, you have 3 or 4 or whatever, and you only expend it when making a Volley roll and getting a partial success (or, I guess, a failed roll.)Well, again, "nothing happens if you fail" isn't really what's entailed by "no-death" gaming. Instead, other consequences occur, usually ones that depend on contextual information. For some examples from my game, trying to keep them really short since this is likely to run long:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Failing to complete the initiation ritual into a cult (which the character is trying to reform); this would make reform efforts much more difficult, and cause the faction willing to consider reform to lose members to the faction that adamantly opposes any reform. One PC (the tiefling Bard) is very committed to this task, so such a failure would hurt a lot.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Allowing an important (to the Battlemaster PC and historians), lost book to be destroyed by malign forces who killed its author, several generations back. TL;DR version is, Battlemaster is a well-read tactician who went looking for an apocryphal fourth volume of a treatise on tactics, strategy, and philosophy, called Struggle and Calm, by Temple-Knight General Khalifa al-Hamdan. Failing to defeat the shadows haunting the valley where the book had been hidden away could have led to the book being found or destroyed by the bad guys.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Becoming corrupted by a spirit of savagery, decay, and entropy, allowing that spirit to break free into the mortal world and causing incredible devastation, while empowering that spirit to be even more dangerous than it already was. (This was the fight against the Song of Thorns, for anyone who remembers prior mentions I've made of it.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Failing to prevent a terrorist sect of Druids from unleashing a zombie-fungus plague onto the city, potentially killing a large number of largely innocent people.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Allowing a friend who went to investigate suspicious activity to die because you didn't make it to where they were in time to save them.</li> </ul>Etc. Point being, none of these would have resulted in death per se if the players lost the combat (which could be the consequence of everyone dropping to 0 HP), but they would have resulted in varying degrees of (Very) Bad Things happening, to people or places the characters care about.Depends on the context of the situation--or, rather, it would in theory since this hasn't come up in practice in my game yet. But more or less, death is a possibility but a death that is permanent, irrevocable, and out of the blue won't be a possibility. So, some of the time a "dead" character could be just so incapacitated that even magical healing can't rouse them. Other times, if appropriate, they might fall off the arena (safely, though probably not painlessly), be captured by the enemy, get teleported somewhere else, or any of a variety of other "incapacitated and can't come back" states.Or they might die! But they won't stay dead, one way or another.I always give my players authority over whether the damage they deal is lethal, non-lethal, or ambiguous, unless the situation is grossly incompatible with one or the other, or they fail rolls or otherwise have something Go Wrong, potentially breaking their intent. (I try to keep that sort of thing very infrequent. I am usually annoyed as a player when DMs pull that sort of thing, so I avoid doing it to my players when I DM.) Usually, the players spare humanoid enemies unless they're evil cultist fanatics or corrupted by a dangerous spirit or the like, and even then they feel bad about it. The PCs usually kill non-sapient monsters, but sometimes spare them if they can afford to do so (because monsters may come back to haunt them in ways humanoid enemies are less likely to, at least as I run them.)My players are much more willing to take risks and do heroic, exciting, dangerous things, because they have the confidence that doing those things will not take away their ability to continue playing. Further, since (as I said) I have not absolutely removed death, just random+permanent+irrevocable death, I sort of get to have my cake and eat it too, having death as a possibility but never as a lame ending to a story. Moreover, by keeping death relatively low and emphasizing high-flying action and derring-do, I can maintain an overall light and positive tone to the game despite featuring some really quite dangerous/nasty/scary antagonists. This means that my campaign can have actual changes in tone, that it has a "dynamic range" broader than both "Saturday morning cartoons" where it's 100% brightness all the time forever, and yet also "Grimdark misery" where it's 100% darkness and awfulness all the time forever. I refer to this approach as "chiaroscuro" rather than "bright" or "dark" per se--the bright elements and the dark elements interplay, shadow and light dappled together, allowing for interesting variation and a finer control over the exact ratio of the two things.</blockquote>

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