Quote from LanternNoir >>

 

At the end, for me, the death of a character at the table due to random monster 17 is boring and dull.   

I can certainly relate to this. having a PC die to a rando skeleton feels really underwhelming. You kind of want it to be a massive boss battle or a sacrifice that means something. At least, I do. Having NPCs die to the equivalent of a drunk driver just feels wrong. 

Consequences do extend beyond just death though. Character injury, or being unable to return to certain towns etc I feel are reasonable but unpleasant consequences.

In my opinion, and how I run my games, actions should always have consequences. Players should expect them.

The problem of character death and consequences for character actions has existed for decades. It isn't new. I ran a game where the players took risky actions but at the time I didn't want to kill the characters so they survived. The players then took even more and more risky actions over the course of the campaign, reaching the point where I was thinking the characters really shouldn't survive this. At that point, I realized that not having appropriate consequences or the possibility of character death was in general a detriment to the game rather than an asset.

However, in the OP's example, I think the DM was wrong (assuming the OP quoted it accurately).

"The GM in question even gave the player an extra freebie warning of 'you're not trying to be sneaky here? There are people on the streets, are you sure you want to attack the NPC? This might attract the wrong sort of attention!' "

This shows a fundamental lack of communication between the player and the DM. "This might attract the wrong sort of attention!" or even "There will be consequences" AREN'T enough.

Think about what the character would know of the world they live in and the consequences for thievery and assault. Attacking the NPC and stealing their stuff in broad daylight in front of witnesses is something the character would never do because they character SHOULD know that it is common in their society for thieves to have their hands chopped off. The characters should generally know this. If the DM doesn't tell the players the likely consequences that their character should know then the DM is setting up a GOTCHA moment of DM vs PLAYER where the consequences come as a surprise in a context when they really should not. Communications is key .. if the player decides to act while aware of the consequences that are known to the character then the decision was theirs - if they just have a nebulous "that might attract the wrong sort of attention" which could mean anything then don't be surprised by a reaction to the extreme consequences imposed.

I try to make consequences scale with how important the encounter is, and also on how important it is to remind the players that they need to be careful.

If a character goes down in a random encounter with the local goblin bandits who ambush people who walk through their woods, then the likelihood of them actually dying should be slim - either through a passing healer or another player with healing, they should recover. They might learn not to employ that tactic again, but they might not.

If a character goes down during an epic boss battle where the stakes should be high, then they will probably die unless other players intervene. There'll be no saving them from this side of the screen.

If the characters are ambushed by the goblin bandits and turn it into an epic siege of the goblin village, then they made it a high-stakes fight and should have a chance of death.

I also throw it in occasionally to see the look on their faces. A while ago, they were on a boat with a drunken captain, and he remarked that he'd never shot the ballista on the back. They pursuaded him to, and he rolled a natural 1, which caused the ballista to misfire, break in half, and launch him off the back of the boat. Everyone was laughing at the hilarity of it, until the monk walked out on the water to bring him back, and found a rapidly spreading pool of red around his face-down body. They pulled the chunk of wood out of him and revived him, but they realised that bad things can happen that day!

My players are very attached to their characters. We've been playing for over a year, and I even bought them custom herofoege minis of their characters as a gift.  That being as it is, they have all said they enjoy the game more knowing that consequences are real, and there are no pulled punches. It can be a real gut check moment for the entire party when the tank takes nearly half his HP in one hit because they underestimated something or got too confident. None of them will take handling the loss of their character well, but they find more enjoyment knowing that it is possible with every turn. 

As a DM, I do try to avoid using situations that might cheapen a death when I set up scenes. I'm not ever going to hit them with a completely random collapsing ceiling without warning several times that the structure is old and crumbling. At the end of the day, even if it is a massive one hit kill from an enemy..it is my job to make sure it has meaning in some way, even if the only ones who walk away with meaning are the characters that survived. 

No idea how to go about normalizing such a thing, but as both a player, and a DM over many years, I want that possibility that the players' decisions may kill their characters.

Case in point: I was once invited to a table, to start at 3rd level. The party was to go to one place and do their thing, but one player, through their character, had learned earlier that an old red dragon, resided in that neighborhood.

That player, whose character currently led the party, wanted to ignore the intended quest, and take on the dragon, with a party of four 3rd level characters. See the problem, here? That player still wanted to do this, after the DM went as far as to say to the players that this information was to tell them that a dragon lived in the area, to be addressed later, and that going there now would be suicide.

The player got all bent out of shape, angry that they couldn't do what they want. Something along the lines of, "If we can't go now, you shouldn't have mentioned it." So much for expanding the world through role play. By this player's thought processes, the party should only be informed of a potential encounter when they can defeat it. I later learned that this particular player will also not tolerate the death of one of their characters.

