Hi all, I don't want to turn a new player off of D&D and TTRPG so want to find a way to change the way death is handled in my game. I want it to be an option but only after a few lives.
I have an idea of allowing a character to cheat death but every time they do they permanently colour one of the death failure spots until they are dead dead.
In the mean time I also want each death to have some significance so considering using the Lingering Injury table but introducing the injury slowly over a few game sessions giving the player a chance to fix the injury (I am thinking giving about a week in game time before the full effects of the lingering injury to happen.
What are peoples thoughts on this and how could it be improved.
(NB) Death is always an option but for these players I want to give a few extra chances. So please no posts saying just kill them and have the roll up new characters or saying let the other PCs take them to a temple for resurrection. I know these are options but I want them to be options for later not right away.
If you must, start rolling everyone's death saves for them - it takes a little more time but if necessary you can fudge a roll if they would have died and give them a lingering injury instead - don't do this too often though; only for new characters so that they don't die in the first session or so because that annoys people. later on they have more hp so there's less need for this anyway - resurrection does become a more viable option too.
If you must, start rolling everyone's death saves for them - it takes a little more time but if necessary you can fudge a roll if they would have died and give them a lingering injury instead - don't do this too often though; only for new characters so that they don't die in the first session or so because that annoys people. later on they have more hp so there's less need for this anyway - resurrection does become a more viable option too.
That sounds feasible, I am not ashamed to admit I do fudge some die rolls to continue the story, I just miss calculated the HP of this particular player. I had intended to get them down to 1hp and have them retreat back to a safer position instead they were on 0hp and then rolled 2 death saves the second being a 1!!! If I roll the Death saves in the future then that 1 could have been a 2...
I feel near death builds more tension than actual death. Actual death to me just derails or delays the story.
"I had intended to get them down to 1hp and have them retreat back to a safer position"...Does this mean you are fudging damage rolls as well? Also, the vast majority of the time players don't retreat. On top of that, your players will retreat even less the more plot armor you give them. Trying to control their actions by specific amounts of damage isn't going to have the results you expect. You're better off just letting the dice fall where they may, and if a player dies just have a powerful NPC come by and revivify/resurrect them. Or just insert a lower level NPC as a party member than has an infinite number of Healing Word spells to cast when they drop to zero.
One of the Live Action RP groups I've played in over the years had a thing called "Res Chance" (or Chance of being Restored to Life), it starts off at 100% but each death reduces this by 10%.
So what you could do is give each player 10 "life points", if they are reduced to zero HP they start to roll their death saves as normal, if they fail 3 death saves or at any time during their death saves, they can then use a life point to bring them back to 1 HP instead of dying, then if/when they run out of LIfe Points the character dies they need to have a Raise Dead or similar cast on them.
The important thing though is that the LIfe Points never renew without a Wish spell or similar.
Seems like a lingering injury will delay the story more than a death. The party will just camp out for a week and wait for the injured to heal. If they die, you bring in the new PC and just keep moving.
Check out the Hero Point optional rule in the DMG. Limited resource, and puts it in the hands of the players. One point can turn a death save failure into a success, as long as they don't blow them all on other rolls.
A home-brewed rule I have used in the past for situations like this is to have the character awaken the following dawn as a new race. I have done this two ways in the past:
1) The character mere takes on the physical appearance of the new race (ie: all the characters existing racial features stay the same but the character is treated as the new race.
2) The character becomes a new, humanoid, race. I then manually adjust the character's abilities scores to match his/hers original ability scores. Everything else stays the same.
I treat this as the character have been Reincarnated. How this comes to be can be a mystery that is revealed later if the character decides to investigate the mystery of his/her rebirth.
The other way I have handled it is that the character also awakes at dawn as a whole new character with the same, original personality (or different if that is what the player decides) with the same memories as the original. How? Well that is a mystery to solved in play as part of the campaign.
You might also look into the options provided in Tomb of Annihilation (if you have access to that module) for how that module handles player death.
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Watch your back, conserve your ammo, and NEVER cut a deal with a dragon!
