Player survey: How often do you like to die?

[Rukelnikov]

Oh thats actually a good point. I would say proper not coming back deaths, not dropping to zero or getting rezzed within a session or two.

This would also apply to swapping characters i suppose, just to liven up the party. Change of scenery y'know?

Yeah, knowing you meant leasting deaths, once every six months or so sounds right for me too.

[Mastikator]

True, but there's a big difference between
You are on 4 hp and take 1d8 damage
vs
You are on 4 hp and take 11d6 fireball damage from a bandit captain throwing every bead from their necklace of fireballs they suddenly have after the 5th round of combat, which they are including themselves in the blast also, and the DM rules it burns up everything they had on them so the surviving party members cannot loot anything after the combat.

^ the later is an example from a game a couple weeks back, and I'm staring to see this as a trend of the DM and not a one-off thing

"Rocks fall everyone dies" is a cue for the DM to take a break. This is a red flag of DM burnout.

Edit-
To answer OP: I think player death should be at least twice per campaign. Once from an enemy encounter, once from misadventure. I'd also like to see one death to the big bad evil guy. I do play in groups the size of 6 players, I understand that a smaller group should see fewer deaths. IMO adventuring should be very dangerous.

[Zhorn]

Wow, that sounds awful (and arbitrary).

And overt! Like he really wanted to drive the point home.

"Rocks fall everyone dies" is a cue for the DM to take a break. This is a red flag of DM burnout.

The worst part is I like the DM personally, and the other players are all a great bunch who I play online games with regularly. I like to believe the mantra of "no D&D is better than bad D&D", but when you know departure will be taken as a critical statement, it's hard to leave without sparking something worse. Even offers to DM instead would be taken poorly.

Have tried talking to them about parts of how they run their games before... and it does not go over well (short fuse, doubles down, etc), so have learned that trying to offer constructive feedback is off the table.
Again though, awesome dude most of the time. But when combats go for more than 4 rounds, suddenly there's some massive AoE coming into play in a 'nuke everything' ploy that no one in the group would have the hp to reasonably be expected to take.

I don't want to burn this bridge... but it is made of very dry and brittle wood

[Cheesegear]

Obviously as players we all try not to die, but how difficult do you like the game to be, mathematically?

I plan my sessions around the DMG guidelines:

1. A party should be able to handle 'this much' XP per day.
2. A party should be able to handle 6-8 Medium/Hard encounters per day, with two Short Rests.

I almost always make the second-last, or last encounter of the Session, a Deadly (or Deadly+), which means throw in an Easy, or just not have an encounter.

If I take away my players' ability to Short Rest, that increases the difficulty of the session again. I know this. I plan everything.

I've known some people who consider a 50% chance of dying over 30 game sessions unacceptable because then you "might not finish the campaign."

The character wont, the player should. The only reason you would ever - ever - not finish a campaign is if your players - or you, the DM - have the mentality that Death = Game Over. Just roll a new character. With everything you know about the campaign so far, you should be able to come up with a new backstory almost on the spot, because you know so much about what's happened and how you can be invested. Not even 'TPK = Game Over'.

s a player I like games where 50% chance of death-from-math every single session exists.

I wouldn't want a game were any given player has an even chance of dying every. Single. Session. But certainly, there should be some amount of risk that a player could die if they make poor decisions. The DM shouldn't actively try and kill players. But they should design challenges in such a way that if a player attempts something by themselves, with no Plan B, with no escape plan, and the odds stacked against them; They should probably die.

I think most importantly, a player should always know why they died, and what they could have done differently.

An NPC tells you that there are 4 hostiles in a room.
- Half the party walks around the back of the room, when we give the signal, that's when you go.
- Instead of waiting for the signal, Player A opens the door and sees one hostile in the room. The hostile sees them, and combat starts. The player runs towards it immediately on the highest initiative.
- The hostiles have next initiative, and the one in the open, attacks. The other three attack from Hidden, with advantage.
- The player dies.
- The other players hear the noises coming from the room but are not in a position to help due to poor initiative.

The player was told there were four hostiles in the room, even though they only saw one.
The player knew that the rest of their party was not in a position to help, yet.

The player who died, should know why they died, and not just because 'The DM rolled big damage numbers.'

As a player, how often do you like Death to show his face to you in 5E?

Often enough that my players should realise that if they make stupid decisions, they die.
But not so often that my players don't get attached to their own characters, and start making stupid decisions on purpose because they know that dying and rolling a new character is just a revolving door and nothing actually matters.

