Should D&D Have an Alternate Death Mechanic?

[Vyvyan Basterd]

call it something else..."mortal wound" means lethal wound. Maybe Grievous Wound? I like the word Griveous it's serious indeed but doesn't mean "dead" .

Good point. But, then again, it could be said that the wound is a 'mortal wound' that would have killed any common person, but not a hero such as the PC.

 

[danzig138]

they'll all be back next week with new characters.

But that isn't necessarily true. They have been quite a few times in my games where characters have suffered untimely death - and I said "I'll let you know when we can work a new character in, so think of this as a vacation." There is no guarantee that if your character dies in one of my games you'll come back next week. You almost positively won't come back in that day, and you won't get a new character in until things in the game are right for it. And I expect people to do the same for characters of mine that die. I have no expectation to come back in soon, and I'm pretty happy to come to the session anyway just to watch (and maybe roll some dice for the monsters).

 

[Li Shenron]

Unsolvable in what way? I think many (if not most) of us posting in this thread are running games where we've made the role of death in the game precisely what we want it to be.

Unsolvable in a way that would please both groups of thought: those who want death to be important and those who want death to be irrelevant.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

No one ever takes the Leadership feat. The problem is that it's a very good feat. If one player takes it, they all have to, otherwise it's unbalancing.

Our group has four players, plus GM. If everyone had a cohort, not to mention animal companions and any other hangers on, there would be too many die rolls, combat would take a long time, the group wouldn't fit in a typical corridor and the importance of each PC would be diminished.

This is one of the features of 1e, of course. Anyone can have henchmen -- you certainly don't need a feat! -- and a character with average charisma can have up to four of them. And you can resolve a battle between 7 characters, their two dozen assorted henchmen and hangers-on and their platoon of summoned monsters on one side, against thirty gnolls with three dozen hyenas and their shaman on the other, in thirty minutes flat, or even faster if the players start firing off sleep spells and fireballs.

And there's no assumption that player characters are superimportant special snowflakes because, at the end of the day, if one dies you can roll another in ten minutes flat and get straight on with the game.

But the 3.x paradigm is, rolling a new character is a major league chore and you can't have hangers-on because then (heaven forbid) one character might be more powerful than another (shock, horror).

Thus the logic that allows characters to be raised an infinite number of times in the core rules, and thus the problems well illustrated by this thread.

It's a major argument in favour of a rules-lite approach, isn't it?

 

[shilsen]

Unsolvable in a way that would please both groups of thought: those who want death to be important and those who want death to be irrelevant.

Ah, I see. I'm a big believer in the "you can't make all of the people happy all of the time" philosophy (especially for gamers on a messageboard ), so it's not a big concern for me. Plus I find the 3e death rules as written very easy to tweak to taste, so I figure people can make it fit their preferences with relative ease.

 

[I'm A Banana]

But the 3.x paradigm is, rolling a new character is a major league chore and you can't have hangers-on because then (heaven forbid) one character might be more powerful than another (shock, horror).

Rolling a character does involve a lot of options. This points to a 3e encouraging a more narrative style of play than 1e, something it probably inherited from 2e. The idea is more that epics like Lord of the Rings didn't kill the main characters, so if the main characters can keep coming back, this preserves some semblance of narrative, as well as letting you hold onto a character you like.

The henchman issue is more to do with 3e encouraging very strategic combat (often by ways of minis). A lot of troops = a lot of strategic elements.

So, compared to 1e, 3e has more options and more character consistency, at the expense of some ability to do it fast, and to do it with bulk numbers. IMO, this is a good trade -- I prefer character options and narrative structure over exactly figuring out the stats for 30 goblins and rolling combat against them and 20 redshirts. I'd rather invest my hour in one character than a dozen. It's not for everyone, but it works for me.

Thus the logic that allows characters to be raised an infinite number of times in the core rules, and thus the problems well illustrated by this thread.

