Yeah, when playing D&D 5e the rules make it clear that player death is quite rare.
In-combat, there's death saves and plenty of ways for your allies to heal you 1 hp before you roll three fails. Monsters basically never get save-or-die spells, at least not until you're quite high level. The recommended ways of creating encounters will rarely put your players in a situation where TPKs are possible. Out of combat, I believe the PHB and DMG do not provide any examples of a save-or-die situation, or at least I don't remember it when reading through.
Player death seems to be the sort of thing that's technically possible, but should probably be very rare unless either the players or the DM screw up really, really badly.
You can of course make an extra-deadly campaign where every encounter has a decent chance of killing the players entirely - that's also a legitimate way to play D&D 5e! - but it's definitely not required and doesn't seem to be either the intended way or, based on what I've seen, the most common way to play.
Death is neither rare or common, what it is is spontaneous driven by a mechanic, not the drama artificially produced by the DM. 5e's system is definitely more forgiving then some versions of the game, but how forgiving it is or is not, is not really the point. The point is that its there, you don't remove death from the game by offering characters impenetrable plot armor [...].
Please BigLizard! No-one has talked about any impenetrable plot armor. Quite the contrary (at least on my behalf). I've said I'm fine with players dying when I think that suits the overall story, and I have said that when I DON'T think it happens at a bad moment - I usually work around it.
And my games are not only about mortal danger. Yes, of course it's there, but there are several other dangers and consequences I also use. It works with my group of players. I want my players to risk their lives to try and save a poor fishmonger's son - I don't need to kill them to feel they failed. It's enough having them to go to the poor fishmonger and give her the news that her son is dead. When that hurts for the player - well that's when I feel like I'm succeeded.
There are lot of issues at hand in this conversation which indeed has meandered over the pages as conversations do. Forums are usually not like a Quora article where we all just post an answer and then it gets upvoted. There is a back and forth as we engage in what should be some of honest discussion.
When it comes to player investment, I've made the case that inflexible DM'ing is deeply problematic and I believe that when that "they didn't solve my problem the way I wanted so they died" happens, it makes the game less fun for all involved. I've also said that I think death in an RPG should be used sparingly; we want players to invest in the game and the characters they've made. We don't want them to say "oh, I died? Hang on I have another bard here in my folder; I'll just play him for a while".
For comedic interlude I recommend this episode of Gamers 2:
Of particular note: The fact that the guy playing the bard brought 50 copies of his character so that when one died, he just pulled out another so much that there was a literal wall of dead bards the party could hide behind.
For my money, I want to AVOID that kind of "meh, who cares if my character is dead" and to do that, as I've cited some examples of my experience, I find it best to give the players a reason to invest, an reason to believe that they are a cut above usual mortals. As for the whole "You're uninvited" I believe that is my failure to communicate so I'll bear that. My point is that when someone is going out of their way to be insane or stupid and violating the agreements the rest of us at the table have made to play a relatively heroic game, I ask them if they're in the right game group. Someone who has the audacity to say "I don't care if i mouth off to the dragon. I know you'll give me at least 3 tries to avoid death" is just being a jerk about the entire narrative and I would rather not play with them.
Likewise, my experience is that many players (perhaps even a majority) find the game more fun when there is an active effort to coordinate a large narrative rather than just rote tactical combat and mini- moving. But that's just me and mine. And the DMG if you read it.
This whole thread reminds me of MMORPG arguments for and against Perma-death. In MMOs, “permadeath” means when your character dies, there is no resurrecting at a spawn point, no “corpse run” to get back your loot, and so on. Your character dies, permanently, and you are taken back to the char gen screen to make up a new one, level 1, and start over. In most MMOs, this isn’t the design — instead, you just respawn somewhere and at worst do a “corpse run.” Oh, and there are arguments within the no-perma-death side about that - should there be corpse runs or not.
The harsher side of both arguments always insists that by doing the gentler thing, the game is somehow ‘corrupted’ from some (imaginary) purity that would exist in both game design and player behavior if only the developers would make the penalties for failure more “real.” So the perma-death people argue that being able to respawn at all, cheapens death and “waters down” the game, leading to all manner of undesirable player behaviors. “All that griefing behavior you see, would not exist if, when I kill the offending player’s character, he never came back! But this jerk can just grief me indefinitely because even if I kill him, he just respawns!”
The same arguments are made by the corpse-run-crowd. Exact same: “All that griefing would not happen if only upon death, the player had to do a naked corpse run instead of just respawning with his equipment.”
The results of decades of MMORPG arguments about this and hundreds if not thousands of MMORPG designs for these kinds of games demonstrate a couple of things. The first is that, bad player behavior is never, ever, going to be solved by an in-game mechanic like severity of death penalty. There are just as many griefers, if not more, on perma-death servers as there are on servers that don’t even have corpse runs. Because trolls don’t change their behavior due to the rules — trolls are immune to the rules of whatever thing they are trolling. Ask the forum moderators here, and they’ll confirm it.
The second principle that we can learn from MMOs is that players, on the whole, don’t like heavy penalties. Now you can flame them all you want for being lame or wimpy or “not real gamers” or whatever, but the facts are indisputable: games with lighter death penalties have much more success and a longer dev cycle before closing down than games with harsher ones. Yes, yes, there are exceptions — there’s no need to cite them. I’m well aware. But there is a reason why, in the general scheme of things, perma-death games gave way to corpse-runs, and corpse runs gave way to “just respawn with all your stuff and maybe have to pay some gold to repair your gear.”
Now there are always going to be “hardcore gamers” who want the perma-death and that is what we are seeing here. And there is nothing wrong with hardcore gaming. Sometimes I am in the mood for it. But not only isn’t everyone going to be, but as the D&D audience expands more and more, you are almost guaranteed to see the same pattern of preferences, with the less hardcore gaming style supplanting the more hardcore bit by bit. (In fact I’d argue, we’ve already seen it happen).
As for the claim that the hardcore, “dice = death” way to play being the “pure” way to play D&D (which is what some folks on this thread are suggesting) — I’ve now read most of the DMG. The current edition of the rules do not agree with you. They spend quite some space describing largely social styles of game like solving mysteries in which the only rolls you might make for an entire session would perhaps be ability checks, and hardly any combat, if any, happens at all. To claim that these types of games, in which the character’s life may never be on the line, are somehow “not real D&D” when the very games type is suggested in one of the core books, is simply not defensible as a position. I am sure some people here would hate a mystery based game where there character is a detective and has to solve magical mysteries of murdered elves and dwarves, but if folks do, that does not mean they are somehow “not playing real D&D.”
And there is literally no correlation between people taking games seriously and how ‘hardcore’ the game is. Again, that’s a myth that the hardcore people constantly try to perpetuate because, for some reason, wanting to play hardcore also seems to go hand in hand, like a linked gene or something, with wanting to make everyone else play hardcore, even the vast majority of other gamers who don’t want to. If you look on this thread you’ll probably see that too... the non-hardcore people saying “hey, you do you, I’ll do me” and the hardcore folks saying “you are corrupting the game by not having harsh death conditions!” Yeah I’ve heard that song played before, and by a better minstrel, in my MMO days.
It is simply not true that harsh death conditions (aka. “Meat grinder” campaigns) lead to more serious gameplay. Seriousness depends entirely on player mentality and DM mentality. And on whether you are all in agreement about the level of seriousness you want in your game. That’s all OOC — and character death is IC. As I have tried to say many times, you cannot solve OOC problems with IC solutions.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I'd like to address the point of your post, Bio, and I hope everyone takes this in the spirit it was given.
Bringing in griefers into the conversation is understandable. I figure nearly everyone here understands the refence. Consider this; To many folks, Murder Hobos are griefers. Much of the conversation in this thread can be tied to the concept of that behavior. "I know some of the players in this world are role playing through the story the DM has created, but I'm bored by all that so I'm just going to start killing NPCs to get the information and stuff I want. Even if I wreck the story and the world the DM prepared, it will at least be fun to see how many developed characters he throws at me and how much loot I get."