[MaxWilson]

The worst part is I like the DM personally, and the other players are all a great bunch who I play online games with regularly. SNIP

I don't want to burn this bridge... but it is made of very dry and brittle wood

This might be one of cases where it's worth pulling the DM aside to say, "I like you, but I need you to know I had a terrible time last season. I just didn't believe that the bandit captain had an 11d6 Necklace of Missiles all along. It felt like a retcon, especially the way it nuked all of his possessions too. It just didn't feel like something that would really happen, it felt blatantly unfair, and I just want you to know that I hated it. How did you expect me to feel about it?"

[Thunderous Mojo]

I, myself, would be interested in reading how likely it is for someone to get up, and not wind up outright: Dead---after failing Unconscious, and Dying?

Some tables expect the opposition to not target Dying PCs.

[Cheesegear]

Some tables expect the opposition to not target Dying PCs.

Typically, I reserve attacking Dying PCs until after someone has dropped to 0, and then the Healer^TM heals them.
Then, the hostiles go 'Nope. If we take someone down, they have to stay dead.' Then they switch to targeting dying PCs and PCs that they have seen cast healing spells.

More intelligent and experienced hostiles will target dying PCs if they have an action economy advantage over the players. They can 'spare' the action(s) to make sure that their opponent is dead.

Beasts, might attempt to 'rag doll' a creature that they have dropped to 0 hit points.

[Rukelnikov]

I, myself, would be interested in reading how likely it is for someone to get up, and not wind up outright: Dead---after failing Unconscious, and Dying?

Some tables expect the opposition to not target Dying PCs.

Well, if the party doesn't have a healer, attacking a downed character doesn't do anything for the opposition, they are spending their turn without diminishing their foes capabilities. So unless they are bots or have a personal gripe with the fallen character, they really have no incentive to attack the downed character, if they pretend to live thru the battle.

[Dark.Revenant]

This question is meaningless. You can't reduce such a complicated topic to such as a simple question without losing context. For most people, the answer depends entirely upon factors such as:
1. the length of campaign
2. the tone of campaign
3. availability of resurrection
4. plausibility of character replacement
5. ongoing character story threads
6. extant party chemistry

In short, you won't get good data points unless you narrow down the criteria.

[KorvinStarmast]

Let's go back to that demon scenario we were discussing on a different thread recently. A D&D player will (rightfully?) expect that that problem probably can be solved with violence.

Maybe? Depends on the group.
Replace "a D&D player" with "a video game or MORPG player" and I agree.

Some D&D players will reflexively use violence as a first choice. (I've got a wizard in my brother's world who is very much in that school of D&D). He's very much a "patience my ass, I wanna kill something" kind of player.
Others will not.
No few players love finding clever ways around 'the obvious' in solving a problem.
(For example, using suggestion to defuse and avoid a potentially violent encounter. Seen that done multiple times in this edition).

And beyond that, some encounters cannot be solved with violence.

(As an aside, I am pretty sure that the Huge metal werewolf statue problem you have presented us with in the PbP game most likely 'solvable' without violence, I just haven't figured it out yet, and our group may never figure that out, and at the moment I suspect that using movement to avoid it is a best approach ...)

I think you are making an uncharitable assumption (in terms of being too narrow) about how D&D players approach an encounter.

I think you misread the quoted text.

I read the whole article, and I find it to be of very low value.
The problem that the combat systems of D&D have always had is how to balance the amount of verisimilitude/realism, and how much pure gamism and abstraction to toss in for the sake of playability.
(The decision to move away from "treasure yields XP" model, combined with MUDS, MORPGs, CRPG, ARPG, and MMORPG amplified that by inextricably linking XP to slaughter; that's not a "promise of D&D" that's a case of taking the purely mechanical and overriding all else in a series of poor design decisions).

As an aside, with the Chainmail rules and Original D&D, roll the six sided dice and you are done. The lethality level was so high that between Gygax's group and Arneson's group (before publishing) they figured out how much "too far in one direction" that was and the alternate combat system was dreamed up - but making the choice to initiate combat was still incredibly lethal. Success was measured in XP, and a great deal of that XP came from treasure, not strewing the battlefield with your enemies.
That's the promise of D&D: dare the dangers of the unknown and recover treasure, save the princess, dethrone the evil overlord, etc.

People who don't want any death in their campaigns - how long are y Not my preference, but we all make compromises for friends, and I don't have to DM, so winning!

Bravo!

[Tanarii]

As a player, I like to die never. I also like to clearly fail never.

