D&D General Why fear is good for PCs

[Paul Farquhar]

There is certainly a case for a more challenging and deadly game to appeal to some players. Elden Ring is this, and it was massively popular. Honour Mode BG3 is also popular.

But it has nothing to do with fear. It's about the sense of achievement you get from overcoming a seriously difficult challenge,

 

[Dessert Nomad]

There is certainly a case for a more challenging and deadly game to appeal to some players. Elden Ring is this, and it was massively popular. Honour Mode BG3 is also popular.

But it has nothing to do with fear. It's about the sense of achievement you get from overcoming a seriously difficult challenge,

I think it's interesting that both of these are extremely low difficulty and deadliness compared to a typical TTRPG scenario, depending on how you define those terms. In Elden ring, you infinitely respawn, and the bosses don't react to you. You can just keep trying the exact same fight over and over until you figure out a boss's abilities. It's inevitable that you beat a boss, you just have to keep trying until you figure out tricks, get better, or get lucky. In Honor mode BG3, it's a bit more similar to a TTRPG in that if you wipe you are dead, but you still know the exact layout of every dungeon and every fight so can fully prepare. You can also leave 1 character in camp ready to use cheap resses to ensure that you don't wipe on almost all of the fights in the game, there's only a few that force the party to all be in the fight. You can also use much more 'camp caster' cheese (like have clerics in the camp cast death ward on every active PC) than you typically can get away with in a TTRPG.

The fact that people consider Elden Ring exciting and deadly even though it's completely impossible to actually die in Elden Ring because you just respawn endlessly is pretty relevant here. I think this demonstrates that (permanent) PC death clearly isn't important to players feeling challenged or to gameplay being interesting.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I think it's interesting that both of these are extremely low difficulty and deadliness compared to a typical TTRPG scenario, depending on how you define those terms

You would need to use a pretty outlandish definition of terms for that to be true, I can attest from extensive personal experience.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

You would need to use a pretty outlandish definition of terms for that to be true, I can attest from extensive personal experience.

I don't think the definitions I used in the material after what you quoted are at all outlandish, and I'm not sure what personal experience has to do with it.

For an encounter to be called 'deadly', there's needs to be a chance of dying. "Dying" in the context of this thread typically means 'permanent death', that is 'your character has died and is no longer playable' - I don't think people talking about PC death causing fear are talking about 'my PC died, then was revivified and finished the fight'. By that definition of deadly, Elden Ring is completely not deadly. There is zero risk of a character ending up dead, they just go through a loading screen and spawn right back in. I don't think defining 'dying' as 'permanent death' is an outlandish definition, especially since it's one that's clearly been used repeatedly in this thread.

For an encounter to be called 'difficult', under some definitions there has to be some chance of losing. In Elden Ring you don't actually lose - if you fail to win a particular fight, you can just come back to it later and try it again. In a typical TTRPG meanwhile, you only get one chance at an encounter, and if you fail even if you're still alive you don't get to come back and try again using what you learned in the first attempt - the boss has finished the ritual and something happens, or you didn't rescue the princess and she's now dead, or something along those lines. This clearly isn't the only definition of 'difficult' one can use, but it's also not outlandish to say that a scenario where you only get one chance and have no foreknowledge of the mechanics is difficult while one in which you can keep trying over and over forever, learning more about how it works each time, is not.

If Elden Ring counts as 'deadly' and 'difficult', then a D&D game where PCs that die automatically respawn back in town and can try whatever they just did again after seeing what failed would also count as deadly and difficult, and I really don't think infinitely respawning and retrying as many times as you like is what 'fear is good for PCs' advocates are talking about when they talk about PC death.

I mean, we can put that question to the thread - for people who think PC death is a good way to create fear that improves the game, do you count it as 'PC death' if a PC drops to 0HP and 3 failed death saves, or -10 HP, or otherwise hits a 'dead' condition, but also they instantly respawn back in town and can come right back into the same fight/trap/journey/etc. and try again?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

For an encounter to be called 'deadly', there's needs to be a chance of dying.

