"Run away! Run away!" ... what if they don't?

[clearstream]

But wouldn't it make more sense to do the exact opposite? To have a learning curve, by starting easy (with a safety net between levels 1-3), and slowly increasing the change of death? After all, the higher level the players are, the more HP they have, and the more abilities they have to prevent death. Isn't that why monsters with insta-kill deathrays are of a high challenge rating?

Player experience is a separate axis from character level, right? For a novice player, it might feel right to reduce chance of death. For a veteran, a safety net is likely unneeded - no matter what their character level.

I might not correctly follow your second point. Do you mean that death becomes a more likely encounter outcome at higher levels? That exacerbates the problem, because wager*risk outstrips pot even faster than I described. If you are right about that, then reducing permanent death through revival magic becomes even more important. Right?

 

[iserith]

Yes, chance of permanent death should decrease as characters rise in level. That is because rewards (relative to level) remain roughly constant, but the wager (time played, i.e. time lost if the character dies) has increased linearly.

One way to use the mechanics provided is to keep the rate at which characters die roughly constant, but allow them access to the revival spells appropriate for their level. So that permanent death becomes less frequent.

I shared your posts with a Discord channel I'm in and someone made an observation I hope you can address: "There seems to be a tone in the post that the player suddenly has a disincentive to use their character when the reward of XP/plot advancement becomes lower than the cost of death."

This doesn't seem to matter in any practical sense on account of players typically having just the one character, so I think it's just testing the logic. What do you think?

 

[5ekyu]

But you've also said that if they jump into that sphere of annihilation they're dead. Period. Now, I may have put that sphere in for any number of reasons such as a way to destroy the McGuffin. It wasn't intended to be a trap. If they all jump into it (and I have a "death is rare" policy) then I've failed to communicate something since I'm going to assume they didn't just have their characters commit suicide on purpose.

So at that point I can either break the covenant I have with the PCs to keep death rare, or I can change the sphere to a portal and carry on.

Or a less extreme set of expectations can be set at the beginning.

"In this game, your pc will not die due to dumb luck. A die roll will not kill you. You might die due to neglect - if companions dont move to save you in the time during death saves. You certainly can die due to blatently suicidal informed choices, where you chose it even with full knowledge. But no die roll or basically single wham mechanic will take you from alive to dead with no chance to stop it in between."

"As such, massive damage rules are out, most all save or die spells go to trio saves, spells like disintigrate have been..."


As such if i then did put a sphere into the game to wipe out some plot hook, it would be a known thing to them, the purpose of quest maybe, or something specific to kill the item but have more interesting effects if person goes in.

 

[clearstream]

I shared your posts with a Discord channel I'm in and someone made an observation I hope you can address: "There seems to be a tone in the post that the player suddenly has a disincentive to use their character when the reward of XP/plot advancement becomes lower than the cost of death."

This doesn't seem to matter in any practical sense on account of players typically having just the one character, so I think it's just testing the logic. What do you think?

Not so much a tone, as a rational observation. If a stake were to increase linearly, while risk and pot remained static, then there would be an economic disincentive against further wagers (in our context, playing). That doesn't rule out continued play, it just means that the arrangement becomes punitive.

What happens instead is that perma-death is less frequent for high level characters than for low level: declining risk. That is built into D&D in the form of revival spells.

Hence the phenomenon of "plot-armour" - what is happening is that characters that represent a greater investment are less likely to perma-die. You can see that their wager in fact stays about the same e.g. 1*0.5% = 10*0.05%. (Where the first value is the stake and the second the risk.)

 

[iserith]

Not so much a tone, as a rational observation. If a stake were to increase linearly, while risk and pot remained static, then there would be an economic disincentive against further wagers (in our context, playing). That doesn't rule out continued play, it just means that the arrangement becomes punitive.

What happens instead is that perma-death is less frequent for high level characters than for low level: declining risk. That is built into D&D in the form of revival spells.

Hence the phenomenon of "plot-armour" - what is happening is that characters that represent a greater investment are less likely to perma-die. You can see that their wager in fact stays about the same e.g. 1*0.5% = 10*0.05%. (Where the first value is the stake and the second the risk.)

Thanks. And the values you chose for stake and risk - are they based on any particular calculation or just something you gut checked?