I have met other players, who cannot tolerate the death of a character, and also want to charge into every encounter and destroy. Apparently, the superman character model would work just fine for them, but godawful boring for the likes of me. Recently, in my attempt at integrating into an online gaming platform, during in-town role play, my character would overhear things like, "I've killed a few dragons; they're no big deal," and think to myself, "If dragons are easy, what can challenge them, aside from a small army?" I don't want to play in a game where my character can make it through, regardless of what it does or doesn't do.

In (combat sessions) such as this, I have (sometimes) literally chosen to do nothing, the lack of actions sometimes being completely ignored by other players, as they focused on their own thing, and my character has walked out without a scratch, the party victorious. In other words, the party was grossly over powered for the mission at hand. In cases like this, the only thing to look forward to then is more XPs, more goodies, and another level up, to go and slaughter more critters more efficiently.

Personally, role play is what I enjoy from the game. The rest is just part of it, not the end goal of it all. Without there being any appreciable risk to the characters, there is no fun for folks like me.

Quote from Aquilain >>

 

 

 
I should have clarified that in this case it was an Artificer Infused item. It was a replicate magic item, so my interpretation was that the infusion essentially got wiped by anti-magic field. GM had a couple of choices, the choice here was to wipe the infusion which meant that the bag returned to a mundane state. What should happen with the items within? Well, they are out there on some other plane somewhere.

 You are correct that the infusions would not work inside the antimagic field. However the spell only suppresses magic, it doesn't end effects (other than summoned creatures disappearing).

So the bag wouldn't be openable in an antimagic field, but the infused magic would start working again when the bag was removed from the antimagic shell, and on opening the bag the contents of the bag of holding would be accessible.

I'm not partial to the discourse of the topic. I'm honestly more happy when there is time for roleplay and downtime to explore a character's backstory or personal goals, but I'm also one who wants to think out decisions, and who makes character of a variety of kinds. I've made murder hobos and I've made characters who can't fight but can solve the ever dwindling numbers of puzzles and riddles that emerge in gameplay.

I've also DM'd for just over ten years. I find that players aren't patient to deal with puzzles anymore, they simply want to fight, and many care nothing for actual roleplay, or even bother to flesh out their characters background. Fewer even pay attention during session 0.

I ran a campaign with players where it was understood by the majority of the players that their character had no classes at the start. That the world was a post-apocalyptic, zombie filled death trap and that survival was of the utmost priority. Death was around every corner and only careful planning and caution would save them. That said, there was one player who discarded all of those warnings and speed ran through three whole characters in their first session because they could not fathom that their actions would have negative consequences, even when such actions came with warning or the consequences were notably obvious. He then quit the table in frustration of failing to accomplish anything (not that he paid attention when he was there) but continued to brag about how many character he'd managed to kill as if that was the point of the game.

I find that the the hero complex has become synonymous with the game and that very few are comfortable with the fact that their character can die at all. But as someone who has played RPGS with cheats on, I find plot armor boring, why have a measure of player Hit Points when no one can die from their depletion? When there is no challenge to survival or combat, what even is the point of playing beyond simply the short dopamine rush of stroking your virtual ego.

Obviously my opinion means very little here, it's important to acknowledge that there are a number of differing player archetypes and I've seen and played with a fair number of their varieties, but as someone who started with 4e before experiencing every edition except 1st edition, I'm disappointed that I can't share with my players and friends the complexities of a good old fashioned dungeon crawl or high stakes boss fight with just a regular old troll or something. To me, death is an occupational hazard when you're and adventurer, and removing it from the game, especially where it concerns the consequences of a player's actions, serves only to enforce their desire to do more things that would likely get them killed, but won't. D&D has stopped being fun, both to run and to play. The climate of the game has shifted and I feel like I'm a relic of a bygone era with old fashioned opinions and ideas.

So in short, I don't think we can normalize any ideology regarding this game that would otherwise go against the public opinion of it as it stands. There is no correct way to play the game, except the way the majority of players play the game. If it's current public opinion that monster's shouldn't be able to critically hit, then that is the opinion that is in the majority so it will be the one that is correct. If a majority of players can't or don't have fun with the potential threat of their character dying, possibly because of their actions, then far be it from the game at large to enforce the opposite. Each DM and group will play the game how they want to play the game, and the majority of their playstyles will define how the game is played standard going forward.

"Safe Mode" is all down to talking to the DM. I spoke to my players a while ago, because I wanted to up the difficulty and danger a bit but didn't want them to have their characters snatched away without mercy, so I asked them whether they would be happy for their characters to die, or if they would prefer a more flexible approach where they may be offered deals with devils or deities, resurrection, or an adventure after death to regain their life. 

The reason I asked this was because I felt that it would be un-fun for the players who love their characters and would want their story to continue to lose them, and similarly it would be un-fun for players who feel it's their responsibility to keep their characters alive and who relish that challenge to get a soft touch when they did not ask for it. Consequently, I have 3 players who would prefer that their characters have the chance to come back, and two who feel that their characters deaths is just a part of their story, and that removing it would be wrong.

Thus far, I haven't (permanently) killed any of them. Nobody has made it to 3 failed death saves, yet...