And some other tables may have a completely different vibe. "OK, lets get ready for the undead horde on the other side of this door. Bard jumps in and knocks on the door and opens it up and says, 'Hey fellas. Glad to meet ya. Hey, we need to get to the summoning chamber up ahead. Can you tell me which corridor it's on? The left or the right?' Bard gets grabbed and killed and all the other undead win their initiative check …"
If we have a griefer at the table we simply need to talk to them and explain the concept and approach to the game this group enjoys. If they don't want to play along, we just need to ban them from our table (server). If the DM created a RP focused game, play the RP game or leave. Don't wreck it for everyone else. If the DM created a smash-and-grab story, play smash-and-grab. If you don't enjoy the sorts of campaigns the DM creates, get someone else to DM the next one. But don't wreck it for everyone else.
There's room in the hobby for all types of players and DMs. But there isn't much room at any table for folks that have widely different expectations. Also, before you tear down what the DM developed, try being a DM sometime. It will probably be a very humbling experience.
In this discussion people seem to think it is just D&D or games in general. But people mindset in general has shifted. Wanting faster rewards for doing less and with little to no repercussions to their bullshit. This overall mindset has caused a lot of degradation in many fields of life. Not just D&D and how "wussified" 5e has become. I still have to see 1 thing in life that became better by opening it up for a larger public that initially had nothing to do with it. Because all that happens is making something for the weakest links of a larger group. Lowering standards and quality in favor of popularity. Biowizard explained that in greater detail. That is what the world has become. Degrading standards and catering to the minorities/weakest and adjusting standards to them. Instead of uplifting them so they can grow, develop and get better. Thus as a whole increase the quality of things over time. Instead we choose degradation over evolution and progress.
However we're in luck that 5e is very modular so we can homebrew/convert old books and mechanics back into 5e. So that we can still have a proper old-school experience where story telling and death and exploration are actually present. Instead of being in the books as 1 of the 3 core principles that gets completely ignored by most, if not all. Padded with lame cringy theatrics parading as roleplay. Skipping travel and exploration in favor of dropping the PC's right in front of the dungeon or dramatic situation. And how can you have serious consequences if you constantly find ways to "keep the story going forward". Sure you can have the PC meet with their god and come to a deal of sorts in order to revive the PC. But doing that over and over just cheapens the deal and everything else. Why even play when knowing that you'll never die anyway. It makes no sense. It also nullifies any other type of conflict/consequence. Just as in real life... when you think you can't die people get reckless and start doing increasingly dumb shit. Same in the game where PC's already do stupid things to begin with. So why bother with the conflicts/consequences when the ultimate consequence isn't even present anymore. What does it matter if the king hates you. It's not like he can do anything about it other than create the illusion of threat.
In my current game the cleric did stuff. He died and went through Limbo to be judged. Got intervened by his god that took him to that realm for a chat. Cleric got revived with a new mission and redemption arc. However the next time he dies....he's gone. Gods don't keep interfering. You keep failing? Well then I'll send a more capable follower to deal with the situation.
Because 5e is so modular...and it allows easy access to newcomers. You'll see a lot of people doing whatever. Thinking they understand what they're doing when they don't. Having all sorts of problems in their games and at their tables. Which is where Lizard's explanation fits really well. Beginners should just stick to the rules laid out before them. Not just in D&D, but with everything in life. Once you've done that for a while the beginner gets to learn and understand how things work and fit together. From there you can then start to make proper homebrew adjustments to fit your table. Otherwise you'll just end up with a game held together by paper and straws like the OP is experiencing.
Also playing occasional 1 shots in different settings is a great way to try out new mechanics, ideas, techniques...before turning it into an actual homebrew for the main game. And occasional 1 shots keep things fresh and changes stuff up as well. Especially if you got players that keep making new PC concepts and wanting to play them.
Lots of good ideas and opinions so far. I’d add one other thing relating to the original post. You described consequences for actions, but all of the consequences were related to the world, not the character. They don’t know what you had planned and any changes to that will be largely unknown to them. This is important for continuity, but you have to remember the players often don’t know what you had in motion and how it changed based on their actions. To address this, you have a couple of options:
- more foreshadowing and expectation setting so they understand how things change based on their actions
- get them invested through the player and character’s involvement in the story and an expectation of what might be coming. This could be emergent or through backstory it could be from in or out of game world building.
- make consequences relevant to the character and player. Death is probably the most extreme, but imagine if you nerf a min/max character by taking a hand or eye (and suffering an associated penalty), cursing them, costing them their investment in that inn, losing their gear after an arrest, or ...
All I will say is this, directing at the OP. You have plenty of opinions about how to address your issue, but it is my opinion that without character death its not possible to have a good game of D&D. I have played in games where plot armor existed many times as this sort of thing is becoming more and more common as the instant gratification generation claims the game of D&D for itself, but I have never had a good experience. In fact I would say games with plot armor are terrible on their best day. Do yourself and your group a favor and don't do this
Which, ironically, literally no one in this conversation is advocating for.
As for the "extremes don't belong in this conversation"? That would be irony, part 2.
One thing I'd advise, what are you and the players looking for?
If you want a story with consequences and boundaries, then yes, death should definitely be a possible outcome of an extremely reckless action. The knowledge that any action can be taken without that ultimate consequence kind of removes a lot of tension from any situation.
If your players are there for escapism and just want to be an invincible hero for a few hours a week though? That might be something that you need to work around. If they want to keep playing a single character in particular, they might just enjoy being that person for a while.
It sounds like you have a rather story driven, consequence heavy, shifting world in mind and that is awesome. It kind of sounds like your players just want to roll some dice, get into some fights, and have a bit of fun for a few hours though. might be an idea to talk about that gap with them.
Either you believe character should sometimes die, or you believe they are protected by plot armor
I mean no offense here but, this is a false dichotomy. I don’t think anyone here is saying characters should be protected by plot armor all the time. (Or really ever — you’re the one who calls it plot armor.) What some of us are arguing is that there are times when the DM may, for story or other reasons, wish to overrule the dice. You appear to object to doing this ever, on some sort of rules purist grounds.
Except that the rules do not agree with you. In the DMG, under the section on the Role of the Dice, in the “Middle Ground” subsection, they literally remind you that the dice should not run the game — you (the DM) should. The DM has not only the right, but the responsibility, to overrule die rolls with good reason.
No one here is saying “all the time,” to overrule them, or even “frequently.” But when the situation calls for it, IMO, a good DM overrules the dice. Because the dice have no sense of story, plot, narrative building, or climax, but the DM does, or should. And again, though as I say this is “my opinion,” the DMG agrees with me.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Actually, I’m not even talking about overruling dice. DM doesn’t need to swap die rolls - they literally set up the world!
If the DM puts three goblins against a small low level group of PCs, pcs win easily, no chance of death. If there turn out to be six goblins, it’s a tough fight, some chance of pc death. If there’s enough goblins (10? 20?), certain death. Who decides how many goblins there are? DM does.
If the players have to jump a chasm, if it’s 5 feet wide, everybody makes it. If it’s 10 feet wide, some characters make it easily and others have to get help or be clever, but there’s probably no chance of falling in completely. At 15 feet wide there’s probably a chance of falling in for some characters, and by 25 feet an attempt to jump the chasm by anyone is doomed to fail. Who decides chasm width? DM.
Consequences for failure: what happens if a character falls in that chasm? Depending on the depth and what’s on the bottom and whether there’s anything on the sides to grab on to, falling in could mean anything from “certain death” to “bruises too minor to mention”. Who decides those things? DM does. There’s no “chasm depth table” they need to roll on.
