D&D Hardcore mode

[Fwiffo86]

I've been reading a lot of threads recently that seem to share this ideology:

"If you get into a fight, and a single PC dies, you have some how lost the game."

When did this become the prevailing ideology? We aren't playing Hardcore mode here people. In fact, 5e made recovery of a lost PC even easier than before thanks to spells like "Revivify" which can be cast by multiple classes and poached by others.

Even if going by the 3.(blah) ideology, an encounter should use 20% of a groups resources. If you have 5 players, that means one of them dies. Well this is an extreme view, but that's what we deal with here, extreme views.

Where did the concept that PC are invincible come from? Why do they HAVE to win every encounter and walk away with nary a scratch on them?

Personally, I think this adopted ideology is the cause for many arguments out there. Examples include the edition war, people thinking CR is somehow broken, the I'm only going to fight when its on my terms (long rested) no matter where I am, and others.

Edition War
I think 3.(blah) gave players a false sense of security because there were so many overpowered options allowed. Crushing your encounters became the default condition, because it became exceedingly difficult to stop the party.

Broken CR
The CR system is no better or worse than choosing HD, or XP. With sufficient resources, the encounter will be defeated. That does NOT immediately mean all PC are happy and healthy. Defeating an encounter is either bypassing the obstacle, or rendering the obstacle inert without ALL PC's dead. So a single PC alive is considered a win condition for the PARTY. Lets not forget all of these things are calculated for a PARTY, not a single PC.

Long Resting
Logic does state, why would I want to fight when I'm not in my peak condition. You don't of course. But this doesn't remotely consider if you are given the opportunity to. The world does not revolve around the PCs. At best, they react to it, not the other way around. What you want, and what you get, are completely different things. That does not mean your PC is suicidal because they are willing to walk into a Den of X to pull out the treasure. It means they think they can do it with a modicum of survivability. But then, nothing is certain. I could be hit by a car on the way home from work, no matter how "cautious" or "rested" I am. Stuff happens.

I think the largest problem is that people are either forgetting, or are ignoring the fact that the game is built on a group of 4 adventurers. Not one. Not two. Four. So if encounter A has a possibility of killing 1 PC, that's 25% resources spent, and a "party" victory. Wounds heal. PCs raise from the dead. Life goes on.

Dungeons and Dragons is NOT Hardcore mode.

[illyrus]

Raise dead only helps if you have reasonable access to it. Personally even if raise dead was common I dislike the resolving door of raise dead in the first place. Most of my characters tend to stay dead if killed.

I don't have a problem with PC death though (we tend to have 5-8 a campaign). I'm not a fan of "gotcha!" deaths as they don't really add anything to the RP portion of the story. In an extreme case where I'd stand a decent chance to lose a character every session I either wouldn't play or would just bring a stack of characters with me I cared nothing about. Fi Tor has died, Sorc Erer replaces him. Death means nothing to me now because I don't have the time to be invested in my character. There is a balancing act that will vary party to party.

[Mr.Moron]

Nothing really wrong with one style or another. However, I think if I wanted to be playing something where characters were just expendable resources for combat encounters, I'd probably play a board game or dig out my warmachine minis instead of doing an RPG. Granted D&D is one of the more wargamey-esque RPGs out there, but it's different enough I'm not looking to get the same experience out of it.

I like having the same PCs around. It lets me build relationships and consistent threads into the overall events. Like it's one thing to have the PCs run into a wandering tribe of nomads. It's yet another to meet them when they're a band from that PCs backstory.It's yet another thing to have them run into a wandering tribe of nomads that one of the PCs was forced to leave, when we've been exploring the reasons they had to leave multiple times over the past year of sessions.

I like that last thing the most. There is a certain weight behind it, expectations for players and PCs that can be either met or defied. There's buildup, there's investment. That's harder to get when the central plot element (the characters) just kind of transient presences.

I'm not going to make PCs invincible, things have to feel like they have stakes to be compelling. However in general I'm going to tune things so that death is the exception rather than the rule, something that can from a metagame perspective mostly be be avoided unless the player wants to take on risk.

[Fwiffo86]

Perhaps I was unclear, and rereading my post, I can see where I may have been. In no way was I stating PCs are expendable. Expendable suggests that when the PC dies, you roll up a new one (or use a spare you brought). While related, this is not what I was speaking about.

I'm talking about the apparent believe that PCs should be free from danger. PC abilities and feats that guarantee victory with virtually no damage taken because people think that is how it "should" be. If this were the default mechanic, there would be no way to return a PC to life.

I suppose I may be alone in thinking that an encounter that can destroy a single PC nearly instantly (turned to stone, dropped down a pit for terminal danger, brain eaten) is not that bad when compared to the party as a whole. Especially with so many ways to cure the "death" condition available to the standard party. But then, that is just thinking mathematically.

[Mr.Moron]

Perhaps I was unclear, and rereading my post, I can see where I may have been. In no way was I stating PCs are expendable. Expendable suggests that when the PC dies, you roll up a new one (or use a spare you brought). While related, this is not what I was speaking about.

I'm talking about the apparent believe that PCs should be free from danger. PC abilities and feats that guarantee victory with virtually no damage taken because people think that is how it "should" be. If this were the default mechanic, there would be no way to return a PC to life.

I suppose I may be alone in thinking that an encounter that can destroy a single PC nearly instantly (turned to stone, dropped down a pit for terminal danger, brain eaten) is not that bad when compared to the party as a whole. Especially with so many ways to cure the "death" condition available to the standard party. But then, that is just thinking mathematically.

There's a middle ground between "PCs are invincible supermen that never take damage and spend all day dunking on fools like it wasn't nothing" and "Encounters that can instagib a player with no input".