 

[Oofta]

Or a less extreme set of expectations can be set at the beginning.

"In this game, your pc will not die due to dumb luck. A die roll will not kill you. You might die due to neglect - if companions dont move to save you in the time during death saves. You certainly can die due to blatently suicidal informed choices, where you chose it even with full knowledge. But no die roll or basically single wham mechanic will take you from alive to dead with no chance to stop it in between."

"As such, massive damage rules are out, most all save or die spells go to trio saves, spells like disintigrate have been..."


As such if i then did put a sphere into the game to wipe out some plot hook, it would be a known thing to them, the purpose of quest maybe, or something specific to kill the item but have more interesting effects if person goes in.

My default assumption is that my player's PCs don't have indestructible plot armor. More along the lines of plot temporary hit points. So the NPCs aren't going to hit the guy that's already unconscious. I'm not going to throw an ogre that could kill a PC with a single lucky roll at a level 1 party.

If they do someting incredibly stupid and suicidal, there's a good chance they'll die. If that fire giant patrol doesn't see them and they decide to taunt it anyway, they will likely be toe jam. Dying because of bad luck would have to be really, monumentally, unbelievably bad luck but it could happen.

If a DM really wants to kill PCs it's always an option. To me it's usually more fun to threaten death or ignomious defeat. After all death is the end of a story, I'd rather let the player continue the story of their PC.

 

[clearstream]

Thanks. And the values you chose for stake and risk - are they based on any particular calculation or just something you gut checked?

Here my OCD shines through

I took values in the DMG for pacing - suggested advancement rates, encounters to advance at that rate, etc - and created scenarios in Excel for survival over a character's career. To allow for the probability that most groups won't play to 20th level, I looked at survival rates moving from tier to tier. What I found was that unless I used very low rates per encounter (half a percent or less) I'd see horrible attrition across the required numbers of encounters.

For instance, if I have a 1% chance to die per encounter, and I need 6 encounters to level, say, then my survival to next level is 0.99^6=0.94. If that stays constant, I have about a 50/50 chance of surviving all the way to level 10.

To be honest, the use of this model isn't the precise numbers, but rather the features and trends. One can see that on a per character per encounter basis, death must occur at a low frequency. Characters should go into encounters with an expectation of survival. Revival magic plays an important role in allowing encounters to remain challenging, instead of becoming more and more trivial at higher levels. High level characters die, but they are less likely to permanently die.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

When I was running 5e PC were up and down so much in a fight at times, wack a mole, that I started thinking it made more sense from the bad guy POV to deliver the coup de grace. Which in the end meant little as revivify fixed up all those PC and they were off and running like nothing had happened.

 

[Tony Vargas]

So, it seems like you saying that the chance of permanent death should decrease as the players rise in level, rather than increase? Or am I misunderstanding?

Thanks, I couldn't tell what he was saying. And, yes, that fits the dynamic of D&D play going back to the beginning.

Yes, chance of permanent death should decrease as characters rise in level. That is because rewards (relative to level) remain roughly constant, but the wager (time played, i.e. time lost if the character dies) has increased linearly.

Is the wager time spent having played the character, or is it the future time you'll spend playing that character? As you level up, presumably, the character may get to be more and more fun to play (or not)? If there's a top level, then dying near the end of that top level means relatively little for continued play?

But wouldn't it make more sense to do the exact opposite? To have a learning curve, by starting easy (with a safety net between levels 1-3), and slowly increasing the change of death?

That would make more sense if you wanted the game to be more-accessible/less-elitist, yes.

 

[clearstream]

Is the wager time spent having played the character, or is it the future time you'll spend playing that character? As you level up, presumably, the character may get to be more and more fun to play (or not)? If there's a top level, then dying near the end of that top level means relatively little for continued play?

That's an interesting thought! If you know your campaign is ending this session, then death might feel less costly!

It seems right to say that investment into a character is not purely about level, but also about duration and depth of immersion in the narrative. In making such an evaluation, one is implicitly assuming continued play is an option. Level is part, but not all, of how much you come to care about your character. My current take is that time spent is a fair proxy for character value.

Referring back to your thought, say there will be no more sessions after this one? I still feel that we can differentiate between a character generated this session, and one that has been played through months of narrative to this point. The death of latter will have greater impact. Not always, but usually.