I think that throwing out character options are baby-with-the-bathwater material. With mechanics like action points you don't even throw out death per se, you just make it astronomically rare for PC's (which further supports the idea that 3e characters should be consistent from session to session). By and large, that's good enough for verisimilitude. "PC's are special, so they avoid death more often" is a perfect narrative-game device.

Really, there are kind of two different trains of thought running through this. One is how rare death is: rarer death is more significant, which adds some great drama. Common death is more "realistic," which does make D&D feel more like a game and less like a novel (definitely appealing). The other is how powerful death is: a death that is a speedbump would rob a rare death of it's significance, but it would be perfect in a game-centric kind of etting where adventurers die in droves. Inalterable death means that there's some pathos, but it gets frustrating if you're hitting it over and over again -- the pathos gets numbing.

NPC-replacement is "realistic," but it also is speedbumping: 10 minutes later, you have a new character (not unlike standard 3e's resurrection, but instead of fixing the mask, you just get a new mask).

Action points are more dramatic, but it tends to go hand-in-hand with rare resurrection, which means that death is there only when it's really dramatic. This doesn't fit with 3e's standard model, but fits with Eberron's "mass magic" and "adventure movie" feel.

It's a major argument in favour of a rules-lite approach, isn't it?

Not really. The convo (or at least the OP), AFAICT, isn't about how to make generating a character or replacement character simpler, but rather about how to avoid having to generate new or replacement characters at all.

There's a lot of good arguments for rules-lite, but death isn't pervasive. You can have rules-light and rare-death just as easily as you can have rules-light and frequent-death. It's just a problem when you have rules-heavy and frequent-death. If your problem isn't the rules, you just need to fix the death (which is pretty easy to do without losing it's punch from a storytelling perspective).

 

[Li Shenron]

Ah, I see. I'm a big believer in the "you can't make all of the people happy all of the time" philosophy (especially for gamers on a messageboard ), so it's not a big concern for me. Plus I find the 3e death rules as written very easy to tweak to taste, so I figure people can make it fit their preferences with relative ease.

It's been a problem for me at some point, you just need to have players with different views on this in the same group and there's your problem. And no, kicking out of the group some of them is not really a solution either. But, if I know beforehand that people in the group have different views, I will for example run the game starting at level 1, and maybe even slow down xp a bit, so that at least the problem is delayed.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

This is how we play in our game.

We took out rez spells

dead= -10 +/- con score.

so a con of 16 means you can get to -13. once you hit -13 you have one round to get healing, or you die.

any amount of damage that would instantly kill the character, instead takes them -13. save or die spells also take them to -13. to fix the dragon shaman bug, a coupdegrace always kills if it takes them past -13.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

Thanks enworld forum people, You have given me many ideas.

I think im going to revise the -10 -con to just -10, but make it so if you drop to -10, you have a number of rounds equal to 1 + your cons ability modifier until your dead dead. In the mean time you can get healed. I am Also toying with that if you get damaged (like with a fireball) while in this state of grace, nothing happens, or it lowers the amount of grace rounds you get until you die. If you only have 1 round left and you take damage (from a fire ball or something), your dead.

I think i like this idea better then my prev idea. Perhaps on your turn you can also use action points to gain an extra rounds of grace.

Also cupdegrace would kill you out right on a failed save, BUT it would be a take a full round to execute (heheh pun), so that would give your allies a chance to stop the action. the attacker making the cupdegrace would be flat footed for this round and provoke attacks of opportunity.

yeahhh... im digging were this is going.

Its still pretty lethal, their are no rez spells, but with good teamwork it should be rare for anyone to die.

 

[Hussar]

Meh, leave the rez spells in. Won't make that much of a difference really.

But, Moon-Lancer, I do like that last idea. I would go with Rounds=1+1/2 level rather than Con bonus. It just makes it more likely that our higher level heroes might survive - but a TPK will still be a TPK.