OTOH, I also like to feel like my decisions are meaningful and encounters were serious enough that they were thwarted only by my quick thinking always.

Have fun reconciling that!

My experience with players is their likes come pretty close to mine.

And of course, the solution as a DM is: people can't always get what they like.

But it's important to keep in mind that players feel they're in far more danger than a DM thinks they are actually in, constantly. If a player feels like they have a 50/50 chance of dying mathematically, they probably have a 5% chance. If a DM feels they have a 50/50 chance of dying mathematically, they probably have a 75% or even 100%.

Like, MaxWilson, the encounters I've seen you present historically in many threads as overcomable with smart tactics and a 50/50 chance of death, IMO would pretty much be a well over 50% chance of a TPK for the average group of pickup players without heavy optimization experience and constant tactical board game experience, if they were part of an adventuring day of say 3 encounters. Not a 50/50 chance of one PC dying.

[fbelanger]

Sometime when my character concept is going nowhere, and the plot go nowhere, it is an interesting thing to have an elegant last performance and die.

[Tanarii]

I read the whole article, and I find it to be of very low value.

I didn't find it of much value either. OTOH then I went on to the follow up article, and found it was pretty accurate. And probably informed the opinions of the first one.
https://stirgessuck.wordpress.com/20...he-ages-of-dd/

Or as you said:

(The decision to move away from "treasure yields XP" model, combined with MUDS, MORPGs, CRPG, ARPG, and MMORPG amplified that by inextricably linking XP to slaughter; that's not a "promise of D&D" that's a case of taking the purely mechanical and overriding all else in a series of poor design decisions).

Thats the problem between the fairly accurate analysis of motivations in the second article, and the mistake that this change in motivations for players is some kind of "promise of D&D" in the first. WotC D&D has a clash/mismatch between the claims (e.g. see the 5e PHB Intro on "story") and the actual game rules and the resulting player (not PC) motivations.

[MaxWilson]

(As an aside, I am pretty sure that the Huge metal werewolf statue problem you have presented us with in the PbP game most likely 'solvable' without violence, I just haven't figured it out yet, and our group may never figure that out, and at the moment I suspect that using movement to avoid it is a best approach ...)

Yes, it is solvable without violence (yep, movement counts as nonviolent*), but it is also solvable with sufficient violence. I would feel like I were cheating you guys if you killed the metal werewolf and then found that violence is not the answer/violence just makes problems worse, or if I made the werewolf unkillable.

In DramaSystem or even some GURPS settings, I would not feel like I was cheating you if violence turned out to just make things worse.

Example of a non-violent solution that involves movement and having a safe zones:

Riddle: A farmer wants to cross a river and take with him a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage. There is a boat that can fit himself plus either the wolf, the goat, or the cabbage. If the wolf and the goat are alone on one shore, the wolf will eat the goat. If the goat and the cabbage are alone on the shore, the goat will eat the cabbage. How can the farmer bring the wolf, the goat, and the cabbage across the river?

"Kill the wolf" is one way, but in the riddle game you can't take it. "Kill the wolf" isn't the only way to solve this riddle in D&D, but it generally works.

But it's important to keep in mind that players feel they're in far more danger than a DM thinks they are actually in, constantly. If a player feels like they have a 50/50 chance of dying mathematically, they probably have a 5% chance. If a DM feels they have a 50/50 chance of dying mathematically, they probably have a 75% or even 100%.

Like, MaxWilson, the encounters I've seen you present historically in many threads as overcomable with smart tactics and a 50/50 chance of death, IMO would pretty much be a well over 50% chance of a TPK for the average group of pickup players without heavy optimization experience and constant tactical board game experience, if they were part of an adventuring day of say 3 encounters. Not a 50/50 chance of one PC dying.

FWIW, my track record is that when I frankly say to the players, "I think you guys are all about to die here," about 75% of the time they don't. Take that with a grain of salt because I have learned from past mistakes and am no longer so quick to believe they're all about to die, but that's where my opinions that you're quoting come from: pushing the limits and observing how often they don't die. And not with tactically sophisticated players, either, just with high school kids using unoptimized characters. 5E characters have surprising defensive depth and I have found that when it feels to everybody including the DM like they're all out of gas and about to die, they're probably not yet.

On the other hand, charging a dozen Umber Hulks solo, attacking Recklessly, and relying on Rage to save you... that will kill you about as fast as one would expect.