Which is highest in BG3 Honour Mode. D&D has always had respawn.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

OK, so people in this thread who talk about thinking PC death is good for creating an atmosphere that includes fear, do you allow PCs to have an NPC back in an always safe area that they can teleport to when not in combat who will ressurrect every dead PC (even if their body is unrecoverable) as long as there isn't a total party kill? He charges a token amount of money, but PCs can just pickpocket the money back from him without penalty, so it's effectively free. Also outside of combat PCs can respec freely, and your players have complete guides to every fight and the mechanics of each fight, and know that those don't change on the fly.

I don't think BG3 style 'free res unless it's a TPK' is really what people are talking about here when they talk about PC death, it probably doesn't qualify as 'deadly' and I think a lot of people consider 'you know the layout and members of every fight in advance' easier than 'you don't know what you're facing in advance'..

 

[tetrasodium]

OK, so people in this thread who talk about thinking PC death is good for creating an atmosphere that includes fear, do you allow PCs to have an NPC back in an always safe area that they can teleport to when not in combat who will ressurrect every dead PC (even if their body is unrecoverable) as long as there isn't a total party kill? He charges a token amount of money, but PCs can just pickpocket the money back from him without penalty, so it's effectively free. Also outside of combat PCs can respec freely, and your players have complete guides to every fight and the mechanics of each fight, and know that those don't change on the fly.

I don't think BG3 style 'free res unless it's a TPK' is really what people are talking about here when they talk about PC death, it probably doesn't qualify as 'deadly' and I think a lot of people consider 'you know the layout and members of every fight in advance' easier than 'you don't know what you're facing in advance'..

Want an honest answer?....
Why would I keep wasting time with somethingt the edition made irrelevant over a decade ago? I've found that 5e players themselves∆ view the risk of PC death so implausible that no matter how much I talk up a friendly local cleric scroll of last resort or even great honking expensive diamond the players just don't view it as a thing to care about. Frankly they can't really be blamed for that either, an actual PC death through death saves erasing all damage between 1hp & death by massive damage bonus action healing word bonus action lay on hands bonus action healing light and so on✰ takes such a rube Goldberg style contrived series of events that it doesn't even look plausible as anything but the PC getting executed by the gm. Somewhere along the line I quit trying because the scroll gets sold the diamond gets sold and the npc gets forgotten or blackmailed for more coin over a service the players can't see themselves ever needing.

A better question would be why the people pushing so hard against risk of death and presenting it as a bad thing don't just convince their group to use the one single optional/variant rule wotc has seen fit to provide for 5.5 if they feel that the case is so open and shut.

Spoiler: said rule

Unfortunately wotc has not seen fit to provide GMs with alternatives that shift that or any other needle in the other direction in the core three or books that followed.
∆ the ones who started with 5e
✰They even tried to introduce an at will HP restoring healing cantrip during the onednd playtest There's zero reason not to expect that list to increase over time

 

[Dessert Nomad]

Want an honest answer?....

I can't really find an answer to what I asked in there, and my question wasn't edition specific but what you said seems to say a lot about 5e. It appears that you are one of the people arguing that some flavor of risk of PC death is good for enhancing the game experience, so let me try to rephrase the question a bit: 'in a game that you like would you consider a game deadly if PCs 'died' frequently but also could be ressurrected for free in an always safe area as long as at least one party member survived a fight? That is, do you think a game like that would get the positive results you expect to get from your preferred level of PC death?' Since you clearly don't like how 5e does things, this could apply to whatever version you do like.

 

[Remathilis]

OK, so people in this thread who talk about thinking PC death is good for creating an atmosphere that includes fear, do you allow PCs to have an NPC back in an always safe area that they can teleport to when not in combat who will ressurrect every dead PC (even if their body is unrecoverable) as long as there isn't a total party kill? He charges a token amount of money, but PCs can just pickpocket the money back from him without penalty, so it's effectively free. Also outside of combat PCs can respec freely, and your players have complete guides to every fight and the mechanics of each fight, and know that those don't change on the fly.

