D&D 5E Why my friends hate talking to me about 5e.

[Micah Sweet]

I've never really understood why DM's want characters to die at all, to be honest. Almost every time someone has died in a game I was running, it led to a complete disaster. The party suddenly realizes they no longer have the ability to continue the adventure now that they are missing a tentpole of the group, and we go from having fun to "let's get out of here".

The difficulties of reviving the fallen character are such that the player generally just wants to make a new character (likely a "better" character, that they feel wouldn't have died the way their current one did), which means now any sort of narrative built around them is done, and we have to integrate this new person into the game.

I've never made rules to make the game easier, other than my insistence on transparency (rolling in the open, trying to give players as much information as possible so that they can make strategic decisions), but I am never in any way looking forward to someone being locked out of the game for an extended period of time, nor do I want the current adventure I've planned out for the players to implode because a character took massive damage with no way to respond to it.

DMs want PCs to be able to die because getting into combat is supposed to be dangerous, and if you can't die, it really isn't. Not every game is collaborative storytelling; D&D particularly is not designed that way (although you certainly can play it that way if you choose).

 

[James Gasik]

Yep, very difference experiences...

Now, I don't want characters to die at all. But I also what is the point of combat, challenge, overcoming the foe if dying isn't there?

Do you want to play in Candyland or something? Again, what kind of game do you want???

One where a character dying isn't a fail state for the session.

 

[pemerton]

Exhaustion at 0 HP is, in my opinion, about more than avoiding the whack-a-mole healing thing. It’s about making a party member falling unconscious into a legitimate emergency state. It’s about making that moment someone falls to 0 into the moment you shift gears away from pushing deeper into the dungeon and towards returning safely to town. It’s about making dungeon delving into a push-your-luck game where getting knocked out is the unlucky outcome you’re trying to avoid as long as possible.

As per my post just upthread that you responded to, I think what you are describing here is a non-mainstream approach to play.

In a more adventure path/"adventure as story" approach, I think @James Gasik's concerns have more purchase.

what is the point of combat, challenge, overcoming the foe if dying isn't there?

Presumably because it's fun and engaging?

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

But rather than leave it at that, they press me for my reasons, I go on this long-winded explanation (I blame reading the 1e DMG cover to cover a couple hundred times), and when I'm done, they're like "ugh. couldn't you just say you didn't like it?".

You should feel honored they ask for reasons. Mine just call me a hater.

To them, if it comes from CR, its pure gold. If I come up with houserule, it will not work and I'm breaking the game (even tho they cant even remember which die to roll to attack, so what do they know about how the games work?).

Talk about unfair

 

[pemerton]

Players don't disengage because there's no clear "we're in a combat"/"we are not in a combat" scenario. If you run, nothing really stops enemies from following, being much more likely to want to finish you off rather than risk you coming back later.

This is a system thing. In classic D&D (OD&D, B/X, AD&D) there is a clear difference between these things, with rules for resolving escape. (Whether the rules are any good is a further question, but they clearly exist.)

 

[Charlaquin]

I've never really understood why DM's want characters to die at all, to be honest. Almost every time someone has died in a game I was running, it led to a complete disaster. The party suddenly realizes they no longer have the ability to continue the adventure now that they are missing a tentpole of the group, and we go from having fun to "let's get out of here".

The difficulties of reviving the fallen character are such that the player generally just wants to make a new character (likely a "better" character, that they feel wouldn't have died the way their current one did), which means now any sort of narrative built around them is done, and we have to integrate this new person into the game.

I've never made rules to make the game easier, other than my insistence on transparency (rolling in the open, trying to give players as much information as possible so that they can make strategic decisions), but I am never in any way looking forward to someone being locked out of the game for an extended period of time, nor do I want the current adventure I've planned out for the players to implode because a character took massive damage with no way to respond to it.

You’re playing a game where the PCs are heroes who go on adventures that have narratives. And that’s a perfectly valid and fun way to play D&D! I would guess it is probably the most popular way to play D&D. But the reason you can’t understand the motives of DMs who you perceive as “wanting characters to die” is because they’re playing a different game than you. As I alluded to in my previous post, they’re playing a sort of push-your-luck game, where the players try to see how deep they can delve into the dungeon and still make it back to town safely. There’s likely no quest that has to be abandoned when the PCs retreat, and little to no character narrative that their death cuts short. Gameplay in this style isn’t really about that; it’s about challenge and risk management more than narrative. The narrative, such as it is, is the war stories you tell after the fact about the time you narrowly escaped, or about the time you thought you’d been doing so well but then that dragon showed up and wiped the party, or what have you.

 

[Micah Sweet]

As per my post just upthread that you responded to, I think what you are describing here is a non-mainstream approach to play.

In a more adventure path/"adventure as story" approach, I think @James Gasik's concerns have more purchase.

Presumably because it's fun and engaging?

I don't see how combat can be fun and engaging if there's no risk. The rest of D&D, sure, if you build for it, but not combat.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Players don't disengage because there's no clear "we're in a combat"/"we are not in a combat" scenario. If you run, nothing really stops enemies from following, being much more likely to want to finish you off rather than risk you coming back later.

To be clear, I meant a single character disengaging and falling back so others can deal with the threat.

Also, gauging how many hits you can take before you drop to 0 is difficult, and in-combat healing is both costly in resources and inefficient.

But you can gauge from the hits you've taken if you want to risk 1, 2, 5, or whatever more hits. Players have to judge for themselves when that point is.

When I gripe about how bad combat healing is, and how unrewarding it is as a player to try and keep everyone healed, I get told "lol, 5e is easy, players are immortal, out of combat healing is super good".