Just how deadly you like your games to be is up to you! Following all the rules, you can pretty easily have a game where the players have no real chance of dying - just give them the three-goblin 10-feet-deep-chasm encounters. No need for “plot armor” or weird invulnerability. Or You can have a game where death happens every session - run the 10-goblin bottomless-chasm type encounters.
As deadly or as friendly as you like, no dice fudging needed.
How can you possibly know if there is a contradiction between what we say and what we do, as DMs, without sitting at the table with us? You literally cannot know in which situations I would overrule the dice and in which situations I would not. You have not sat at the table with me, and watched the situation unfold, to know how I would rule in any particular case.
To take your example — of a lava pit that is clearly fatal to jump across if you fall, and a player who, after I have clearly described how dangerous it is to jump, chooses to jump it anyway, then the roll would determine the fate of the character. I do not intervene to save players from their own foolhardiness. Same applies if a player forgets to check for traps in an area that common sense tells you would probably be trapped. They forgot, they take the consequences. I don’t think we actually disagree much about that at its core. Actions have consequences.
My point about the GM running the game and not the dice is, there are times when it’s not a result of villain power levels or player stupidity that a player dies, but due to sheer, unadulterated luck of the RNG (the die). And sometimes what the RNG tells you would be anticlamactic or in other ways harm the drama of the unfolding story. In such circumstances, I will overrule the dice, because the story and the drama of the scene take precedence over the RNG.
I mean take a look at FTL’s point — that as DM, you have decided that there are 3, or 6, or 9, or 100, goblins in this room. Are we going to let the dice determine how the dungeon is stocked, too? Is that the only way to “really do it right?” The DMG provides you with all the tables of RNG you need to literally randomly construct the entire dungeon map, its purpose, its inhabitants, etc. If I, as a DM, put in way less goblins than the DMG’s RNG tables call for, haven’t I done the same thing as “giving the players plot armor” with the die rolls? Do you object to purposely stocking the dungeon with easy things too, just because you want this to be a relaxed session after a very harrowing one the week before? And if you don’t object to me purposely stocking it with easy things, how is that conceptually different from me stocking it with random things, but then purposely “making some of the die rolls easier” instead? Aren’t they two sides of the same coin?
Take the lava pit. As FTL said, you decide if it’s a 1 foot, 5 foot, or 10 foot wide crevice. You decided when you made the dungeon that the DC of jumping this pit was 5, 10, 15, or 20. That happened first. So it’s not just that the dice decide, because on a 10 DC pit, an 11 succeeds. But on a 15 DC pit, it fails. Who set the DC of the pit? The DM. So if I, as a DM, say the pit DC is 8, let’s say, how is that any different from me setting the DC to 12, but then when the player rolls a 9, I fudge it and say “Oh you made it” when they really didn’t? (As long as the players don’t know I fudged it to them it is the same either way.)
Again, I generally let the dice fall where they fall... like 99% of the time or more. But when something happens that story-wise would be less dramatic or interesting or narratively satisfying because of a die roll, you’d better believe I will overrule it in that 1/100th of a time case. Because I don’t think the whole story of an entire campaign should come apart just because someone rolled a Nat 1.
Also, I do want to point out on a personal note that I have only been back to D&D at all for a couple of months, not even actually played yet (our session 0 got delayed by the holidays and some personal issues) and not actually DMed anything in probably 30 years. So saying “what I say and what I do” is not applicable. I have said much, but not done anything yet. ;)
Finally, I appreciate your willingness to agree to disagree politely. Not many people on the internet are willing to do that.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Just keep in mind that if you treat D&D as a theater show, your not doing the same thing the rest of us are which is playing D&D .. the game.
I would recommend keeping one's comments respective of their own lives/games. Please refrain from speaking for all when referring to how games are played or decisions made. There are a fantastical amount of ways I've witnessed D&D played, from the extreme DM vs Players "My goal is to kill them," to the COOP-DM "We're all just writing a fun story without the need for dice." When we start speaking for other people and/or their thoughts/beliefs, frustration and negativity results. Best to contribute your own and leave others to agree/disagree as they see fit.
I do understand what you mean by the correlation between what you prepare, the difficulty of the encounters/events and the potential for danger. In this I can only say that as a DM your creation shouldn't be based on "difficulty or challenge", but on a believable premise. So how many goblins are in a cave, well as a DM you ask, how many goblins could live in a cave, what are they doing their, who leads them, why do they lead them.. etc. You kind of have a responsibility to make it a place indifferent to who or why someone might visit there and give its occupants the third dimension of motivation so there is some logic to their existence in the world rather then simply being there for the characters to run into.
That is a valid way to play, but it is not what is recommended by the rules (DMG) which gives guidelines for how to make appropriate encounters based on the number of PCs and their level (I.e. based on the strength of the party.)
I guess I come down where Matt Colville does in his video on fudging rolls. I'm a huge Colville fan and he says it way better than I ever could.
For those who don't want to watch the whole video, I will summraize:
In this video, Colville talks about fudging die rolls to, in his words, prevent a weird edge case from determining the direction of an entire campaign.
In other words (my interpretation now), you don't want the trajectory of the campaign to be altered by some incredibly unlikely, one in a thousand occurrence that is against all the normal expectations of probability, and is going to take you where neither the players nor the DM want to go. We're all here to have fun, after all... not suffer miserably for weeks because "that's what the dice said." At its core the "dice are dictators" model potentially holds an entire game company of human beings hostage to a handful of plastic or wooden polyhedral objects. "The dice say it happens, so it has to happen, even if none of us to want it to happen." -- No one in my game group would have found this to be a constructive position to adopt. (Note, this is not just about death -- it can apply to lots of things.)
Back to the video, Colville discusses the oft-repeated refrain, "If you're going to fudge die rolls in some cases, why roll dice at all?" He argues that your job as a DM is to curate the experience for the players -- to make it feel realistic, dramatic, and fun. As long as the die rolls are doing that -- great! But if they stop doing that -- if they cause catastrophic failure, for example, on what should be a routine situation (and a failure which may seem very unrealistic to everyone at the table), then the dice may need to be overruled.
Matt points out in his video, and this is a key point -- that the reason we even bother to roll dice is because we imagine that leaving something up to the dice is equivalent to leaving it up to fate. But that is not true -- fate (he explains), is a dramatic entity that human beings have invented. The dice are random. They don't care about drama. But a DM should.
Players want to feel like, if their character dies or something else dramatic happens, it was the result of fate -- that's why they may ask to see the roll when the DM makes it behind the screen. This proves that the crit was "fated to happen."
But, Colville explains (correctly), the dice cannot provide fate. They can only provide randomness. And randomness is the opposite of drama.
Now, Matt goes on to say, if you want to fudge or not, it's up to you. It all depends on your style at the table. He admits that he has fudged rolls before. He gives a hypothetical example of a night when he just by luck could not roll above a 7 on d20. Every encounter would immediately became stupidly easy as not a single monster could ever hit. This destroys drama and ruins fun for players, so he will start fudging hits for the monsters. Another night, he (again, hypothetically) rolls 4 nat 20s in a row -- 4 crits. Well, this wasn't supposed to be such a hard encounter, so he'd fudge the last one or two -- to make the encounter as hard as he intended, rather than the bloodbath 4 crits in a row might cause.
I note here that by his own admission, Colville is notorious for being a "killer DM," so his players certainly don't think he is coddling them or providing them with plot armor. And in his campaign diaries he describes the deaths of more than one player character. When appropriate, players die. But he's not going to do a TPK by accident, either. Because that would be random, and not dramatic, and his goal is to create drama. Because in an RPG, drama is fun (at least, for most people).
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Adding on to Biowizard (as I will only rarely disagree with her) there is another factor of "blame".
