How often should PCs die?

How often should PCs die?

>Playing a 5e group on R20
>we've had 1 tpk in the 2ND session which the DM avoided by having us captured
>1 not-quite-a-TPK-because-we-all-disengaged-and-ran-away in the fourth session.
>This feels like too many for me.
>When were getting absolutely pounded in the fourth one the DM decided to pile more mobs on us, and then said it was in the interests of "realism".
>We are going to die a LOT at this rate.

My view: DMs should try wherever possible to keep PCs alive even if it means fudging and secret roles, it's important that the party feel they are in genuine peril but games are a million times more fun if PCs have time to grow.

I highly doubt anyone is playing D&D for realism.

>5e

Is your GM out to get you?

I´m the GM for 5 players who don´t really give a fuck about efficiency. Everything I throw at them is at least what would be considered a dangerous or lethal challenge, or else they just get rid of it in a moment.

It is difficult to balance encounters, and much more difficult when you players are low lvl.

Depends on expectations and flavor of the game. Did you approach these situations idiotically? Then perhaps death is what you deserved.
Is the game supposed to have a more realistic flavor? Then running away should be a viable option, and not something to regret.

I don't know. It sounds like a lot, and I probably would have spared you extra mobs if you were already hard-pressed, but it's impossible to know these things for people who weren't there.

I'd advise you to have a frank conversation with your DM about expectations for the campaign. But don't be self-righteous about this.

They should Die when they make fatal mistakes or suffer from a lethal outburst of bad luck.

What if it happens in just a couple of turns?

>How often should PCs die?
As often as the PCs' actions warrant it.
The end.

You have provided zero details about the scenarios that resulted in capture or running away.
If you were 4 guys taking on a bandit stronghold or staging a frontal assault on a castle, that is an expected result.

>>When were getting absolutely pounded in the fourth one the DM decided to pile more mobs on us, and then said it was in the interests of "realism".
This sounds like an unreasonable DM
see >I highly doubt anyone is playing D&D for realism.
But it could just be you skewing things.

>My view: DMs should try wherever possible to keep PCs alive even if it means fudging and secret roles, it's important that the party feel they are in genuine peril but games are a million times more fun if PCs have time to grow.
It depends.
If everyone has worked hard integrating their characters and backstories into the main plot of a long campaign, then that totally makes sense.
If you all are just rolling random and playing by ear, then no.
The important thing is that all the players and the GM get on the same page.

I play OSR.
PC deaths are very common until you hit level 3.

There was a thread that went to 500 posts about whether an average pc should be able to kill king in his throne room.
It boiled down to two differing philosophies:
1.) The players are mortal protagonists and can fail and die by their own choices and actions or through significantly bad luck.

2.) The PCs are essentially General Zod strolling through the setting with no obstacle they cannot surmount to do whatever they want to at the time.

>My view: DMs should try wherever possible to keep PCs alive even if it means fudging and secret roles
It seems OP is in camp 2 while their GM may be in camp 1.

Scenario A was the party travelling to rest away from the cave entrance after quite a bloody fight and the DM deeming us not as having travelled far enough and having us ambushed by wolves and goblins before we have a chance to long rest, so all spells and health was still out.

Scenario B we busted out of the cell and were attacked by a mini-boss and some more goblins. Nobody was assaulting Castle Doom armed only with thumbtacks, they were both fairly normal early-level encounters.

No not at all she's a good DM I'm just a bit worried about the difficulty scaling, these were two very early encounters - our third and fourth of the game in fact. The first one was very hard because we weren't rested and all spells had been used, the second because we'd been stripped of all our possessions (which included spell focuses for spellcasters)

I lean more towards the first than the second but I think that the only goal of D&D is to be fun and shifting away from realism and mortality ever so slightly makes that happen.

>How often should PCs die?
Only once.
Fuck undead.

I think it's fair to say that a level 6 PC could kill a king in his throne room given the right circumstances.
>First the King can't be a high level.
>Second it should be a low magic setting so there aren't any magic safeguards to keep the King safe.
>Third the PC has to have gained a fair amount of trust from the King and his guards.
>Fourth the PC should not expect to live for long after killing the King.

>How often should PCs die?
Every 3 hours.

>How often should PCs die?
Whenever is best for the narrative.