I don't think BG3 style 'free res unless it's a TPK' is really what people are talking about here when they talk about PC death, it probably doesn't qualify as 'deadly' and I think a lot of people consider 'you know the layout and members of every fight in advance' easier than 'you don't know what you're facing in advance'..

By the same token, D&D doesn't require reflexes, muscle memory and puzzle-like fight mechanics. The biggest thing D&D needs on that regards.is the ability to roll a d20 on a flat surface. So you really can't compare the two challenge levels equally despite the same fail conditions of losing all your health = loss.

Then again, if you take D&D characters as toons rather than character, the respawn idea does start to look familiar. After all, what is Bob II, Son of Bob off to avenge his father's death but a thinly veiled respawn? Especially for those players who literally reuse the same stats.

 

[tetrasodium]

I can't really find an answer to what I asked in there, and my question wasn't edition specific but what you said seems to say a lot about 5e. It appears that you are one of the people arguing that some flavor of risk of PC death is good for enhancing the game experience,

Id hate for you to feel uncertain about my position, here's a post I made about the benefits of properly setting risks for players to fear and greedily embrace.

Spoiler

You left out an entire pillar of stuff to be afraid of that makes taking a small 3-5hp hit something that can create some fear even if taking several more that would drop the PC to that 0-5 razor's edge range you note as an area of fear. That omission is one 5e primes players to ignore by design though.

Prior to 5e PCs died at zero (or neg10 with the death's door optional rule) and every single point of damage needed to be healed at a situational day by day rate and spell slot by spell slot and without unlimited cantrips while lacking full BaB progression the cleric wasn't going to be keen on dumping all of their slots healing everyone back to full. Sure they might burn a couple bringing the tank back to the upper 80% or so, but they aren't going to and generally couldn't top off everyone. That led to the situation where a 2-3 point hit to the wrong PC could be scary because the player knew their cleric couldn't waste the heals on them when they might need it for the tank later.

Fear in PCs requires that the system present plausible risk like that to the players coupled with a hunger for more. Will our resources hold out? If we work together better and really stretch can we get MOAR of the phat lewtz we know that we really need and bigger experience payoffs? Can our carrying capacity carry all of the supplies and equipment we expect to need?... Obviously not... Which do we need now and which can we plan to go without? How can we stretch each HP of life?...

With 5e we have endless discussions over useless storytelling concepts like "horror" and "[narrative] fear" because the system now answers all of those questions with "easily but you shouldn't need to!" and " of course who cares?" while effectively ensuring that the PCs don't actually mechanically require anything they might narratively "need" to remove that hunger side of the formula. As long as the system designs against it, why are we asking how the gm can generate fear in PCs instead of asking why the system itself lacks anything that should provide plausible reasons to be convincingly having PCs feel fear?

so let me try to rephrase the question a bit: 'in a game that you like would you consider a game deadly if PCs 'died' frequently but also could be ressurrected for free in an always safe area as long as at least one party member survived a fight? That is, do you think a game like that would get the positive results you expect to get from your preferred level of PC death?' Since you clearly don't like how 5e does things, this could apply to whatever version you do like.

The problem with your original question and this second even more warped stab at reloading it with extra kick is that the phrasing is loaded in the extreme and as a result the answer needs to reframe it to something neutral rather than loaded in excess. Deliberate choice or subconscious slip, you couldn't even hold off the slip to shift from relatively accurately recognizing that my position is in favor of some level of risk before converting it to a hypothetical where answering the trap of a question you asked as phrased results in me arguing for a "desired level of PC death" while literally quoting the post you snipped the answer from quoting the answer to. It may not be the gasoline soaked answer the phrasing invites by depending on acknowledging a target frequency of PC death, but the bit you omitted about talking up the friendly cleric scroll and diamond to players are the answer and I don't know what part of it were not grasped because you don't even appear to recognize their relevance enough to avoid saying that you "can't find an answer to what you asked.". I went ahead and linked to Miriam Webster on that but if slang on the chance that it's much more regional than expected, that should clear up any uncertainty provided you are familiar with what role an NPC cleric scroll and diamond can play in spells like raise dead if so.