YMMV of course, but I have never found combat healing to be bad or unrewarding, a lot of players like that role IME.

5E is easy using the default adventuring day/encounters/etc. once you reach a certain point. Yes, you can throw infinite dragons blah blah blah but that isn't the default design.

I don't find out of combat healing to be super good, either. It is just another form of healing.

If I'm looking at an upcast level 3 healing spell doing 3d8+Wis, for an average of 16 hit points, when should I cast it?

One of our golden house-rules might help you here: Upcasting spells yields maximum results on additional dice. So, in your example, instead of 3d8+3, make it d8+19.

When a player has taken 16 hit points? That could be one turn from a monster. So now I just used my best spell to cancel out one turn of attacks, what do I do next turn?

Fight the monster? I don't know, there are too many variables to answer that. PCs get a lot of hit points as it is, and self-healing in combat just aggravates the issue as I see it.

What do I do if we're fighting more than one enemy and I got two people taking damage at once?

There is also where players have to be responsible for their own defense. Disengaging and Dodging are two of the least used but most effective actions IME. You heal one, the other focuses on defense while waiting for help.

FWIW, our first 5E didn't have any sort of healer-caster. We had a PC with the healer feat, but that was it until after 5th level, when a druid finally joined the group.

5E offers a lot of out-of-combat healing. So, yes, the point is to make it through the fight to use some of those healing resources and move on to the next fight. There are lots of solutions if you want to it easier, like 5-minute short rests.

One where a character dying isn't a fail state for the session.

There are plenty of other fail states, dying is just one (and arguably the most effective) fail state.

So, what do you want the fail state to be?

 

[Charlaquin]

As per my post just upthread that you responded to, I think what you are describing here is a non-mainstream approach to play.

In a more adventure path/"adventure as story" approach, I think @James Gasik's concerns have more purchase.

Oh, absolutely! That’s what I’ve been trying to get across. A rule like this wouldn’t work well for that mainstream “adventure path” type play, for basically all the reasons @James Gasik already illuminated in the opening post. What I’m saying is, a rule like this is “for” a different style of play, wherein those reasons aren’t really significant concerns. And, yeah, I think that style is a lot less popular and mainstream, but that’s why it’s a house rule, not part of the core rules.

 

[James Gasik]

To be clear, I meant a single character disengaging and falling back so others can deal with the threat.


But you can gauge from the hits you've taken if you want to risk 1, 2, 5, or whatever more hits. Players have to judge for themselves when that point is.


YMMV of course, but I have never found combat healing to be bad or unrewarding, a lot of players like that role IME.

5E is easy using the default adventuring day/encounters/etc. once you reach a certain point. Yes, you can throw infinite dragons blah blah blah but that isn't the default design.

I don't find out of combat healing to be super good, either. It is just another form of healing.


One of our golden house-rules might help you here: Upcasting spells yields maximum results on additional dice. So, in your example, instead of 3d8+3, make it d8+19.


Fight the monster? I don't know, there are too many variables to answer that. PCs get a lot of hit points as it is, and self-healing in combat just aggravates the issue as I see it.


There is also where players have to be responsible for their own defense. Disengaging and Dodging are two of the least used but most effective actions IME. You heal one, the other focuses on defense while waiting for help.

FWIW, our first 5E didn't have any sort of healer-caster. We had a PC with the healer feat, but that was it until after 5th level, when a druid finally joined the group.

5E offers a lot of out-of-combat healing. So, yes, the point is to make it through the fight to use some of those healing resources and move on to the next fight. There are lots of solutions if you want to it easier, like 5-minute short rests.


There are plenty of other fail states, dying is just one (and arguably the most effective) fail state.

So, what do you want the fail state to be?

It's a good question, that. I don't really have an answer, because I've been too focused for a long time on "what could go wrong" and trying to adjust for it. When I run a game, I spend a lot of time planning sessions. I go over the monsters, I compare them to the party's abilities, I try to make encounters memorable, throw in a few non-combat challenges, weave an interesting story about the area they are adventuring in, and generally, spend more time planning than actually playing.

When things go wrong, it's not usually a little wrong. Like, oh, we might have to skip an encounter or whatnot. It's usually catastrophically wrong, and it always irks me when I say "this happened to me" and other people are like "lol, impossible".

No, it's not impossible, and it can happen. I've had a player up and leave my house when they died in the middle of a challenging encounter, realizing that they weren't going to be able to play their character for the rest of the night.

I've had good campaigns that I'd been running for over a year suddenly crash and burn, with players all of a sudden going from "we should play this weekend at the last minute, bonus session!" to "uh, I'm too busy at work, I can't play this week" all over a session that went horribly south.

There's a limit to what kind of abuse a lot of players can take, I've found, so it's all this careful balancing act to make sure that I know what they can handle, and just have to hope they know what they can handle. Personally, I think part of the problem in communication is that, in games where you're actively trying to challenge the players, the players are probably better at strategy and cooperation than my usual pack of misfits, and probably have more optimized characters as well.

My groups are...a mixed bag. I've yet to have a successful session zero, for example. For 25 years, I've tried bringing the players together to plan their characters as a group. Nope. Best I get is "whose the Fighter? Who is healing? Ok."

Then they all make their characters independently of one another, and you better believe they are all at different power levels from one another.

And the guy who said he'd play a Cleric comes in with a Storm Cleric who wants to blast enemies to bit with thunder damage rather than heal (imagine that!), and the Fighter is a janky dual-wielding Eldritch Knight with 12 Constitution...

And this is what I get to run for, lol.