"I had intended to get them down to 1hp and have them retreat back to a safer position"...Does this mean you are fudging damage rolls as well? Also, the vast majority of the time players don't retreat. On top of that, your players will retreat even less the more plot armor you give them. Trying to control their actions by specific amounts of damage isn't going to have the results you expect. You're better off just letting the dice fall where they may, and if a player dies just have a powerful NPC come by and revivify/resurrect them. Or just insert a lower level NPC as a party member than has an infinite number of Healing Word spells to cast when they drop to zero.
This is only something I was planning to use for the first 3-5 levels after that death becomes more substantial. As I will explain to the players at that time, in this campaign level 3 is the hotspot but in another like LMoP it would be level 5.
Check out the Hero Point optional rule in the DMG. Limited resource, and puts it in the hands of the players. One point can turn a death save failure into a success, as long as they don't blow them all on other rolls.
This would have been great but I would have needed to use the system before starting the adventure.
Thanks for the suggestion though, I like it and may use it in the future to an extent. Modified to a limit though.
I remember when I first started playing D&D in the way-back-when....
My friend who was the DM told me and my more experienced friend to each make one character. My friend started to say something and the DM shot him a look. I noticed it, but had no idea what it meant. My friend must have, because he clammed up right away. The DM asked my friend to help me make my first character. I wanted to make a Greatsword wielding behemoth like Conan. The DM and my friend both convinced me to make a different character. So after about an hour we were ready to play, I had a character designed to be a longbow user.
We started playing, and within ten minutes my character had found a coin purse in a pile of junk in a desk. My character started to investigate the purse. Upon opening it, the DM told me I could see a platinum coin in the bottom of it (back then that was a fortune for a 1st level PC). I stated that my character was going to get the coin out. My friend who was the other player started to say something and the DM quickly shot him another look and informed him that his character didn’t see this happening. My friend again clammed up. The DM asked specifically if my character had put their hand into the purse. I looked at my buddy who was near about to explode keeping his mouth shut. I said, “No, I turn it upside down to shake the coin out.” The DM informed me that nothing fell out. I said that my PC looked into the bag again. The DM informed me that I could still see the coin in there. I said “Okay, I put my hand into the purse.
The purse turned out to be a Bag of Devouring (they worked differently back then) and it bit my character’s right hand off. My PC lost his right hand and almost died (he only had 6HP, that was normal back then). I was very upset (we were all kids). The DM told me that D&D was not a game where we could run around like idiots doing foolish things without consequences. Characters died. I needed to know that.
At that point our fourth finally arrived. The DM instructed each of us to make three PCs for the real adventure that was about to start.
I realized that my DM has been doing me a favor. I learned that PCs died, and that I shouldn’t get too attached to them so quickly. By having me make that first PC as something other than what I really wanted, I was spared the hurt of that experience happening to a character I was really attached to. I learned a lot about D&D, education, and friendship that day.
I hope something from the story of that experience is helpful in some way.
I remember when I first started playing D&D in the way-back-when....
My friend who was the DM told me and my more experienced friend to each make one character. My friend started to say something and the DM shot him a look. I noticed it, but had no idea what it meant. My friend must have, because he clammed up right away. The DM asked my friend to help me make my first character. I wanted to make a Greatsword wielding behemoth like Conan. The DM and my friend both convinced me to make a different character. So after about an hour we were ready to play, I had a character designed to be a longbow user.
We started playing, and within ten minutes my character had found a coin purse in a pile of junk in a desk. My character started to investigate the purse. Upon opening it, the DM told me I could see a platinum coin in the bottom of it (back then that was a fortune for a 1st level PC). I stated that my character was going to get the coin out. My friend who was the other player started to say something and the DM quickly shot him another look and informed him that his character didn’t see this happening. My friend again clammed up. The DM asked specifically if my character had put their hand into the purse. I looked at my buddy who was near about to explode keeping his mouth shut. I said, “No, I turn it upside down to shake the coin out.” The DM informed me that nothing fell out. I said that my PC looked into the bag again. The DM informed me that I could still see the coin in there. I said “Okay, I put my hand into the purse.
