this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Needing to fudge dice usually means the rules have failed.
A common trope is "I don't want my PC to die!". Fine. Reasonable. You can have rules about that. Look at how Fate handles "concede" and getting taken out. Look at how DND does jack shit.
Many games also have a fail forward mechanic. You don't need to fudge their check if the rules have mechanics for "if you really want to succeed but luck isn't on your side, here's what you can pay to succeed"
DND kind of sucks.
Youre right. Its not like death was part of the mechanics from the start, they also could be ignored.
Also, there totally isnt like 5 different ways for the players to rez a pc.
And lets forget about habing NPCs do the rezing as a sidequest.
I say all that, but I love death. I WANT my PC to die if he dies. Thats how you get thrills. Suspense. Tension. Playing with cheats on is fun, but gets boring fast.
Played a control/support wizard for almost two years. Died to a power word kill and BBG used his soul as a bargaining chip. Party was too full of themselves and newer players, they called his bluff, my wizard was perma dead. The rest of the session was them as players and characters coming to terms with his death. It was god damn beautiful and one of my favorite memories in gaming.
Please DMs, kill your ~~players~~ player's characters. For the character development.
Edit: being neurodivergent I sometimes forget that people can have personal feelings that I find illogical, so as the comment under mine says; please make sure your player or players are not going to be traumatized if you kill their characters. As a DM I have always done this, because even if they are killed off I want the players input on how it goes, but that is for narrative reasons and I had not considered how badly it could have gone if I hadn't been asking. I have never been asked by a DM, it just doesn't bother me because to me it is a part of the fun and magic of TTRPGs.
I've also seen players devastated by character death. The correct advice is to check in with your players about what they want to do with possible character death. Don't just spring it on players who don't want it.
I had two player characters foolishly break into a vampire wizard's office to try to steal something. It was a series of incredibly foolish decisions, starting with "let's split the party", and it escalated to violence. When it was looking especially grim, I asked them if they would be okay with character death. They said yes. The two characters died.
The in-game funeral for them was fantastic. Real tears. But the important thing is they consented to this. If they had wanted these characters to live, it would've been a dick move to be like "nah they dead". There's no reason to make the players real-life extra upset. I don't have the hubris to think I know better what kind of story they want.
You are absolutely right, and I have always got buy in from players, I just never thought about how badly things could have gone if I hadn't been doing that so I have edited my comment. For narrative reasons I always think players should have a say in their characters death, it helps me as a DM and can lead to fantastic world building opportunities. Thankfully I've never killed a PC without consent for that reason.
I read the second paragraph first and interpreted it as “kill the person playing the character and make someone else play them so that the character will have a different personality.”
I play versions of myself in a fantasy setting. I emphasize a particular part of my personality and give them funny voices, so no one has caught on. Thankfully people tend to like me for some reason, and therefore my characters, but that is why I always forget to make the player versus player character distinction.
Depends on character level, setting, game tone. Not a universal solution to a universal problem.
Not every game lends itself well to an unexpected sidequest. Also what is the dead PC's owner to do in the interim? This introduces a lot of questions and is also not a universal solution.
Did you read how defeat works in Fate? You can have death.
https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/conceding-conflict . If you don't want to go look it up, I'll summarize here:
In a conflict, before a roll is made, you can Concede. This is a Player action, not a character action. It means that you give up the conflict, but you get a say in what happens. You don't get whatever you were fighting over, but so long as the group agrees it's reasonable you can get something like "taken prisoner" or "left for dead." You also get a Fate point, which is nice. (D&D also has an extremely lackluster meta currency system, but that's a separate discussion). Note that it's not the DM just deciding what happens to you. That's for getting Taken Out.
If you instead let the roll happen, and you take more stress (damage) than you can hold, you instead get Taken Out. When that happens, you have no say. Barring normal social contract stuff, whoever was coming at you has free rein to just be like "And the spell explodes your head."
This is in the rules. To me that's much better than D&D's wishy-washy "maybe the DM will do this or that" standard. I don't want to hash this out at every single table I join from first principles.
D&D kind of sucks because it leaves a lot of important things up to the DM, so you get wildly different experiences depending on whatever half-baked whims this table has. And you have to have these conversations over and over again. And some people never will know there's other ways things could be, and leave the hobby or just be unhappy.
Some people might say "leaving more up to the DM is better" but that's wrong. Clearly going maximum calvinball "whatever the DM says in this moment" is not the platonic ideal of a game. At least not for me or anyone I know. Some rules are important. D&D is missing some important ones. And has too many rules in other places.
No system is perfect, has every rules and isn't relying on the master to some degree. But then, if you dont like death as being part of the game, why play dnd at all then ?
It would be like not liking horror and picking CoC.
If you want your PC to always survive no matter what, either play a system with it in the rules or make a deal with the DM. But blasting dnd because its not part of the core rules (besides all the ways to bring a PC back from the dead that are already there) isnt fair.
This is aggravated by DND being mega popular. Many people who would enjoy some other kind of games don't get to play them . Or don't even know there are options. Or the alternatives they find are close relatives of dnd that don't change much of the fundamentals.
Many new players may not even know that you can have a "hey I don't want my character to die unless I consent in that scene" conversation. If that was in the rules, they would likely know!
But DND simply doesn't address this. At least not in the phb. It's very cut and dry "if you drop to 0 hit points and fail your saves, you die."
That's a very specific style of play that's not appropriate for the most popular game.
Of course any popular produce in any medium will show their strenghts and weaknesses to the world. But better to try a defective product than none at all.
It's fine so long as everyone's on board with PC death, but this is just an example of D&D struggling to hold onto a giant audience with conflicting views. If they get rid of death, the people who actually play D&D the way it's meant to be played get pissed off. If they don't, the more narrative-focused players (who really shouldn't be playing D&D in the first place) will get pissed off. So they just ignore it.
In video game design there is the MDA framework. Where mechanics (rules) create dynamics (gameplay flow) that express aesthetics (genre and emotional expression). Thus in d&d the rules change the actions players take and these actions determine the tone and feel of the game. This is why Silvery Barbs is miserable, the dynamic it creates diminishes the roleplaying aesthetic by breaking suspension of disbelief.
When looking at 5e the fact most players don't just homebrew a few rules, but gut large mechanics (light, encumbrance, gold, travel) of the game. This has completed removed WotC's control of D&D's dynamics. This breaks the aesthetics of the system. 5e in it's current state is not a heroic fantasy game, but everyone thinks it is. Which is why so many tables fail and new DMs burn out.
Rules don't have to fail to fudge dice. You do it to curate the experience - the dice give us the illlusion of fairness but that's about it. Just because we expect them to roll somewhere in the averages doesn't mean a common bandit won't roll four crits in a single encounter or one of your playera won't have a session where they cannot roll above 6.