Okay, from this
>No not at all she's a good DM I'm just a bit worried about the difficulty scaling
And this, I'd say she just set up a leveled scenario and stuck to it even after you after guys took actions that weakened you, thereby changing the level of the encounter.
Once you guys escaped and didn't immediately find your gear, you should've just ran then.
You guys need to stop thinking like players and start thinking "realistically" like people actually in that situation:
>If you just fought a tough battle, are weak and exhausted, and know there are hostile enemies in the area, how far away is far away enough?
As far as possible. Plus you should sleep in shifts.
>If you are beaten, wounded, weaponless, and just escaped in an enemy cave, do you fight or run home to regroup, reequip, and rest?
You save your own asses first unless babies are about to be eaten.

Git gud.
Your GM just isn't pulling any punches.
I like her.

But if she gets carried away I got story about a halfling in a wall she should read.

If the session ends and a character is still alive, I drop some elephants on him. Never leave survivors, your players won't respect you if they know their characters have a chance of winning.

We did sleep in shifts, it's why we didn't get murdered in our beds, we just lost the subsequent encounter. Hard to say how far is too far really, but I think patrols would be small to cover a wider area and more easily dispatched.

We were given a couple of weapons for free and there wasn't a way out of the cave without avoiding fights completely. And we did run eventually, once it became clear it was too much, which was precisely the correct time to run.

We were thinking "realistically" or at least in character - the mini boss was holding the barbarian-type's weapon which he is obsessively dedicated to, so he tried to get it back. It all snowballed from there.

Alright, git gud, fine, I was questioning if that's the best way to run a game if it results in too many PC deaths.

>I was questioning if that's the best way to run a game if it results in too many PC deaths
There is nothing really wrong with pc deaths, and your idea of "too many" is rooted in the mistaken idea that a pc has a right to live.
Look, user, the point of a game is to challenge the player character as they pursue an objective. Most people don't actually have the guts to kill pcs, especially in groups.
What this experience should be showing you is BE SMART. The GM will not pull back because you had a couple of bad rolls. You will get rolled if you act stupid and assume you have the PC Power some GMs give in game.
And you have now learned Rule #10: Running is ALWAYS an option. You can't win every battle, nor will you.

don't go out of your way to get them killed
insta-kill traps, CR20 rabbits, "keep tapping the floor with your 10 foot pole or lose your foot", and so on are not fun (unless that was the point) do not include them

also, consider the disposition of the players, some people treat death as a chance to roll new characters, while others treat them like memnbers of the family. try not to show favorites, play the dice as they land, and if that kills the special snowflake so be it, but keep in mind that some people do not appreciate their character dying because "it is in the the nature of goblins to gang up on the rouge"

as the DM, you have to make sure most everyone has fun, so dole out deaths as mandated by the players, so when they die its their fault, not yours

>CR20 rabbits
Do they have a vicious streak a mile wide?

>How often should PCs die?

That's up to them. The DM's job isn't to keep the PCs alive, it's they're player's job.

>DMs should try wherever possible to keep PCs alive even if it means fudging and secret roles

NO.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

NO.

BAD user.

While your DM example in OP is clearly doing a bad job of things by apparently being out to get you, you should never, ever, EVER

EVER

fudge rolls to keep PCs alive, and especially not "wherever possible". Always let the chips (dice, whatever) fall where they will.

If the PCs are any good at their jobs - and their players any good at running them - then they should never be at risk of dying to a random skeleton or goblin or something, especially after level 1, excepting if they're engaging a horde of such creatures.

Agreed.

Then it happens in just a couple of turns. Again, the DM's job is to give the PCs nominally balanced encounters, with the occasionally potentially-lethal one for boss battles or the like. Surviving those encounters, however, is up to the players.

LOOK AT THE BONES!

>First the King can't be a high level.
>Second it should be a low magic setting so there aren't any magic safeguards to keep the King safe.
>Third the PC has to have gained a fair amount of trust from the King and his guards.

Pic related.

Spoken like a true autistic asshole of a GM.

Unless you intend to help the players make perfect characters for your game, you will never be satisfied by your players, and you will never keep any players worth having, only autistic minmaxing mathheads who would only be of any use playing 4e, the game for autistic, unimaginative math geeks.

Oh, you run 4e don't you.

Never mind.

Being a cruel but fair man is essentially an old-school Referee description. So fuck off with your shitposting mate

Nah, he's fine.
He is just just the far end of camp 1.
Some people don't like to eat fudge, and it would be wrong to make them.