We can say "it's what the dice said" but at the end of the day, we as DM's are at fault for everything outside of the PC's direct control. For example:
The campaign is in it's 8th week. Players are invested. The DM is invested. The party is at sea and a storm hits. The ship's navigator hasn't made it below decks. The party rogue, who has taken a shine to the navigator tries to save her. The dice fall badly and after a series of failed roles, a series of good choices ruined by bad dice, the rogue is washed overboard into the darkness. Now the player needs to make a new character (because they like the game group) and the party either has to go off on a side quest to recover and rez the body, or they simply go on without.
First, how did the Navigator end up exposed to the storm? Was it the dice? Did you really roll Wis and Dex checks to see if she failed to get below in time? Or did you, as DM, just put her there to create dramatic tension? Why would you do that? Did you set out to kill a PC by making a "trap"? I don't believe anyone here would do the work to use the dice to make all the choices of our NPC's. We as leaders in this game made the choice to create this scene. And as such we bear responsibility for what comes out of it, both in game and out of game.
So first there is the issue of "who's fault is it" when a player character dies? We can say it was just up to the dice but that's only part of the equation. Two more goblins in an encounter is OUR choice and as such it can swing the battle from "moderate" to "Total Party Wipe". We can say we don't care when someone slides their character sheet into a folder because that's it, that investment is gone. We can say it doesn't bother us when a player says "yeah, I'm gonna take a week off from the game; I'm not feeling it any more". We can blame them for not being tougher and for being a "crybaby" about "just a character". I'm not sure any of those attitudes make for good games among friends, though.
Then there's the issue of what we want our players to do as part of the game. Is DnD a tactical combat exercise interspersed with strategic dungeon crawling? Or is it a story based game where characters engage in a variety of encounters and opportunities? If you want to play the former, more power to you for having fun that way. I tend to lean towards the latter.
At the end of Gamers 2 (available in it's entirety on YouTube), a character "wastes a wish spell on an NPC". And her justification is "It's what my character would do". There is a serious fight over this issue and people storm away from the table in fury. The game is "Ruined!" they cry.
But for me, having a game where the players are invested deeply in the world, where the NPC's are ~people~ and the characters are part of that world is my goal as a DM. I want the story to be fun, dramatic, and real.
But what I really really don't want is players to say "don't bother, it's just an NPC". From my first example, I'd be a little heart broken if no one tried to save the navigator because "she's just an NPC, we can hire another one in the next port." If your players are identifying a fundamental difference between themselves and the NPCs then they're metagaming and they're breaking the world. Unless it's an evil party, they're saying some lives are more valuable, fundamentally, than others. I find that deeply problematic in my gaming.
he fudges dice on rare occasion and only when weird anomalous things happen. I have seen his streams, I can promise you that in the "jump over the lava pit" scenario he would have no problem letting a character plummet to their death if they failed the check.
And I have literally said exactly the same thing. I said I would have no problem letting someone fall to their death on a failed check to jump over the lava pit, since it is clear before the character took this (voluntary, I might add) action what the consequences could be. I said repeatedly that I let the dice determine things 99% of the time. I think most of the rest of us have said the same. We’re not saying “fudge a lot,” but rather, “fudge when the situation calls for it.” To me this is a very rare case. I almost never fudged rolls in practice, in any game. And I suspect if you were to go back and check, say if we had a recording of all my fudges in all game I’ve GMed over the years, you’d find about as many fudges to benefit the bad guys as the good. Never for me, as GM, to “beat” the players, but to do things like, maybe, keep a villain from being KOed this round so something cool can happen next round, or what have you. Again, drama of the scene > die rolls, but in most cases, the die rolls do not negate the drama so it is not a problem.
The question is do you save them, session after session from death, or do you at some point accept that characters are going to die by the dice.
I let them die. I do not save characters session after session from death. If that is going on, session after session, something is up. Either I have grossly mis-estimated the characters’ abilities, in which case I’d go back and re-tool the rest of the scenario/adventure, etc... or else they are being repeatedly stupid, in which case, they deserve what happens to them.
I’m not sure where the miscommunication has been here but I don’t I’ve said that I save PCs over and over again. I don’t think I’ve had it happen more than once or twice in all the adventures I’ve done. It’s just that sometimes I didn’t mean this encounter to be lethal this particular time, it being so is going to eff with the story and the drama and what is coming next, and I overrule the dice. And sometimes I meant this encounter to be way harder, but I forgot a character had an ability that will just negate the villain, and it’s going to ruin everyone’s fun if that happens, so I give the villain defense.... like the time I was using a Champions villain show was supposed to be powerful and awesome, and I forgot that one of the heroes had a powerful NND with “No Range Modifier” so the attack I thought would be “roll a 3 on 3d6 or miss” became like 15 or less, he hit, and it would have stunned the villain and allowed the heroes to just mop the floor with him... Yeah, I fudged that (in that case, the damage to the villain not the hit). But this occurs only in rare cases of RNG killing drama or story, not all the time. Or heck even a lot.
I also fudge sometimes with new players, BTW. When we had a new guy join our very veteran Champions group, I fudged attacks against him in the first battle to keep him alive and pretended that “random choices” of who to attack were going against other people and not him (not bothering to even notice the roll) — all so that his new character could be the “hero” of the battle. This made him feel awesome, no one else minded (they probably suspected, but if they did, they did not object) and it instantly made his character feel like a valuable new addition to the team. I try to keep in mind that the folks on the other side of the screen are human beings, with emotions and doubts and maybe some anxiety about fitting into the group, and if I judge that fudging a couple of rolls tonight will help them feel more comfortable, it happens. The people matter more than the dice. BTW, never felt the need to fudge for that player after that night — just wanted to make him feel a little special when coming into an awkward situation with a bunch of people who knew each other and him being the outsider. (And it worked, so I am glad I did it.)
As for balancing encounters being derived from video game philosophy, that is utter hogwash (again, with no offense intended). It is simply false on its face, since D&D modules going back into the 1970s were clearly balanced for a level range and group size. They said right on the cover, things like, “An adventure for parties of 4-6 characters of levels 3-6.” B2, Keep on the Borderlands, was levels 1-3, I believe. X1 and X2 were like 4-7. Secret of Bone Hill was 2-4, if I recall. Against the Giants, Vault of the Drow, Queen of the Demonweb Pits — all those classic D&D modules were in fact designed for parties of a particular both group size and level — and they told you what those were right on the cover. So let’s not blame “video games” for the concept of a level-balanced encounter. This concept has existed since the earliest days of D&D, when (and I am old enough to remember this, sadly), the only “video games” that existed were Pong (on console) and maybe Space Invaders and Missile Command (and then, only in an arcade).
Furthermore, sourcebooks for other RPGs that pre-date video game RPGs have extensive tables, and large amounts of space, devoted to how to design “balanced” battles that are an appropriate challenge for your characters. In Champions, the ideal battle ended with one or two of the heroes still conscious and everyone else (other heroes, villains, and agents) out cold (though usually, if the heroes did their job right, nobody dead and no innocent bystanders hurt). The Champions books devoted significant text to explaining how to do this as a GM. The goal is usually to provide an experience that is dramatic, challenging, and fun — and to do that, you need two sides that are, approximately, evenly matched. If one side is wildly overpowered vs. the other, then the battle is a walkover and not fun. Players will get bored if the enemies are too weak, and feel taken for a ride if the villains are too strong.
After all, it’s trivially easy as a GM to create an encounter that is too hard and “beat” the party — just throw a level 20 lich against level 1s. And it’s trivially easy to create an adventure that is too easy — just throw a group of 4 garden variety giant rats against a level 20 party. But to make an encounter that is just challenging enough that the players have to use all their resources and ingenuity to beat it, but they can beat it — that is a thing of beauty and it is what most GMs aspire to do for at least the signature battle of an evening. And the only way to do that is by balancing it for the party’s ability level.
But that is getting way off topic. The thread is about, should you kill the PCs... not encounter balance. Maybe if people want to discuss that we can make another thread.
