What Do You Do To Make Your Campaign Deadly

[mr_odd]

Right now, I am in the second half of the second year of my DM experience. For the most part, my experience has been light hearted, fun, not particularly dangerous adventures. The players always came out on top, and through all of that time, I had only killed three players, two of which practically killed themselves. For the current campaign, I'm looking to make a change. The world that the players inhabited has been ruined, they were forced to escape to another already destroyed material plane. I want it to be difficult and deadly.

So what do you do to make your adventures deadly? What do you do to make your players genuinely fear the death of their characters and have those deaths matter?

For notes on my campaign, the players are at level 12. They are in a post apocalyptic setting, so resurrections can only be performed if they find the right diamonds to do so or a Rod of Resurrection. My players are using a character tree of four characters, so that they have a character to jump in if they die.

[randomodo]

There are a number of ways you can do things. For example:

- Emphasize the dangerous nature of the setting. Limited food, limited water, limited shelter. Limited access to civilization. No allies. Every person you meet may be desperate and dangerous. This, admittedly, can be as much a fluff/tone as a mechanical thing, but can potentially induce the right mindset in your players.

- Even more limited access to healing. Use the variant short/long rest rules from the DMG in which a long rest is a week rather than overnight. This forces PCs to husband their resources carefully.

- More dangerous encounters. Bump the average encounter difficulty up to Hard or Deadly, perhaps; alternately, make more encounters for which a draw or an escape is the best the PCs can realistically hope for.

The hard part is managing these sorts of things without the PCs feeling like they're being railroaded or hosed.

[mr_odd]

There are a number of ways you can do things. For example:

- Emphasize the dangerous nature of the setting. Limited food, limited water, limited shelter. Limited access to civilization. No allies. Every person you meet may be desperate and dangerous. This, admittedly, can be as much a fluff/tone as a mechanical thing, but can potentially induce the right mindset in your players.

- Even more limited access to healing. Use the variant short/long rest rules from the DMG in which a long rest is a week rather than overnight. This forces PCs to husband their resources carefully.

- More dangerous encounters. Bump the average encounter difficulty up to Hard or Deadly, perhaps; alternately, make more encounters for which a draw or an escape is the best the PCs can realistically hope for.

The hard part is managing these sorts of things without the PCs feeling like they're being railroaded or hosed.

Yeah, my players are aware of the nature of the setting, hopefully they don't feel that way. Also, I am using a resting variant, but only for health. For abilities and spells, a short and long rest are normal, but for health, a short rest is a night and a long rest is a week.

[Myzz]

in my experience, characters only ever fear character death if it happens...

If it becomes challenging they enjoy it, but usually come away with "I knew he wasn't gonna kills us". Well they do until someone dies... even if that someone is a party NPC with similar stats as the players. With my players, I typically run an NPC for this very reason, but tell players its for party balance or to flesh out the party... Then when they inevitably get too cocky... Bam NPC falls dead. They can of course choose to or not to bring NPC back to like if thats available, usually they dont unless they have a story hook reason to.

Then if they get too OVERLY confident again, I can always kill one of them off. Typically if I know ahead of time I am going to kill someone I have access to resurrection available (typically shortly afterwards or in the same encounter). Whenever my party sees a Rod of Resurrection they go completely defensive and become highly skittish. Trying to get them not to METAgame it is frustrating.

If you want the sense that they could die from any such encounter have rotating sacrifial NPCs on occasion and ensure that the players too come close to death.

I love traps so... thats usually how I twiddle down resources like HP and rests, which can put them in precarious places resting so that disadvantages and such from poisons expire... Having to hole up in dangerous terrain can be... well dangerous.

[Celcey]

For this kind of thing, it's all in the atmosphere. Think games like The Last of Us. People are scared, and will sometimes do terrible things out of fear.