In fact, that middle ground is pretty huge. Really tons of space between those extremes. Those aren't the only two choices available.

My opinions may also be colored by the fact that I tend to run games where in nonstandard settings where death is permanent. If you die, you die end of story, well yours anyway.

[SiuiS]

I support and agree with your basic premise. I understand the opposite side of things and why character death is such a deal breaker, but I feel the levels to which things have gone are ridiculous; unfounded arguments because a starting character cannot beat DC 10 more than 90% of the time, IP-proofing, mandatory max hp and feat taxes. So silly.

[Tengu_temp]

Easy death and easy resurrection cheapens the impact of death - it turns your game into a superhero comic book, or Dragonball Z, or some other story where characters die and are brought back to life on such a routine basis that nobody really cares when a certain character dies anymore. Easy death and bringing in spare characters to replace the dead ones, on the other hand, makes it incredibly hard to create a meaningful narrative and interactions, and hurts roleplaying.

The best approach to a game, in my experience, is: dying is hard, but bringing the dead back to life is also hard, and might even be impossible. At the same time, getting knocked out or temporarily disabled in combat is much easier than dying, and it's what happens by default when you run out of health.

[Fwiffo86]

I support and agree with your basic premise. I understand the opposite side of things and why character death is such a deal breaker, but I feel the levels to which things have gone are ridiculous; unfounded arguments because a starting character cannot beat DC 10 more than 90% of the time, IP-proofing, mandatory max hp and feat taxes. So silly.

Thank you.


Easy death and easy resurrection cheapens the impact of death - it turns your game into a superhero comic book, or Dragonball Z, or some other story where characters die and are brought back to life on such a routine basis that nobody really cares when a certain character dies anymore. Easy death and bringing in spare characters to replace the dead ones, on the other hand, makes it incredibly hard to create a meaningful narrative and interactions, and hurts roleplaying.

I agree with you. There is no need to [for lack of a better term] popularize death. It should have meaning, both to the story and to the mechanics. But the assumption that being taken out of a fight (even "knocked" out) seems to be taboo. As if it should never ever possibly happen. And if it does, the encounter or mechanics are some how broken in some way.

[hawklost]

Easy Death at low levels does not cheapen anything. You are low and weak and need to learn that you cannot just charge into combat and think you are awesome.

Death becomes harder and harder as you level up. (you should also be more cautious still since you learned that early on)

As for easy bringing back. The only spell that is easy for a lot of people to have (unless you are giving NPCs lvl 9 as a common level) would be Revivify and you could conceptually make it so that it isn't a "Bring Back the Dead" except in the sense that DnD only has 2 states (Dead or Alive). You could see it as a Defibrillator that always works but can only be used within 6 seconds of something going brain dead.

Otherwise you are spending massive amount of money (which yes, you probably have by level 9, but we are still talking about huge amount of wealth) to bring someone back from the dead.

[Tengu_temp]

I agree with you. There is no need to [for lack of a better term] popularize death. It should have meaning, both to the story and to the mechanics. But the assumption that being taken out of a fight (even "knocked" out) seems to be taboo. As if it should never ever possibly happen. And if it does, the encounter or mechanics are some how broken in some way.

Well, it's not fun if you get OHKO'd by a save-or-die effect and can't even do anything about it. That's where I imagine all the Intellect Devourer hate comes from, for example.

[archaeo]

Right now, we're still short two books that will probably be crucial to building good encounters for a variety of campaigns. After the MM and the DMG are out and the encounter building rules and expectations are finalized, it should be a lot easier to make sure that you're running the kind of campaign you want to run, with the level of difficulty you're looking for.

That said, the MM is organized alphabetically and the rules we have currently encourage DMs to first select monsters while using CR as a rough guideline, and then adjust the difficulty as needed per the XP tables. It'll be easy to make "easy" encounters with this system, and easy to make "hard" encounters, and it's easy to know you're somewhere between those extremes, but it's not really foolproof yet.

Otherwise, I don't think 5e is biased towards "hardcore mode." I think we just have a lot of people learning the system for the first time.

[squashmaster]

Easy Death at low levels does not cheapen anything. You are low and weak and need to learn that you cannot just charge into combat and think you are awesome.

Personally I'm totally down with deadliness early game. Or any part of the game.

There's Dungeon Crawl Classics, a semi-retro clone, that has a feature I've always kind of liked. Everyone starts as a level 0 commoner, your first adventure gets you to level 1, and you're probably gonna die. They even say roll multiple toons from the get go so that at least one of them survives that you can continue playing.

[Slipperychicken]

Well, if it's your character who died when he was trying to live, then yeah, you really did lose.


Also, I expected this thread to be about extreme gameplay challenges. Things like rolling 2d6 down the line (you heard me right) for ability scores, all encounters at least CR+4, ambushes try to interrupt every long rest, all NPCs start as hostile or unfriendly, instant perma-death at 0hp, no magic allowed, minimum hit points per level, disadvantage on all rolls (enemies get advantage), no level-ups, and so on.

[Mr.Moron]

Well, if it's your character who died when he was trying to live, then yeah, you really did lose.


Also, I expected this thread to be about extreme gameplay challenges. Things like rolling 2d6 down the line (you heard me right) for ability scores, all encounters at least CR+4, ambushes try to interrupt every long rest, all NPCs start as hostile or unfriendly, instant perma-death at 0hp, no magic allowed, minimum hit points per level, disadvantage on all rolls (enemies get advantage), no level-ups, and so on.

Also, the floor is lava. All of the floors, everywhere and forever. Everyone is immune to it but you.