PS - Sorry about the crappy quoting, I am on a tablet and the paste feature and quote feature do not want to cooperate.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
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There is a difference between adventure "balance" of then vs now. back then DM's were out to make highly logical dungeons that were basically DM vs Players. Encounters/situations required high preperation and thought etc. These days videogames are geared heavily in favor to the player. Mechanics are in play, that most don't seem to know/notice, but it is heavily favored to players ******* up. And that toxic mindset has invaded 5e as well. Where GM's these days are far more lenient and careful in creating encounters and how situations are played out.
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Yeah, when playing D&D 5e the rules make it clear that player death is quite rare.
In-combat, there's death saves and plenty of ways for your allies to heal you 1 hp before you roll three fails. Monsters basically never get save-or-die spells, at least not until you're quite high level. The recommended ways of creating encounters will rarely put your players in a situation where TPKs are possible. Out of combat, I believe the PHB and DMG do not provide any examples of a save-or-die situation, or at least I don't remember it when reading through.
Player death seems to be the sort of thing that's technically possible, but should probably be very rare unless either the players or the DM screw up really, really badly.
You can of course make an extra-deadly campaign where every encounter has a decent chance of killing the players entirely - that's also a legitimate way to play D&D 5e! - but it's definitely not required and doesn't seem to be either the intended way or, based on what I've seen, the most common way to play.
Please BigLizard! No-one has talked about any impenetrable plot armor. Quite the contrary (at least on my behalf). I've said I'm fine with players dying when I think that suits the overall story, and I have said that when I DON'T think it happens at a bad moment - I usually work around it.
And my games are not only about mortal danger. Yes, of course it's there, but there are several other dangers and consequences I also use. It works with my group of players. I want my players to risk their lives to try and save a poor fishmonger's son - I don't need to kill them to feel they failed. It's enough having them to go to the poor fishmonger and give her the news that her son is dead. When that hurts for the player - well that's when I feel like I'm succeeded.
Ludo ergo sum!
There are lot of issues at hand in this conversation which indeed has meandered over the pages as conversations do. Forums are usually not like a Quora article where we all just post an answer and then it gets upvoted. There is a back and forth as we engage in what should be some of honest discussion.
When it comes to player investment, I've made the case that inflexible DM'ing is deeply problematic and I believe that when that "they didn't solve my problem the way I wanted so they died" happens, it makes the game less fun for all involved. I've also said that I think death in an RPG should be used sparingly; we want players to invest in the game and the characters they've made. We don't want them to say "oh, I died? Hang on I have another bard here in my folder; I'll just play him for a while".
For comedic interlude I recommend this episode of Gamers 2:
Of particular note: The fact that the guy playing the bard brought 50 copies of his character so that when one died, he just pulled out another so much that there was a literal wall of dead bards the party could hide behind.
For my money, I want to AVOID that kind of "meh, who cares if my character is dead" and to do that, as I've cited some examples of my experience, I find it best to give the players a reason to invest, an reason to believe that they are a cut above usual mortals. As for the whole "You're uninvited" I believe that is my failure to communicate so I'll bear that. My point is that when someone is going out of their way to be insane or stupid and violating the agreements the rest of us at the table have made to play a relatively heroic game, I ask them if they're in the right game group. Someone who has the audacity to say "I don't care if i mouth off to the dragon. I know you'll give me at least 3 tries to avoid death" is just being a jerk about the entire narrative and I would rather not play with them.
Likewise, my experience is that many players (perhaps even a majority) find the game more fun when there is an active effort to coordinate a large narrative rather than just rote tactical combat and mini- moving. But that's just me and mine. And the DMG if you read it.
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This whole thread reminds me of MMORPG arguments for and against Perma-death. In MMOs, “permadeath” means when your character dies, there is no resurrecting at a spawn point, no “corpse run” to get back your loot, and so on. Your character dies, permanently, and you are taken back to the char gen screen to make up a new one, level 1, and start over. In most MMOs, this isn’t the design — instead, you just respawn somewhere and at worst do a “corpse run.” Oh, and there are arguments within the no-perma-death side about that - should there be corpse runs or not.
The harsher side of both arguments always insists that by doing the gentler thing, the game is somehow ‘corrupted’ from some (imaginary) purity that would exist in both game design and player behavior if only the developers would make the penalties for failure more “real.” So the perma-death people argue that being able to respawn at all, cheapens death and “waters down” the game, leading to all manner of undesirable player behaviors. “All that griefing behavior you see, would not exist if, when I kill the offending player’s character, he never came back! But this jerk can just grief me indefinitely because even if I kill him, he just respawns!”
The same arguments are made by the corpse-run-crowd. Exact same: “All that griefing would not happen if only upon death, the player had to do a naked corpse run instead of just respawning with his equipment.”
The results of decades of MMORPG arguments about this and hundreds if not thousands of MMORPG designs for these kinds of games demonstrate a couple of things. The first is that, bad player behavior is never, ever, going to be solved by an in-game mechanic like severity of death penalty. There are just as many griefers, if not more, on perma-death servers as there are on servers that don’t even have corpse runs. Because trolls don’t change their behavior due to the rules — trolls are immune to the rules of whatever thing they are trolling. Ask the forum moderators here, and they’ll confirm it.
The second principle that we can learn from MMOs is that players, on the whole, don’t like heavy penalties. Now you can flame them all you want for being lame or wimpy or “not real gamers” or whatever, but the facts are indisputable: games with lighter death penalties have much more success and a longer dev cycle before closing down than games with harsher ones. Yes, yes, there are exceptions — there’s no need to cite them. I’m well aware. But there is a reason why, in the general scheme of things, perma-death games gave way to corpse-runs, and corpse runs gave way to “just respawn with all your stuff and maybe have to pay some gold to repair your gear.”
Now there are always going to be “hardcore gamers” who want the perma-death and that is what we are seeing here. And there is nothing wrong with hardcore gaming. Sometimes I am in the mood for it. But not only isn’t everyone going to be, but as the D&D audience expands more and more, you are almost guaranteed to see the same pattern of preferences, with the less hardcore gaming style supplanting the more hardcore bit by bit. (In fact I’d argue, we’ve already seen it happen).
As for the claim that the hardcore, “dice = death” way to play being the “pure” way to play D&D (which is what some folks on this thread are suggesting) — I’ve now read most of the DMG. The current edition of the rules do not agree with you. They spend quite some space describing largely social styles of game like solving mysteries in which the only rolls you might make for an entire session would perhaps be ability checks, and hardly any combat, if any, happens at all. To claim that these types of games, in which the character’s life may never be on the line, are somehow “not real D&D” when the very games type is suggested in one of the core books, is simply not defensible as a position. I am sure some people here would hate a mystery based game where there character is a detective and has to solve magical mysteries of murdered elves and dwarves, but if folks do, that does not mean they are somehow “not playing real D&D.”
And there is literally no correlation between people taking games seriously and how ‘hardcore’ the game is. Again, that’s a myth that the hardcore people constantly try to perpetuate because, for some reason, wanting to play hardcore also seems to go hand in hand, like a linked gene or something, with wanting to make everyone else play hardcore, even the vast majority of other gamers who don’t want to. If you look on this thread you’ll probably see that too... the non-hardcore people saying “hey, you do you, I’ll do me” and the hardcore folks saying “you are corrupting the game by not having harsh death conditions!” Yeah I’ve heard that song played before, and by a better minstrel, in my MMO days.
It is simply not true that harsh death conditions (aka. “Meat grinder” campaigns) lead to more serious gameplay. Seriousness depends entirely on player mentality and DM mentality. And on whether you are all in agreement about the level of seriousness you want in your game. That’s all OOC — and character death is IC. As I have tried to say many times, you cannot solve OOC problems with IC solutions.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I'd like to address the point of your post, Bio, and I hope everyone takes this in the spirit it was given.