See, fudging rolls is like eating fudge.
Eating only fudge all the time is sickening and disgusting.
Eating fudge with every meal is too much is to be avoided.
Declaring that nobody should ever eat fudge for any reason is categorically stupid.
Sometimes fudge is damn tasty and if you add a little, it can make a person’s dessert amazing even if they don’t know it’s there.
Just don’t go putting it the damn tuna casserole.

You, however, are douche nugget jumping at shadows.

My GM at the moment's doing okay on the balance.
We've had 1 death and a couple of near misses in about 3 sessions. Our dorf barbarian went down from essentially facetanking a boss all on his lonesome (our healer was absent), which was nearly a wipe.
The GM's been decent, aside from that. I'm playing a full RP style Int Warlock and they've kept the heat off me unless I draw attention to myself.

Point is, I'm not dying despite my AC 9 because I'm making a deliberate point to stay behind the barb/paladin at all times. That said if I draw attention to myself my warlock hits the floor in one shot.

Your PCs should die when they fuck up badly. Bad rolls happen, good rolls happen, whatever. CHOICES need consequences.

There are plenty of good systems where death is effectively an impossibility, unless the player really wants their PC to die. 5e is more of an old school dungeon romp game, and though you can bend the rules to make it fit a different genre, you probably should be playing another game if you think PCs shouldn't be dying.

Except for the many anons who swear that martials should never be allowed to do anything at all.

>stay behind the barb/paladin at all times

This. Playing halfling sorcerer 8. Every encounter I just haste / enlarge person / bull's strength the cavalier and sip tea watching him murder everything. If he ever gets in trouble I run / fly / invisibility up to him and dimension door him away. We've survived the brink of death countless times with that against things that would eat our face.

We've had two deaths so far, but none since I picked up dimension door.

I love how you blended 4e hate perfectly into your accusations of autism and your fatalistic rhetoric. Most of the time the 4e hate seems tacked on, like a pathetic wannabe troll screaming for any kind of attention they can get. It works here, though.

8/10, I'd say.

Also, you are absolutely correct, on the side.

>the DM's job is to give the PCs nominally balanced encounters

Can't really agree with this. It makes the world feel like a theme park where they're allowed to run the rides once they're high enough level to handle them. Constraining the party to winnable, level-appropriate encounters is basically the same as fudging dice rolls outright. Anything they're 'allowed' to deal with is something the DM is assuring them they can handle. Either way it's orchestrated in a way that removes player agency.

What the DM should do is to be transparent about just how threatening various things are, but then allow the players to run free as they like. The world has things that can't be taken on right away, but if they really, really want to take on an encounter well above their ability, let them try and fail. If the players want to take on something they've clearly leveled beyond, let them stomp the mooks and let them have a cakewalk and really feel the results of just how strong they've become for once. That's how they learn. It adds a big dose of perspective as to the character's place in the world as they slowly gain power and move upwards to take on the bigger things that they couldn't manage before.

>Oh, you run 4e don't you.

Fuck no. 5e. Before that, 3e. Before that, 2e. Before that...I didn't play before that, I'm not THAT old.

Like I said in my post, a DM shouldn't be throwing wave after wave of impossible encounters at the PCs, but he shouldn't be holding back, either. A DM who sets out to kill his players' characters is a complete failure as a DM, but so is a DM who fudges rolls "whenever possible" to keep them alive.

*At most* the DM should run things on an "everybody gets one" rule, where the DM will fudge the rolls once per player. I did that once, but then at the time the players' characters were agents for the Goddess of Fortune, Lady Luck herself. So it was justified in-universe. And I certainly didn't TELL the players that until after the campaign was long done.

All I mean to say is, if my players are in an ordinary encounter (say, 4 normal hobgoblins verses 4 PCs of 5th level), and the dice say that those hobgoblins are kicking the player characters' asses, then their asses will indeed be kicked.

I am of the intense opinion that the best DM is imaginative, intelligent, accommodating, adaptable, fair, attentive, charismatic...and just a tiny bit malevolent.

Those people are stupid and should be shunned, at least if they also want to play in a world of high magic and HIGH ADVENTURE.

Hence "nominally". As much as I've come to dislike 3e as a whole, I do like its rough "budget" of encounter levels per adventure:

~10%: Easy; the players would have to be particularly bad to suffer any real damage.