The purse turned out to be a Bag of Devouring (they worked differently back then) and it bit my character’s right hand off. My PC lost his right hand and almost died (he only had 6HP, that was normal back then). I was very upset (we were all kids). The DM told me that D&D was not a game where we could run around like idiots doing foolish things without consequences. Characters died. I needed to know that.
At that point our fourth finally arrived. The DM instructed each of us to make three PCs for the real adventure that was about to start.
I realized that my DM has been doing me a favor. I learned that PCs died, and that I shouldn’t get too attached to them so quickly. By having me make that first PC as something other than what I really wanted, I was spared the hurt of that experience happening to a character I was really attached to. I learned a lot about D&D, education, and friendship that day.
I hope something from the story of that experience is helpful in some way.
In one of my earlier campaigns, I rolled dice behind the screen and occasionally adjusted as needed. It was fun. The characters did lots of cool things. Success was never guaranteed, however, surprisingly no one ever died (perhaps not surprising to me since I was inadvertently giving the characters plot armor ... if I rolled bad I fudged it so everything came out ok).
BUT! :) ... over the longer term, by the time the characters were level 6-9 or so, the gnome illusionist-thief who initially started taking an occasional risk to achieve a goal started taking bigger and bigger risks. They would want to sneak into the mayor's house, steal the jewels from his wife's safe, escape, sell them and walk off with lots of gold, untouched. The character started actively looking for more and more risky things to do because they were succeeding at these tasks. If they didn't actually get the treasure they didn't seem to die. They didn't seem to be punished and somehow everything just worked out. As a DM, I realized at this point that the DMing style I had been using was fun to a point since the results felt more heroic but later in the game they just felt unrealistic and forced. The players either consciously or subconsciously realized that they had plot armor, that risks weren't as risky as they thought, that they could try more and more outrageous things and they wouldn't die. It essentially ran the game off track and it was difficult to correct at that point since players like the heroic feel. However, without the risk of actually dying to constrain the choice of actions to something "reasonable", some players move onto "unreasonable". Where that line is though depends on the individual and trying to fix the problem later just tends to cause friction.
So, these days, I roll everything in front of the players. Whether they hit death saves or not is due to encounter balance and dice rolls. The players in the party know that if a character goes down and starts making death saves then the party needs to step up and use healing (healing potion, healer feat, cure wounds. lay on hands, healing word or something) to get them back on their feet before they die. The character's life is in the hands of the party and not the DM.
I control the situation via encounter balance and NPCs. If the battle is too easy then additional monsters may enter on future rounds as reinforcements. If something disastrous happens then an NPC might show up as a friendly reinforcement. These don't happen every time but they are held in reserve for that critical moment when the DM might need to step in with some plot device to prevent a TPK due to bad dice rolls (note: If the TPK is due to stupid party decisions that the party knew could go badly then the outcome is on them).
Finally, during session 0 with new players, describe how dangerous D&D can be for the characters especially at lower levels. Emphasize that sometimes fleeing or not engaging at all is the better choice. Remind the players that they can always ask the DM what their character might know about a creature and how dangerous it might be. The DM could then give a hint as to the difficulty of the encounter ... not a spoiler but if the party is staring at a TPK because they took a wrong turn then the DM wants to foreshadow that a bit.
In the end, some characters may die. I had a 4th level rogue playing in Tomb of Annihilation, we jumped out of our canoes to make camp and were attacked by giant crocodiles from the river. They had better initiative than I. The crocodile crit my character for 51 points of damage. I only had a maximum 27 hit points at the time (12 con) ... and was down 2 hit points. The 51 damage took me to -26 ... 1 hit point away from instantly dying. It made the situation very memorable. However, if I had had 3 hit points of damage or more, the character would have died instantly. The point is that death remains a risk throughout the character's life and it is better to make this clear to the players early on rather than trying to soften the impact.
Just to clarify to everyone. Death is still an option. I am just wanting to give extra lives and each death has less death saves available due to having to give up a death failure spot. So second death would mean only needing 2 death save fails 3rd death would only be 1 death save forth death final unless using resurection.
This is purely to ease my young newbie players into the game. My adult group doesn't have this rule and future campaigns for these young players won't have it (and they will be told that).