Bringing in griefers into the conversation is understandable. I figure nearly everyone here understands the refence. Consider this; To many folks, Murder Hobos are griefers. Much of the conversation in this thread can be tied to the concept of that behavior. "I know some of the players in this world are role playing through the story the DM has created, but I'm bored by all that so I'm just going to start killing NPCs to get the information and stuff I want. Even if I wreck the story and the world the DM prepared, it will at least be fun to see how many developed characters he throws at me and how much loot I get."
And some other tables may have a completely different vibe. "OK, lets get ready for the undead horde on the other side of this door. Bard jumps in and knocks on the door and opens it up and says, 'Hey fellas. Glad to meet ya. Hey, we need to get to the summoning chamber up ahead. Can you tell me which corridor it's on? The left or the right?' Bard gets grabbed and killed and all the other undead win their initiative check …"
If we have a griefer at the table we simply need to talk to them and explain the concept and approach to the game this group enjoys. If they don't want to play along, we just need to ban them from our table (server). If the DM created a RP focused game, play the RP game or leave. Don't wreck it for everyone else. If the DM created a smash-and-grab story, play smash-and-grab. If you don't enjoy the sorts of campaigns the DM creates, get someone else to DM the next one. But don't wreck it for everyone else.
There's room in the hobby for all types of players and DMs. But there isn't much room at any table for folks that have widely different expectations. Also, before you tear down what the DM developed, try being a DM sometime. It will probably be a very humbling experience.
I mostly agree with Lizard.
In this discussion people seem to think it is just D&D or games in general. But people mindset in general has shifted. Wanting faster rewards for doing less and with little to no repercussions to their bullshit. This overall mindset has caused a lot of degradation in many fields of life. Not just D&D and how "wussified" 5e has become. I still have to see 1 thing in life that became better by opening it up for a larger public that initially had nothing to do with it. Because all that happens is making something for the weakest links of a larger group. Lowering standards and quality in favor of popularity. Biowizard explained that in greater detail. That is what the world has become. Degrading standards and catering to the minorities/weakest and adjusting standards to them. Instead of uplifting them so they can grow, develop and get better. Thus as a whole increase the quality of things over time. Instead we choose degradation over evolution and progress.
However we're in luck that 5e is very modular so we can homebrew/convert old books and mechanics back into 5e. So that we can still have a proper old-school experience where story telling and death and exploration are actually present. Instead of being in the books as 1 of the 3 core principles that gets completely ignored by most, if not all. Padded with lame cringy theatrics parading as roleplay. Skipping travel and exploration in favor of dropping the PC's right in front of the dungeon or dramatic situation. And how can you have serious consequences if you constantly find ways to "keep the story going forward". Sure you can have the PC meet with their god and come to a deal of sorts in order to revive the PC. But doing that over and over just cheapens the deal and everything else. Why even play when knowing that you'll never die anyway. It makes no sense. It also nullifies any other type of conflict/consequence. Just as in real life... when you think you can't die people get reckless and start doing increasingly dumb shit. Same in the game where PC's already do stupid things to begin with. So why bother with the conflicts/consequences when the ultimate consequence isn't even present anymore. What does it matter if the king hates you. It's not like he can do anything about it other than create the illusion of threat.
In my current game the cleric did stuff. He died and went through Limbo to be judged. Got intervened by his god that took him to that realm for a chat. Cleric got revived with a new mission and redemption arc. However the next time he dies....he's gone. Gods don't keep interfering. You keep failing? Well then I'll send a more capable follower to deal with the situation.
Because 5e is so modular...and it allows easy access to newcomers. You'll see a lot of people doing whatever. Thinking they understand what they're doing when they don't. Having all sorts of problems in their games and at their tables. Which is where Lizard's explanation fits really well. Beginners should just stick to the rules laid out before them. Not just in D&D, but with everything in life. Once you've done that for a while the beginner gets to learn and understand how things work and fit together. From there you can then start to make proper homebrew adjustments to fit your table. Otherwise you'll just end up with a game held together by paper and straws like the OP is experiencing.
Also playing occasional 1 shots in different settings is a great way to try out new mechanics, ideas, techniques...before turning it into an actual homebrew for the main game. And occasional 1 shots keep things fresh and changes stuff up as well. Especially if you got players that keep making new PC concepts and wanting to play them.
Lots of good ideas and opinions so far. I’d add one other thing relating to the original post. You described consequences for actions, but all of the consequences were related to the world, not the character. They don’t know what you had planned and any changes to that will be largely unknown to them. This is important for continuity, but you have to remember the players often don’t know what you had in motion and how it changed based on their actions. To address this, you have a couple of options:
- more foreshadowing and expectation setting so they understand how things change based on their actions
- get them invested through the player and character’s involvement in the story and an expectation of what might be coming. This could be emergent or through backstory it could be from in or out of game world building.
- make consequences relevant to the character and player. Death is probably the most extreme, but imagine if you nerf a min/max character by taking a hand or eye (and suffering an associated penalty), cursing them, costing them their investment in that inn, losing their gear after an arrest, or ...
Which, ironically, literally no one in this conversation is advocating for.
As for the "extremes don't belong in this conversation"? That would be irony, part 2.
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One thing I'd advise, what are you and the players looking for?
If you want a story with consequences and boundaries, then yes, death should definitely be a possible outcome of an extremely reckless action. The knowledge that any action can be taken without that ultimate consequence kind of removes a lot of tension from any situation.
If your players are there for escapism and just want to be an invincible hero for a few hours a week though? That might be something that you need to work around. If they want to keep playing a single character in particular, they might just enjoy being that person for a while.
It sounds like you have a rather story driven, consequence heavy, shifting world in mind and that is awesome. It kind of sounds like your players just want to roll some dice, get into some fights, and have a bit of fun for a few hours though. might be an idea to talk about that gap with them.
No, that's not true. You're deliberately pretending those are the only two sides to make people who disagree with you look ridiculous.
I don't believe characters should never die. I also don't agree with you.
I mean no offense here but, this is a false dichotomy. I don’t think anyone here is saying characters should be protected by plot armor all the time. (Or really ever — you’re the one who calls it plot armor.) What some of us are arguing is that there are times when the DM may, for story or other reasons, wish to overrule the dice. You appear to object to doing this ever, on some sort of rules purist grounds.
Except that the rules do not agree with you. In the DMG, under the section on the Role of the Dice, in the “Middle Ground” subsection, they literally remind you that the dice should not run the game — you (the DM) should. The DM has not only the right, but the responsibility, to overrule die rolls with good reason.
No one here is saying “all the time,” to overrule them, or even “frequently.” But when the situation calls for it, IMO, a good DM overrules the dice. Because the dice have no sense of story, plot, narrative building, or climax, but the DM does, or should. And again, though as I say this is “my opinion,” the DMG agrees with me.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
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Actually, I’m not even talking about overruling dice. DM doesn’t need to swap die rolls - they literally set up the world!
If the DM puts three goblins against a small low level group of PCs, pcs win easily, no chance of death. If there turn out to be six goblins, it’s a tough fight, some chance of pc death. If there’s enough goblins (10? 20?), certain death. Who decides how many goblins there are? DM does.
If the players have to jump a chasm, if it’s 5 feet wide, everybody makes it. If it’s 10 feet wide, some characters make it easily and others have to get help or be clever, but there’s probably no chance of falling in completely. At 15 feet wide there’s probably a chance of falling in for some characters, and by 25 feet an attempt to jump the chasm by anyone is doomed to fail. Who decides chasm width? DM.
Consequences for failure: what happens if a character falls in that chasm? Depending on the depth and what’s on the bottom and whether there’s anything on the sides to grab on to, falling in could mean anything from “certain death” to “bruises too minor to mention”. Who decides those things? DM does. There’s no “chasm depth table” they need to roll on.
