It happened again. Last week. I didn’t mean to, I swear. As it was happening, I tried to stop it, or at least to make it mean something. It was no good. No matter what I did, no matter which way I looked for a way out, for a reason to take it all back, it was going to happen. Was it my fault? Perhaps. Could I have resisted? Absolutely. Yet I did not, and now someone must pay the piper…
Having played in or DMed games for some twenty years off and on, I’ve heard of and participated in a variety of approaches to PC death. They all have their merits and shortcomings, and there really is no system for an RPG that adequately accounts for every aspect of playing style and investment to completely mitigate the death of somebody’s long (or even short) suffering player character.
My own thoughts on PC death are far more romantic than perhaps some players and GMs out there. I want every death, every drop of blood to count for something. I want every fight to be epic, and any death to be legendary. I won’t kill off a PC for falling from a great height, unless they are doing something that furthers the plot of the adventure which would make such a lame death interesting. Perhaps they charge the big bad evil guy off a cliff’s edge, but the only way to make sure the creature hits bottom and meets their demise is by that party member making the ultimate sacrifice to grapple the beastie all the way down, ensuring they make no radical escape by magic or trickery.
That’s an epic death. The rest of the group races to the edge of the cliff, hoping to find their companion by some divine miracle awaiting rescue on a small ledge close to the bottom. They are filled with dismay to see that the corpses are entwined in a broken heap. The bard immediately starts to compose the tale of his fellow hero, and how, even until the end, they hung on with their incredible strength, ensuring that their mighty foe would be unable to escape the consequences of their evil actions.
I would certainly never allow a PC to die by a falling death because they rolled a critical fail on a routine check.
I’ve played in campaigns wherein nobody of great consequence died any kind of death. All of the PCs lived until the end, with only a few moments where their hit points were brought dangerously close to the limit. Even the NPCs we dealt with never died. It was pretty boring after a while. Although the healthy demonstration of risk to life and limb creates excitement and tension within a story narrative, if you fail to deliver in some capacity, eventually the group figures out that the chance of character death is an illusion, and the veil falls away. After that, they tend to start doing stupid things.
In my own ongoing campaign, I wrote recently that a revolving door of players has presented me the problem of limited buy-in from those currently participating. They don’t care about the story because they weren’t there from the beginning. The fact that they are dungeon crawling now is little comfort, as that doesn’t tend to breed investment in a narrative plot, although it is fun to go into dark places and risk life and limb to get shiny things.
So last week, the group finally made it to the heart of darkness in this particular locale. I promise not to spoil anything if you haven’t played Princes of the Apocalypse. It is safe to say however, that as with any long running campaign, you will fight lieutenants or mini-bosses as you journey along. This was one such encounter.
Now that the group is of a higher level (seven to be accurate), they have been expecting greater challenges, as you do. I have endeavoured to deliver, although this is my first long campaign using the newest edition of Dungeons and Dragons. I have been running the encounters as written for a group that is usually one short. That means that this group of four characters should be slightly challenged but not overly taxed during the encounters that are constructed by the authors of the module. And in most cases, that’s not true.
What I mean by that is that my four players have created little monsters and have done it all completely by the book. Couple that with the fact that there is an aspect of new D&D enemies that allows optimally built characters a greater advantage, and you get big, foamy Nerfed encounters.
I shall explain… Adversarial spell casters in fifth have some pretty powerful spells. They also have some decent defensive spells. What they don’t have is more than one spell action per turn, at least the ones my people are fighting don’t. So in a combat situation, an enemy mage will want to Alpha Strike an opposing force before they can return fire, meaning defensive spells are often second round considerations.
So they do that. If it’s fire based, the Genasi Wiz-Bard takes half due to his resistance. It doesn’t matter what type of attack it is to the Assassin, whose class abilities allow her to take no damage on Dexterity Saves made for half damage. And then round two happens and the enemy spell caster is on the run or dead. Never mind the fact that the group is smart enough not to bunch up if they can avoid it.
I know that the power to make encounters challenging is in my hands, and I know that with GM fiat I can pretty well do what I like, and I do. I fudge HP and dice results whenever I feel it will improve the narrative or ratchet up the excitement. I do it when they are going to totally Nerf the encounter and I just want the chance to get my own shots in.
I know that they have done everything above board and according to the rules of the system, and as I am not yet comfortable with the math at these levels, I am (disregard above) following the rules as far as enemy attacks are concerned.
My beef up until last Thursday is that enemy spellcasters are just not working for me so far. They seem like they should do more, or better at this level and they just…aren’t. At first, the group was always panicking when some beastie or masked nasty let off an arcane burst of hurt. They felt this way because in the earlier levels, their enemies had a real effect on them in this area. They also know that enemies have the same spells as they do, and that their spells were pretty darn powerful. Yet the caster just can’t compete with an entire party of determined heroes. At least not at my table. I have to fix that.
I fixed it. Ish. As the group faced off against Wicked McTaxNasty in the lair of Eternal Income, I saw that for the first time, I had an Alpha Strike of my own. So I used it, thinking that I needed to really amp up the performance of my spell wielding enemies and show my table that they still had something to fear from their arcane foes.
And then I killed Kain’s Genasi Bard-ard. Wiz-Ba. Whatever. I also knocked Trent’s Halfling Fighter Unconscious, and he was left making Death Saves, while Morgan’s “Murder Bird” desperately fought on for a round thinking she could take the adversary alone. Thankfully she realised it was futile, and beat a retreat lugging a near death hobbit along with her.
Careful what you wish for.
I like the latest D&D. We are all having a good time, and, as far as popular RPGs go, this one makes a bunch of sense most of the time and is fairly easy to teach to both veterans and new players, which makes it great for a community gaming group.
Where it currently doesn’t make sense to me is in the adversarial magic department. I was playing it kind of safe up until last week, when I really pushed the pendulum hard in the other direction. It paid off in a manner of speaking, as Morphignus (previously living Genasi finger waggler) died on the battlefield, but facing a great and powerful foe, not giant rats or uppity goblins. Nor did he die making an inconsequential ability or skill check to avoid stepping on d4s on a bridge somewhere in the middle of the night. So that was a plus.
What it does mean is that I still have some work to do to find that balance of challenge and narrative tension to give my players the courage to carry on in the face of possible fatal injurious defeat at the hands of their enemies. So I will spend some time on character death, hopefully without too much field research.