I think its important to encapsulate the morale of IamSposta's story because this isn't just a story about teaching players of the risk of characters dying, but creating an anxiety of the fact that it could happen and not because of anything the DM did to you.
Good DM's will not kill characters, they will instead make sure that when a character dies, the players blame themselves. The story shows the DM setting the player up to make a mistake, aka the lure and the challenge of the game is figuring out how to succeed without losing your hand (or life). Failing that challenge can get you killed, but a player has the choice to avoid the challenge.
One of the key mistakes DM's make when creating their adventures and campaigns is creating challenge the players can't avoid that get characters killed. When you do this, YOU (the DM) killed the character and so the players may indeed blame you, your adventure design or whatever.
This is why Adventure Modules where so important to DM's because this is also a method of deflecting blame. Its not the DM that kills you, its the module, hence its not even the DM setting the lure, its the module.
In any case I do however agree with your Dramacius that new players should get a soft introduction, the lessons of "character death" is something that they will learn time, there are other more pressing lessons for a new player to learn at the start.
Additionally you have to consider whether you are running a story game or a D&D adventure and the two are not the same, though both have stories, a true story game is focused on telling a long term story of the character adventures, while an adventure game is a "challenge" to the players (as a game and as a role-playing experience). The former, you need to make sure that characters don't die, even if they bite on deadly lures because as a DM it can be a real pain when a character important to the story dies. This is however where it gets tricky because if the players feel they have plot armor, they will lose interest in the story.
I personally don't think the death system in D&D is particularly great for creating a story game. In a story game, rather then death you need some other form of consequence that ensures the players avoid death with the same anxiety without actually being at risk of it. If however your trying to create an adventure (the more standard way to play D&D), I think its a good idea to do as I IamSposta's story suggest and introduce new players to potential of character death very early in the nicest way possible (I think his DM's method was brilliant).
I am running this group through the Tales from the Yawning Portal. They should be able to deal with the goblins however, I had previously decided that when they reach certain points in the Sunless Citadel (that's what we are playing atm) I would level them up and they are very close to the first of those points now so it stands to reason that the challenge maybe a little harder although it is also their first combat besides the Giant Rats at the beginning and they also fell for one of the traps which hit one of the, quite hard.
I think its important to encapsulate the morale of IamSposta's story because this isn't just a story about teaching players of the risk of characters dying, but creating an anxiety of the fact that it could happen and not because of anything the DM did to you.
Good DM's will not kill characters, they will instead make sure that when a character dies, the players blame themselves.
[sic]
I think its a good idea to do as I IamSposta's story suggest and introduce new players to potential of character death very early in the nicest way possible (I think his DM's method was brilliant).
I have to disagree with one thing: “Accepting responsibility” is not the same as “blaming themselves.”
As far as the original idea goes- I'd say if you want your characters to be Big Damn Heroes, there's nothing wrong with that rule proposal. I'd say, maybe, veer a little bit less on the side of fudging rolls if you're going to implement that, because implementing that sort of a rule gives you more leeway to let the dice fall as they may, but players will still feel harried and nervous about their characters slowly getting closer and closer to death if they start blocking out those death save boxes. This might work better & feel better on a lower level campaign though, considering the prevalence of the use of revivify and the relative ease of acquiring the money for a proper revival once you hit mid-tier. A player may choose not to mark off the box and get back up just with the thought that a revivify might be available in mind.
If you are looking for a framework to implement the cheat death houserule you propose, I've always been find of a patron diaty of gamblers looking for amusement.
D&D has temples that regularly provide divine magic services, including reviving the dead. It's not inconceivable that one of these clerics might do the work in exchange for a favour. You're the GM, mate. You don't have to adhere strictly to the rules if they make the game worse. Hell, dead doesn't have to mean dead. You can say that they have a lasting injury which they need to get healed or suffer a persistent penalty. You can say the last hit was non-lethal, so they aren't even making death saves. Or maybe there is some divine or diabolical figure that steps in at the last minute for their own purposes.