Just how deadly you like your games to be is up to you! Following all the rules, you can pretty easily have a game where the players have no real chance of dying - just give them the three-goblin 10-feet-deep-chasm encounters. No need for “plot armor” or weird invulnerability. Or You can have a game where death happens every session - run the 10-goblin bottomless-chasm type encounters.
As deadly or as friendly as you like, no dice fudging needed.
How can you possibly know if there is a contradiction between what we say and what we do, as DMs, without sitting at the table with us? You literally cannot know in which situations I would overrule the dice and in which situations I would not. You have not sat at the table with me, and watched the situation unfold, to know how I would rule in any particular case.
To take your example — of a lava pit that is clearly fatal to jump across if you fall, and a player who, after I have clearly described how dangerous it is to jump, chooses to jump it anyway, then the roll would determine the fate of the character. I do not intervene to save players from their own foolhardiness. Same applies if a player forgets to check for traps in an area that common sense tells you would probably be trapped. They forgot, they take the consequences. I don’t think we actually disagree much about that at its core. Actions have consequences.
My point about the GM running the game and not the dice is, there are times when it’s not a result of villain power levels or player stupidity that a player dies, but due to sheer, unadulterated luck of the RNG (the die). And sometimes what the RNG tells you would be anticlamactic or in other ways harm the drama of the unfolding story. In such circumstances, I will overrule the dice, because the story and the drama of the scene take precedence over the RNG.
I mean take a look at FTL’s point — that as DM, you have decided that there are 3, or 6, or 9, or 100, goblins in this room. Are we going to let the dice determine how the dungeon is stocked, too? Is that the only way to “really do it right?” The DMG provides you with all the tables of RNG you need to literally randomly construct the entire dungeon map, its purpose, its inhabitants, etc. If I, as a DM, put in way less goblins than the DMG’s RNG tables call for, haven’t I done the same thing as “giving the players plot armor” with the die rolls? Do you object to purposely stocking the dungeon with easy things too, just because you want this to be a relaxed session after a very harrowing one the week before? And if you don’t object to me purposely stocking it with easy things, how is that conceptually different from me stocking it with random things, but then purposely “making some of the die rolls easier” instead? Aren’t they two sides of the same coin?
Take the lava pit. As FTL said, you decide if it’s a 1 foot, 5 foot, or 10 foot wide crevice. You decided when you made the dungeon that the DC of jumping this pit was 5, 10, 15, or 20. That happened first. So it’s not just that the dice decide, because on a 10 DC pit, an 11 succeeds. But on a 15 DC pit, it fails. Who set the DC of the pit? The DM. So if I, as a DM, say the pit DC is 8, let’s say, how is that any different from me setting the DC to 12, but then when the player rolls a 9, I fudge it and say “Oh you made it” when they really didn’t? (As long as the players don’t know I fudged it to them it is the same either way.)
Again, I generally let the dice fall where they fall... like 99% of the time or more. But when something happens that story-wise would be less dramatic or interesting or narratively satisfying because of a die roll, you’d better believe I will overrule it in that 1/100th of a time case. Because I don’t think the whole story of an entire campaign should come apart just because someone rolled a Nat 1.
Also, I do want to point out on a personal note that I have only been back to D&D at all for a couple of months, not even actually played yet (our session 0 got delayed by the holidays and some personal issues) and not actually DMed anything in probably 30 years. So saying “what I say and what I do” is not applicable. I have said much, but not done anything yet. ;)
Finally, I appreciate your willingness to agree to disagree politely. Not many people on the internet are willing to do that.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I would recommend keeping one's comments respective of their own lives/games. Please refrain from speaking for all when referring to how games are played or decisions made. There are a fantastical amount of ways I've witnessed D&D played, from the extreme DM vs Players "My goal is to kill them," to the COOP-DM "We're all just writing a fun story without the need for dice." When we start speaking for other people and/or their thoughts/beliefs, frustration and negativity results. Best to contribute your own and leave others to agree/disagree as they see fit.
A DM who never puts something that could insta-kill PCs, it's not a good DM.
And that includes the fact a player who wears heavy armor have to swim to save his life against the attack of a KRAKKEN.
My Ready-to-rock&roll chars:
Dertinus Tristany // Amilcar Barca // Vicenç Sacrarius // Oriol Deulofeu // Grovtuk
That is a valid way to play, but it is not what is recommended by the rules (DMG) which gives guidelines for how to make appropriate encounters based on the number of PCs and their level (I.e. based on the strength of the party.)
I guess I come down where Matt Colville does in his video on fudging rolls. I'm a huge Colville fan and he says it way better than I ever could.
For those who don't want to watch the whole video, I will summraize:
In this video, Colville talks about fudging die rolls to, in his words, prevent a weird edge case from determining the direction of an entire campaign.
In other words (my interpretation now), you don't want the trajectory of the campaign to be altered by some incredibly unlikely, one in a thousand occurrence that is against all the normal expectations of probability, and is going to take you where neither the players nor the DM want to go. We're all here to have fun, after all... not suffer miserably for weeks because "that's what the dice said." At its core the "dice are dictators" model potentially holds an entire game company of human beings hostage to a handful of plastic or wooden polyhedral objects. "The dice say it happens, so it has to happen, even if none of us to want it to happen." -- No one in my game group would have found this to be a constructive position to adopt. (Note, this is not just about death -- it can apply to lots of things.)
Back to the video, Colville discusses the oft-repeated refrain, "If you're going to fudge die rolls in some cases, why roll dice at all?" He argues that your job as a DM is to curate the experience for the players -- to make it feel realistic, dramatic, and fun. As long as the die rolls are doing that -- great! But if they stop doing that -- if they cause catastrophic failure, for example, on what should be a routine situation (and a failure which may seem very unrealistic to everyone at the table), then the dice may need to be overruled.
Matt points out in his video, and this is a key point -- that the reason we even bother to roll dice is because we imagine that leaving something up to the dice is equivalent to leaving it up to fate. But that is not true -- fate (he explains), is a dramatic entity that human beings have invented. The dice are random. They don't care about drama. But a DM should.
Players want to feel like, if their character dies or something else dramatic happens, it was the result of fate -- that's why they may ask to see the roll when the DM makes it behind the screen. This proves that the crit was "fated to happen."
But, Colville explains (correctly), the dice cannot provide fate. They can only provide randomness. And randomness is the opposite of drama.
Now, Matt goes on to say, if you want to fudge or not, it's up to you. It all depends on your style at the table. He admits that he has fudged rolls before. He gives a hypothetical example of a night when he just by luck could not roll above a 7 on d20. Every encounter would immediately became stupidly easy as not a single monster could ever hit. This destroys drama and ruins fun for players, so he will start fudging hits for the monsters. Another night, he (again, hypothetically) rolls 4 nat 20s in a row -- 4 crits. Well, this wasn't supposed to be such a hard encounter, so he'd fudge the last one or two -- to make the encounter as hard as he intended, rather than the bloodbath 4 crits in a row might cause.
I note here that by his own admission, Colville is notorious for being a "killer DM," so his players certainly don't think he is coddling them or providing them with plot armor. And in his campaign diaries he describes the deaths of more than one player character. When appropriate, players die. But he's not going to do a TPK by accident, either. Because that would be random, and not dramatic, and his goal is to create drama. Because in an RPG, drama is fun (at least, for most people).
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Adding on to Biowizard (as I will only rarely disagree with her) there is another factor of "blame".
We can say "it's what the dice said" but at the end of the day, we as DM's are at fault for everything outside of the PC's direct control. For example:
The campaign is in it's 8th week. Players are invested. The DM is invested. The party is at sea and a storm hits. The ship's navigator hasn't made it below decks. The party rogue, who has taken a shine to the navigator tries to save her. The dice fall badly and after a series of failed roles, a series of good choices ruined by bad dice, the rogue is washed overboard into the darkness. Now the player needs to make a new character (because they like the game group) and the party either has to go off on a side quest to recover and rez the body, or they simply go on without.