As for players feeling like they're in great danger, yes, exactly, that's what this thread was about. I personally like to feel like I'm about 50% likely to die this game session, and then try my hardest not to, because it lets me game a lot of gaming done in a single session. I don't want to wait 100 sessions for Darwin to show up, I want to feel like the Grim Reaper is here tonight. Maybe I would feel differently if I played 5E as a player more often. Or, maybe I don't have the attention span or free time to play as a player more often, and this is how I try to get my jollies in anyway. [shrug] But it appears that I'm even more of an outlier than I thought, based on thread responses.

[MrStabby]

I like to feel campaigns are dangerous. Its pretty tough to make them feel like hazards are real if they get pulled away at the last moment... half the party is bleeding out, the wizard is out of spell slots but the dragon fails that dex save vs sacred flame and hoes down just as a TPK was in the offering. Sure it can happen from time to time but too often feels forced.

The only way to actually be confident threat is real is for the DM to prove it. This means character death has to have some realistic prospect of happening sometime.

On the other hand too dangerous a campaign leads to bland optimised characrers making optimised decisions. If doing something characterful might get you killed, it is a powerful incentive not to do it. Do you try and parlay with your enemy, expressing your character, motivations and view of the world as well as giving a chance for your enemy to express the world back to you... or does the party hide, spring an ambush and try and give them the surprised condition for maximum chance at survival.

Honestly, there can be room for both but it does require a bit of telegraphing from the DM to tell which circumstance is which.

So to put a number on it... 10% chance over 20 sessions, but that probability concentrated into about 4 sessions of serious danger and the rest having a little more latitude for RP over optimal play.

[loki_ragnarock]

FWIW, my track record is that when I frankly say to the players, "I think you guys are all about to die here," about 75% of the time they don't. Take that with a grain of salt because I have learned from past mistakes and am no longer so quick to believe they're all about to die, but that's where my opinions that you're quoting come from: pushing the limits. And not with tactically sophisticated players, either, just with high school kids using unoptimized characters. 5E characters have surprising defensive depth and I have found that when it feels to everybody including the DM like they're all out of gas and about to die, they're probably not yet.

I had a long running Pathfinder game where - when I was presenting a challenge in the session somewhere that had a good chance of killing a few party members - I would apologize in advance, at the start of the session, letting them know that what was coming up had a good chance of killing them.
Never. Once. Happened. Natural twenties, Gonzo crits, beating every save; everything always worked out in the players favor, and what should have killed some party members never did. There was a ranger who rolled a natural twenty on something like 5 finger of death spells in a row over various sessions. Eventually, I just said the gods had spoken and he was immune to the spell.

However, because I did this, my players would start asking me jokingly at the start of the session if their players were going to die this time. They came to dread the reply "Nah, you guys should be fine. Tonight's easy street." Because this is when PCs died. Things that should have been cake walks were beset with loads of critical hits in the other direction, botched saves, failed perception checks, monsters that could not fail despite the math indicating that their chances of success were so slim as to be vanishing. It always went badly for them, when it really shouldn't have. They were very rarely in fights that were delicately balanced enough where things should be that swingy; the dice just decided to make a liar of me every night. The ranger that took 5 fingers of death full in the face wound up being crit several times in a row by monster's whose main powers were crit related, who would have not focus fired were it not for the party arrangement on the board; cake walks but for a small percentage of the time, they just stomped him into the ground the night I said "Nah, you guys should be fine." What should have been one, maybe two dramatic hits spread out to make them say "rut-roh" became 5 dramatic crits directed at one character. Yeesh.
I had narratively baked in unique resurrection mechanics for each character, so it wasn't the end of the world and mostly served as a mechanism for introducing new drama... but the dice just always, always made a liar of me.

The take away is that I am a bad arbiter of what's going to challenge the PCs and don't balance things particularly well, I suppose. But you can't DM for very long without coming away from what you thought was a breazy encounter leading to a bunch of near dead or dead PCs all of a sudden. Run an encounter enough times, the edge cases will arise. And those edge cases drip blood.

[Pex]

People who don't want any death in their campaigns - how long are your campaigns?

My group meet pretty erratically, but the campaign has been ongoing for 2-3 years and.. I just get bored of being the same character. I've died once before, and want to retire my current character as it's just been too long. Only had one other character death in the campaign, and while I'd be happy with more death, it's very much run as a combat as sport campaign, so outside of boss fights it's pretty hard to get close to death. Not my preference, but we all make compromises for friends, and I don't have to DM, so winning!