If dying isn't going to make the story better? Don't let it happen. Unlike the pretty standard grognard response, the game doesn't really gain anything by making it a strict simulation. If it did? We wouldn't bother playing at all. We could set up a random story generator and save ourselves a lot of time. This isn't about systems integrity. It's about people and stories about them that we build with our players. Seldom is a story served by its characters being killed off before we've had a chance to grow attached to them. If the only thing that is served by a character's death is that any background work that player did has been wiped out then... probably you shouldn't let that happen.
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Hi all, I don't want to turn a new player off of D&D and TTRPG so want to find a way to change the way death is handled in my game. I want it to be an option but only after a few lives.
I have an idea of allowing a character to cheat death but every time they do they permanently colour one of the death failure spots until they are dead dead.
In the mean time I also want each death to have some significance so considering using the Lingering Injury table but introducing the injury slowly over a few game sessions giving the player a chance to fix the injury (I am thinking giving about a week in game time before the full effects of the lingering injury to happen.
What are peoples thoughts on this and how could it be improved.
(NB) Death is always an option but for these players I want to give a few extra chances. So please no posts saying just kill them and have the roll up new characters or saying let the other PCs take them to a temple for resurrection. I know these are options but I want them to be options for later not right away.
If you must, start rolling everyone's death saves for them - it takes a little more time but if necessary you can fudge a roll if they would have died and give them a lingering injury instead - don't do this too often though; only for new characters so that they don't die in the first session or so because that annoys people. later on they have more hp so there's less need for this anyway - resurrection does become a more viable option too.
Chilling kinda vibe.
That sounds feasible, I am not ashamed to admit I do fudge some die rolls to continue the story, I just miss calculated the HP of this particular player. I had intended to get them down to 1hp and have them retreat back to a safer position instead they were on 0hp and then rolled 2 death saves the second being a 1!!! If I roll the Death saves in the future then that 1 could have been a 2...
I feel near death builds more tension than actual death. Actual death to me just derails or delays the story.
"I had intended to get them down to 1hp and have them retreat back to a safer position"...Does this mean you are fudging damage rolls as well? Also, the vast majority of the time players don't retreat. On top of that, your players will retreat even less the more plot armor you give them. Trying to control their actions by specific amounts of damage isn't going to have the results you expect. You're better off just letting the dice fall where they may, and if a player dies just have a powerful NPC come by and revivify/resurrect them. Or just insert a lower level NPC as a party member than has an infinite number of Healing Word spells to cast when they drop to zero.
One of the Live Action RP groups I've played in over the years had a thing called "Res Chance" (or Chance of being Restored to Life), it starts off at 100% but each death reduces this by 10%.
So what you could do is give each player 10 "life points", if they are reduced to zero HP they start to roll their death saves as normal, if they fail 3 death saves or at any time during their death saves, they can then use a life point to bring them back to 1 HP instead of dying, then if/when they run out of LIfe Points the character dies they need to have a Raise Dead or similar cast on them.
The important thing though is that the LIfe Points never renew without a Wish spell or similar.
Seems like a lingering injury will delay the story more than a death. The party will just camp out for a week and wait for the injured to heal. If they die, you bring in the new PC and just keep moving.
Check out the Hero Point optional rule in the DMG. Limited resource, and puts it in the hands of the players. One point can turn a death save failure into a success, as long as they don't blow them all on other rolls.
A home-brewed rule I have used in the past for situations like this is to have the character awaken the following dawn as a new race. I have done this two ways in the past:
1) The character mere takes on the physical appearance of the new race (ie: all the characters existing racial features stay the same but the character is treated as the new race.
2) The character becomes a new, humanoid, race. I then manually adjust the character's abilities scores to match his/hers original ability scores. Everything else stays the same.
I treat this as the character have been Reincarnated. How this comes to be can be a mystery that is revealed later if the character decides to investigate the mystery of his/her rebirth.
The other way I have handled it is that the character also awakes at dawn as a whole new character with the same, original personality (or different if that is what the player decides) with the same memories as the original. How? Well that is a mystery to solved in play as part of the campaign.
You might also look into the options provided in Tomb of Annihilation (if you have access to that module) for how that module handles player death.