~20%: Easy if handled properly. Some complication (say, fighting on a burning building) makes it nominally harder than above, but still should be simple enough to resolve.

~50%: Challenging. Consumes a notable amount of the party's resources (spells, hit points, consumables), but no one of these is likely to be game-ending.

~15%: Very difficult. Consumes a rather sizable portion of the party's resources. One PC might very well die, more if they're not careful.

5%: Overpowering. Barring exceptional luck, this could potentially be a TPK. The party should run or avoid this encounter if at all possible.

>I lean more towards the first than the second
That's not even close to what you said in the OP.

CoC is my home game.
So very rarely. Much better that they go insane instead of dying.

Depends on the game. If you're running Paranoia, and there isn't at least one PC death per player, you're doing it wrong. If you're running a game where players are expected to spend a lot of effort on making characters(including backstories, personalities, etc.), then PC death should be fairly rare.

>My view: DMs should try wherever possible to keep PCs alive even if it means fudging and secret roles
This, however, is ALWAYS wrong. Personally I think fudging is something to be avoided except maybe if you as the GM have screwed up. However, if you DO fudge, it should be because a PC is getting screwed over by the dice or because they've come up with an interesting plan that honestly deserves to succeed, NOT because PCs should be kept alive at all costs even if they fuck up.

>they've come up with an interesting plan that honestly deserves to succeed

Generally, if my players come up with a course of action that genuinely impresses me (with the bar being set according to how new the group is), I let it go without a roll, so long as it makes sense.
So long as your players know from the start that it'll take more ingenuity each time, it encourages creativity. It helps that my players tend to be a bunch of tricksy bastards though

> I have never, ever actually run a game: The Post

>One of the PCs kills a novice RPG player in his sleep
>Novice naturally needs a bit of help building a character for a gameplay perspective
>Novice seems pretty good at everything aside from gameplay-side character building
>Rerolls as the same class/race/backstory/personality/name as if none of it ever happened to save time/spite the guy that killed him
Not to sure how to feel about this

Did the throat-slitter have a good reason?
If he didn't, good. Backstabbers deserve as little satisfaction as possible.

Literally because the barbarian player was chaotic "neutral" and felt like killing the novice because the novice's character told him to not to charge into every NPC head first (which the barbarian insists is in character), which apparently really got under the character's skin.

I dunno if he has some kind of vendetta against the novice guy outside of the game, but I'm having the police/guards go after him for the next session, and if he dies/gets arrested, I'm forcing him to re-roll either LG or NG or get out.

Maybe start by asking the shit to stop being a douchenozzle?

Thanks user. That's basically my exact view.

I had my four level 1 PCs go up against a CR10 construct and a horde of 30 skeletons in the first session. They survived (easily) by...

>Making called shots to the construct's eyes
>Finding the spellcaster that was controlling it and intimidating him into hesitating
>Making the construct have to smash through steel doors and then spend a turn squeezing through each doorframe.
So the encounter wasn't "balanced" for regular combat, but they had plenty of ways to survive.

Encourage creativity. 'Balancing' the world around the players restricts their freedom, so try to find a middle ground where there's obvious points of interest that you HAVE balanced to the party.

IC/OOC that's just a dick move.

"It's what my character would do" is always bullshit. And killing a noob's character is nothing more than a cock-flex.

Tell this prick that you all are playing the game to have fun, he is ruining other peoples' fun, and you won't tolerate it. You, as the GM, are not there to facilitate this dickhole's power fantasies.

As far as the noob creating a clone... I think that's funny. Maybe he's the dead PC's twin brother or long lost cousin and he's out for revenge. If the barbarian doesn't tow the line help the noob murder him. Then kick the barb out of the game.

That last bit is a bit petty but fuck that guy. I hate players that ruin other players fun. It's one of the hardest parts of being a GM.

Half a dozen campaigns that are usually a year or so long in real-time, actually. Two D&D 3.X (one of which was my most recent), one Vampire: the Masquerade, one Star Wars d20, one Kingdom Hearts (using a modified version of the Star Wars SAGA rules), and one set in an original sci-fi universe and using a modified version of the Star Wars RCR d20 rules.

Once my group finished up Rise of Tiamat, I'll be DMing again, specifically Out of the Abyss.