deaddmwalking wrote: ↑Wed Jul 20, 2022 1:10 pm
merxa wrote: ↑Tue Jul 19, 2022 10:51 pm
the more general question is, should PCs die? My answer is yes, it should be on the table, there should be some set of decisions and/or dice rolls that cause PC death.
I agree that PCs should be able to die, in part because that's an expected part of genre simulation. Trivial PC death (such as stepping on a trip wire - rocks fall - you die) is bad, and exists in traditional D&D.
[...snip...]
D&D is a cooperative game. If being dead means you can't participate in the game for some number of real-life hours or multiple real-life sessions that's not ideal. If death is a temporary, easily removed condition (like hit point loss is in standard D&D), I don't think that gives death the seriousness that it deserves. For what it's worth, we don't have any [real] way to bring a dead character back to life. We also don't have to have 'super-dead' like 'disintegrated' or 'eradicated'.
Saying 'death can happen but it is super-easy to remove' is virtually the same as saying 'death can't happen', but it is the worst version of that to my personal taste.
I'm confused on your stance, you agree PCs should be able die, but then spend the remainder discussing how awful in play it is to die. The nature of dice is they provide RNG, unless you want to play a game where you can never die because of a dice rolls (and arguably this game is no longer d&d), this is a necessary fact, and yes if 10,000 groups play, someone is certainly going to die in the first or second session if the game allows for a series of bad dice rolls to kill a PC. Meta currencies can be something of a solution, but in my experience PCs tend to hoard a meta currency that lets them avoid death, and are therefore almost never in actual risk of death, which turns the death mechanic into a vestigial appendage and perhaps that's really what some people want, the illusion that death exists in their game when for all intensive purposes it doesn't because they don't want to actually suffer death in their ttrpg.
pulp cthulu has the
"Avoid certain death: (cost: all, at least 30) the hero gains 1d6+1 hit points and returns in the next scene"
which consumes luck, and luck tends to build somewhat slowly, so its likely if a character uses their luck to survive, they won't build up enough luck until a full session or two goes by. And if we take the case that say it takes 1-2 sessions to rebuild your luck to be able to spend the meta currency of 'Avoid certain death', that drastically changes the odds of actually dying, because if you continue with the original thought experiment that bad dice (in the below 1% area) causes death, when it actually happens and you spend meta currency to avoid it, you would then need to repeat bad dice within that narrow 1-2 session window and otherwise become 'safe' once more. Once death becomes so unlikely (1% of 1%), it practically doesn't exist as the vast majority of groups will never actually experience a PC death unless they want to die and take steps to actually die.
This is actually one of the faults of 5e, it is very difficult for a PC to die if they don't want to, even without introducing metacurrency. Healing word alone ensures near immortality for many. PC deaths in 5e tend to be from tpk or near tpk when a surviving member flees, or happen at very low levels before PCs have enough HP to avoid being one shot by nearly anything in the game.
When death is more likely at first level or very low levels, this is actually something of a bad 'onboarding' experience for new players who will also be unfamiliar with the system and therefore more likely to make less optimal survival choices. A new system should probably take some pains to make death at level 1 somewhat harder to achieve, and ramping up the 'difficulty' in the mid levels where players are expected to be more familiar with the system and able to make better choices to survive, I would also then expect the likelihood of death to further decrease in the higher levels as players achieve system mastery and their character powerlevels begins to reach escape velocity from the system (where only the top tier threats present the possibility of 'true' death, threats they presumably don't encounter regularly).
In terms of reducing the players pain of death or losing access to their character for an extended period of times, there are things that can be done to mitigate or eliminate it. I've been in more than one game, especially at low levels, where an unlikely death caused the player to erase their character name, replace it with a new one, and say "i'm here to avenge my kin", an easy if at times unsatisfying fix. Having a backup character can also be a fix, but comes with its own challenges, creating more work that may never see the light of day. Making character gen faster and easier helps with this of course. As suggested, playing a NPC can also be a fix, especially if it isn't 'true' death, but for whatever reason several out of game, real hours, will go by before they can access their character again. Metacurrency is a possible fix, but it tends to make death near impossible if the rate of currency replenishment isn't very carefully handed out. For a given campaign, the metacurrency could be a shared group currency that doesn't replenish, and it instead slowly drains until it is all gone, this would let groups and individuals decide which characters they are interested in keeping or okay with discarding, and avoid early death as well while eventually allowing for more tension as the campaign draws to a close and the currency dwindles (but can create player vs player conflict as a shared resource disappears). Another solution, and I believe people here have used it, is to discuss character death with the player, asking if they want to continue with that character or not, and then providing some in-game means of reviving them: 'oh look, that chest had a scroll of raise dead in it, lucky huh?', it makes death narrative, and death by narrative is likely what many people want, but it comes with the possible loss of immersion which can ruin a game as much as a PC death.