Watch your back, conserve your ammo,
and NEVER cut a deal with a dragon!
I don't have that module although it is on my list but for a different adult group.
This is only something I was planning to use for the first 3-5 levels after that death becomes more substantial. As I will explain to the players at that time, in this campaign level 3 is the hotspot but in another like LMoP it would be level 5.
This would have been great but I would have needed to use the system before starting the adventure.
Thanks for the suggestion though, I like it and may use it in the future to an extent. Modified to a limit though.
I remember when I first started playing D&D in the way-back-when....
My friend who was the DM told me and my more experienced friend to each make one character. My friend started to say something and the DM shot him a look. I noticed it, but had no idea what it meant. My friend must have, because he clammed up right away. The DM asked my friend to help me make my first character. I wanted to make a Greatsword wielding behemoth like Conan. The DM and my friend both convinced me to make a different character. So after about an hour we were ready to play, I had a character designed to be a longbow user.
We started playing, and within ten minutes my character had found a coin purse in a pile of junk in a desk. My character started to investigate the purse. Upon opening it, the DM told me I could see a platinum coin in the bottom of it (back then that was a fortune for a 1st level PC). I stated that my character was going to get the coin out. My friend who was the other player started to say something and the DM quickly shot him another look and informed him that his character didn’t see this happening. My friend again clammed up. The DM asked specifically if my character had put their hand into the purse. I looked at my buddy who was near about to explode keeping his mouth shut. I said, “No, I turn it upside down to shake the coin out.” The DM informed me that nothing fell out. I said that my PC looked into the bag again. The DM informed me that I could still see the coin in there. I said “Okay, I put my hand into the purse.
The purse turned out to be a Bag of Devouring (they worked differently back then) and it bit my character’s right hand off. My PC lost his right hand and almost died (he only had 6HP, that was normal back then). I was very upset (we were all kids). The DM told me that D&D was not a game where we could run around like idiots doing foolish things without consequences. Characters died. I needed to know that.
At that point our fourth finally arrived. The DM instructed each of us to make three PCs for the real adventure that was about to start.
I realized that my DM has been doing me a favor. I learned that PCs died, and that I shouldn’t get too attached to them so quickly. By having me make that first PC as something other than what I really wanted, I was spared the hurt of that experience happening to a character I was really attached to. I learned a lot about D&D, education, and friendship that day.
I hope something from the story of that experience is helpful in some way.
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Thank you, that is a great and informative story.
Risk to characters is a part of D&D.
In one of my earlier campaigns, I rolled dice behind the screen and occasionally adjusted as needed. It was fun. The characters did lots of cool things. Success was never guaranteed, however, surprisingly no one ever died (perhaps not surprising to me since I was inadvertently giving the characters plot armor ... if I rolled bad I fudged it so everything came out ok).
BUT! :) ... over the longer term, by the time the characters were level 6-9 or so, the gnome illusionist-thief who initially started taking an occasional risk to achieve a goal started taking bigger and bigger risks. They would want to sneak into the mayor's house, steal the jewels from his wife's safe, escape, sell them and walk off with lots of gold, untouched. The character started actively looking for more and more risky things to do because they were succeeding at these tasks. If they didn't actually get the treasure they didn't seem to die. They didn't seem to be punished and somehow everything just worked out. As a DM, I realized at this point that the DMing style I had been using was fun to a point since the results felt more heroic but later in the game they just felt unrealistic and forced. The players either consciously or subconsciously realized that they had plot armor, that risks weren't as risky as they thought, that they could try more and more outrageous things and they wouldn't die. It essentially ran the game off track and it was difficult to correct at that point since players like the heroic feel. However, without the risk of actually dying to constrain the choice of actions to something "reasonable", some players move onto "unreasonable". Where that line is though depends on the individual and trying to fix the problem later just tends to cause friction.
So, these days, I roll everything in front of the players. Whether they hit death saves or not is due to encounter balance and dice rolls. The players in the party know that if a character goes down and starts making death saves then the party needs to step up and use healing (healing potion, healer feat, cure wounds. lay on hands, healing word or something) to get them back on their feet before they die. The character's life is in the hands of the party and not the DM.
