Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 6529387" data-attributes="member: 53980">That's all well and good when death occurs as a result of poor choices, but in my experience it can often come about a plain bad luck. A streak of good rolls on the DM's part can put a character down before the player has much of a chance to make any kind of choice. When that happens, I'm inclined to be lenient. Last session, the party was trying to rescue a NPC friend who'd been taken by enemies who were looking for revenge against the PCs. The NPC was very ill, so they couldn't retreat if they wanted any chance of saving her. The party was playing well but they were losing because my dice were on a hot streak and theirs were cold. Based on her AC and the monsters' attack bonus, I should have been hitting the rogue maybe 50% of the time, but it was closer to 90% with above average damage rolls on top of it. She went down and because the creature she was fighting had an attack left and couldn't reach anyone else, it hit her again leaving her one death save away from death. Since the party had performed a service for a deity in their prior adventure, I decided to roll for deity intervention, and the dice came up favorably. The deity appeared to the rogue in a vision and offered to give her a second chance, in exchange for a major service to be named at a later date. The rogue awoke with half her hit points restored, and the party managed a win by a narrow margin (they were all running on fumes by the end). Of course, now the rogue owes this deity a big favor, which will cause complications for her at a later date.That's not to say I disagree with most of what you said. As long as it's not crippling, bringing in a new character at a lower level and having them earn their stripes can certainly add something to the game. If the divine intervention roll had failed, the rogue would almost certainly have died and there would have been a high probability of a TPK. Sometimes you just have to let the dice fall as they may.My group got away from level loss due to death a while ago, but I've been thinking for a while now that I'd like to bring it back. 5e seems to handle level disparity very well (a while ago I had three 3rd level characters adventuring alongside two characters who were 5th or 6th level, and things went surprisingly smoothly). Since we entered this campaign with the unspoken assumption that there would be no level loss, I'll probably let the first death be a freebie and start dropping them to the bottom of their tier beginning with the second death.</blockquote>

Verification