First, how did the Navigator end up exposed to the storm? Was it the dice? Did you really roll Wis and Dex checks to see if she failed to get below in time? Or did you, as DM, just put her there to create dramatic tension? Why would you do that? Did you set out to kill a PC by making a "trap"? I don't believe anyone here would do the work to use the dice to make all the choices of our NPC's. We as leaders in this game made the choice to create this scene. And as such we bear responsibility for what comes out of it, both in game and out of game.
So first there is the issue of "who's fault is it" when a player character dies? We can say it was just up to the dice but that's only part of the equation. Two more goblins in an encounter is OUR choice and as such it can swing the battle from "moderate" to "Total Party Wipe". We can say we don't care when someone slides their character sheet into a folder because that's it, that investment is gone. We can say it doesn't bother us when a player says "yeah, I'm gonna take a week off from the game; I'm not feeling it any more". We can blame them for not being tougher and for being a "crybaby" about "just a character". I'm not sure any of those attitudes make for good games among friends, though.
Then there's the issue of what we want our players to do as part of the game. Is DnD a tactical combat exercise interspersed with strategic dungeon crawling? Or is it a story based game where characters engage in a variety of encounters and opportunities? If you want to play the former, more power to you for having fun that way. I tend to lean towards the latter.
At the end of Gamers 2 (available in it's entirety on YouTube), a character "wastes a wish spell on an NPC". And her justification is "It's what my character would do". There is a serious fight over this issue and people storm away from the table in fury. The game is "Ruined!" they cry.
But for me, having a game where the players are invested deeply in the world, where the NPC's are ~people~ and the characters are part of that world is my goal as a DM. I want the story to be fun, dramatic, and real.
But what I really really don't want is players to say "don't bother, it's just an NPC". From my first example, I'd be a little heart broken if no one tried to save the navigator because "she's just an NPC, we can hire another one in the next port." If your players are identifying a fundamental difference between themselves and the NPCs then they're metagaming and they're breaking the world. Unless it's an evil party, they're saying some lives are more valuable, fundamentally, than others. I find that deeply problematic in my gaming.
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And I have literally said exactly the same thing. I said I would have no problem letting someone fall to their death on a failed check to jump over the lava pit, since it is clear before the character took this (voluntary, I might add) action what the consequences could be. I said repeatedly that I let the dice determine things 99% of the time. I think most of the rest of us have said the same. We’re not saying “fudge a lot,” but rather, “fudge when the situation calls for it.” To me this is a very rare case. I almost never fudged rolls in practice, in any game. And I suspect if you were to go back and check, say if we had a recording of all my fudges in all game I’ve GMed over the years, you’d find about as many fudges to benefit the bad guys as the good. Never for me, as GM, to “beat” the players, but to do things like, maybe, keep a villain from being KOed this round so something cool can happen next round, or what have you. Again, drama of the scene > die rolls, but in most cases, the die rolls do not negate the drama so it is not a problem.
I let them die. I do not save characters session after session from death. If that is going on, session after session, something is up. Either I have grossly mis-estimated the characters’ abilities, in which case I’d go back and re-tool the rest of the scenario/adventure, etc... or else they are being repeatedly stupid, in which case, they deserve what happens to them.
I’m not sure where the miscommunication has been here but I don’t I’ve said that I save PCs over and over again. I don’t think I’ve had it happen more than once or twice in all the adventures I’ve done. It’s just that sometimes I didn’t mean this encounter to be lethal this particular time, it being so is going to eff with the story and the drama and what is coming next, and I overrule the dice. And sometimes I meant this encounter to be way harder, but I forgot a character had an ability that will just negate the villain, and it’s going to ruin everyone’s fun if that happens, so I give the villain defense.... like the time I was using a Champions villain show was supposed to be powerful and awesome, and I forgot that one of the heroes had a powerful NND with “No Range Modifier” so the attack I thought would be “roll a 3 on 3d6 or miss” became like 15 or less, he hit, and it would have stunned the villain and allowed the heroes to just mop the floor with him... Yeah, I fudged that (in that case, the damage to the villain not the hit). But this occurs only in rare cases of RNG killing drama or story, not all the time. Or heck even a lot.
I also fudge sometimes with new players, BTW. When we had a new guy join our very veteran Champions group, I fudged attacks against him in the first battle to keep him alive and pretended that “random choices” of who to attack were going against other people and not him (not bothering to even notice the roll) — all so that his new character could be the “hero” of the battle. This made him feel awesome, no one else minded (they probably suspected, but if they did, they did not object) and it instantly made his character feel like a valuable new addition to the team. I try to keep in mind that the folks on the other side of the screen are human beings, with emotions and doubts and maybe some anxiety about fitting into the group, and if I judge that fudging a couple of rolls tonight will help them feel more comfortable, it happens. The people matter more than the dice. BTW, never felt the need to fudge for that player after that night — just wanted to make him feel a little special when coming into an awkward situation with a bunch of people who knew each other and him being the outsider. (And it worked, so I am glad I did it.)
As for balancing encounters being derived from video game philosophy, that is utter hogwash (again, with no offense intended). It is simply false on its face, since D&D modules going back into the 1970s were clearly balanced for a level range and group size. They said right on the cover, things like, “An adventure for parties of 4-6 characters of levels 3-6.” B2, Keep on the Borderlands, was levels 1-3, I believe. X1 and X2 were like 4-7. Secret of Bone Hill was 2-4, if I recall. Against the Giants, Vault of the Drow, Queen of the Demonweb Pits — all those classic D&D modules were in fact designed for parties of a particular both group size and level — and they told you what those were right on the cover. So let’s not blame “video games” for the concept of a level-balanced encounter. This concept has existed since the earliest days of D&D, when (and I am old enough to remember this, sadly), the only “video games” that existed were Pong (on console) and maybe Space Invaders and Missile Command (and then, only in an arcade).
Furthermore, sourcebooks for other RPGs that pre-date video game RPGs have extensive tables, and large amounts of space, devoted to how to design “balanced” battles that are an appropriate challenge for your characters. In Champions, the ideal battle ended with one or two of the heroes still conscious and everyone else (other heroes, villains, and agents) out cold (though usually, if the heroes did their job right, nobody dead and no innocent bystanders hurt). The Champions books devoted significant text to explaining how to do this as a GM. The goal is usually to provide an experience that is dramatic, challenging, and fun — and to do that, you need two sides that are, approximately, evenly matched. If one side is wildly overpowered vs. the other, then the battle is a walkover and not fun. Players will get bored if the enemies are too weak, and feel taken for a ride if the villains are too strong.
After all, it’s trivially easy as a GM to create an encounter that is too hard and “beat” the party — just throw a level 20 lich against level 1s. And it’s trivially easy to create an adventure that is too easy — just throw a group of 4 garden variety giant rats against a level 20 party. But to make an encounter that is just challenging enough that the players have to use all their resources and ingenuity to beat it, but they can beat it — that is a thing of beauty and it is what most GMs aspire to do for at least the signature battle of an evening. And the only way to do that is by balancing it for the party’s ability level.
But that is getting way off topic. The thread is about, should you kill the PCs... not encounter balance. Maybe if people want to discuss that we can make another thread.
PS - Sorry about the crappy quoting, I am on a tablet and the paste feature and quote feature do not want to cooperate.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
There is a difference between adventure "balance" of then vs now. back then DM's were out to make highly logical dungeons that were basically DM vs Players. Encounters/situations required high preperation and thought etc. These days videogames are geared heavily in favor to the player. Mechanics are in play, that most don't seem to know/notice, but it is heavily favored to players ******* up. And that toxic mindset has invaded 5e as well. Where GM's these days are far more lenient and careful in creating encounters and how situations are played out.