I control the situation via encounter balance and NPCs. If the battle is too easy then additional monsters may enter on future rounds as reinforcements. If something disastrous happens then an NPC might show up as a friendly reinforcement. These don't happen every time but they are held in reserve for that critical moment when the DM might need to step in with some plot device to prevent a TPK due to bad dice rolls (note: If the TPK is due to stupid party decisions that the party knew could go badly then the outcome is on them).
Finally, during session 0 with new players, describe how dangerous D&D can be for the characters especially at lower levels. Emphasize that sometimes fleeing or not engaging at all is the better choice. Remind the players that they can always ask the DM what their character might know about a creature and how dangerous it might be. The DM could then give a hint as to the difficulty of the encounter ... not a spoiler but if the party is staring at a TPK because they took a wrong turn then the DM wants to foreshadow that a bit.
In the end, some characters may die. I had a 4th level rogue playing in Tomb of Annihilation, we jumped out of our canoes to make camp and were attacked by giant crocodiles from the river. They had better initiative than I. The crocodile crit my character for 51 points of damage. I only had a maximum 27 hit points at the time (12 con) ... and was down 2 hit points. The 51 damage took me to -26 ... 1 hit point away from instantly dying. It made the situation very memorable. However, if I had had 3 hit points of damage or more, the character would have died instantly. The point is that death remains a risk throughout the character's life and it is better to make this clear to the players early on rather than trying to soften the impact.
Just to clarify to everyone. Death is still an option. I am just wanting to give extra lives and each death has less death saves available due to having to give up a death failure spot. So second death would mean only needing 2 death save fails 3rd death would only be 1 death save forth death final unless using resurection.
This is purely to ease my young newbie players into the game. My adult group doesn't have this rule and future campaigns for these young players won't have it (and they will be told that).
I am running this group through the Tales from the Yawning Portal. They should be able to deal with the goblins however, I had previously decided that when they reach certain points in the Sunless Citadel (that's what we are playing atm) I would level them up and they are very close to the first of those points now so it stands to reason that the challenge maybe a little harder although it is also their first combat besides the Giant Rats at the beginning and they also fell for one of the traps which hit one of the, quite hard.
I have to disagree with one thing: “Accepting responsibility” is not the same as “blaming themselves.”
Mat’s method was rather brilliant however.
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As far as the original idea goes- I'd say if you want your characters to be Big Damn Heroes, there's nothing wrong with that rule proposal. I'd say, maybe, veer a little bit less on the side of fudging rolls if you're going to implement that, because implementing that sort of a rule gives you more leeway to let the dice fall as they may, but players will still feel harried and nervous about their characters slowly getting closer and closer to death if they start blocking out those death save boxes. This might work better & feel better on a lower level campaign though, considering the prevalence of the use of revivify and the relative ease of acquiring the money for a proper revival once you hit mid-tier. A player may choose not to mark off the box and get back up just with the thought that a revivify might be available in mind.
If you are looking for a framework to implement the cheat death houserule you propose, I've always been find of a patron diaty of gamblers looking for amusement.
D&D has temples that regularly provide divine magic services, including reviving the dead. It's not inconceivable that one of these clerics might do the work in exchange for a favour. You're the GM, mate. You don't have to adhere strictly to the rules if they make the game worse. Hell, dead doesn't have to mean dead. You can say that they have a lasting injury which they need to get healed or suffer a persistent penalty. You can say the last hit was non-lethal, so they aren't even making death saves. Or maybe there is some divine or diabolical figure that steps in at the last minute for their own purposes.
If dying isn't going to make the story better? Don't let it happen. Unlike the pretty standard grognard response, the game doesn't really gain anything by making it a strict simulation. If it did? We wouldn't bother playing at all. We could set up a random story generator and save ourselves a lot of time. This isn't about systems integrity. It's about people and stories about them that we build with our players. Seldom is a story served by its characters being killed off before we've had a chance to grow attached to them. If the only thing that is served by a character's death is that any background work that player did has been wiped out then... probably you shouldn't let that happen.