They last as long as real world interference will let them. My barbarian game I've talked about lasted 3 and a half years. My paladin game started in 2014 playing once every three weeks with a Virus Apocalypse break. I was in a Pathfinder game for 3 years. I had a 3E group play 4 campaigns over 12 years. Other games ended earlier because of Life. There have been PC deaths. It happens. Not wanting that X + 1 death does not mean any PC death > 0 is the most horrible thing ever. The circumstances matter, both in PC actions and how the DM runs the game. I see nothing wrong where a campaign death count is 0 given no shenanigans play, but that doesn't mean it must be 0. However, I do not apologize for not declaring a campaign must have Y PC deaths, 0 < Y < X + 1.

[Yora]

I guess surviving two out of three campaigns to the end would be okay.

Now how long is a campaign? No clue.

I guess a statistical chance of 5% to die every time you play a character would be fine. When the ability to resurrect characters comes into play, it could go a lot higher.

[MaxWilson]

I guess surviving two out of three campaigns to the end would be okay.

Now how long is a campaign? No clue.

I guess a statistical chance of 5% to die every time you play a character would be fine. When the ability to resurrect characters comes into play, it could go a lot higher.

Is that 5% before or after accounting for tactics? If the chance to die with bad tactics/decisions is 50%+ but good tactics can make it 5% or less, would you enjoy that?

[EggKookoo]

But it's important to keep in mind that players feel they're in far more danger than a DM thinks they are actually in, constantly. If a player feels like they have a 50/50 chance of dying mathematically, they probably have a 5% chance. If a DM feels they have a 50/50 chance of dying mathematically, they probably have a 75% or even 100%.

This is how I see it. I try never to kill the PCs. I don't construct encounters to kill them -- in fact I tend toward making them easier than harder. But I try to frame the encounter and conflict in a way that the players aren't sure if this is the one that will finally get them. I try to play on their fears a bit. Or give them a deliberately easy fight followed by something bit harder (but still not designed to outright kill them). The contrast pushes buttons, and the players worry about their PCs' survival, even if in all probability they're not in much greater danger than typical. That's all the game needs at my table.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I guess a statistical chance of 5% to die every time you play a character would be fine. When the ability to resurrect characters comes into play, it could go a lot higher.

A quick bit of math, assuming a 5% per session death rate for a single character and 1 adventuring day per session (1-5 adventuring days per level, starting at 1 and then leveling out at ~5 by level 5 or so).

Session	Level	Chance of having survived to session's end
1	1	95%
7	4	70%
10	5	60%
20	7	35%
40	11	12%
70	17	3%

Take from that what you will. If, instead, you had a 5% per encounter, with 3 per adventuring day, the probabilities of reaching each tier without having died would be
T2: 24%
T3: 0.2%
T4: 0.002%

[MaxWilson]

A quick bit of math, assuming a 5% per session death rate for a single character and 1 adventuring day per session (1-5 adventuring days per level, starting at 1 and then leveling out at ~5 by level 5 or so).

Session	Level	Chance of having survived to session's end
1	1	95%
7	4	70%
10	5	60%
20	7	35%
40	11	12%
70	17	3%

Take from that what you will. If, instead, you had a 5% per encounter, with 3 per adventuring day, the probabilities of reaching each tier without having died would be
T2: 24%
T3: 0.2%
T4: 0.002%

Where are your assumptions about leveling velocity coming from? I see that you are assuming DMG standard XP budgets every season, but I'm asking WHY you assume them (and also assume no "quest awards" or XP from treasure). It stands to reason that great risks bring great rewards. Die quicker OR level up quicker, it's all about getting more done per game session.

BTW I don't see it as a bad thing if getting to T4 is a rare and difficult achievement. I just think the assumptions driving your calculations are implausible, which means reaching T4 in a deadly-ish campaign is not as rare as your numbers are predicting.

P. S. Harry Dresden's odds of having survived up to book 17 are perhaps less than 1%, but that's precisely what makes his adventures fun to read about and vicariously experience. As a player I like THOSE kinds of situations where you're badly outgunned and outnumbered and probably gonna die if you don't think of something quick. Just like I don't want to read a book about the other 364 days a year where Harry has everything under control, I don't want to waste play time on the easy and boring parts of a PC's life.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Where are your assumptions about leveling velocity coming from? I see that you are assuming DMG standard XP budgets every season, but I'm asking WHY you assume them (and also assume no "quest awards" or XP from treasure). It stands to reason that great risks bring great rewards. Die quicker OR level up quicker, it's all about getting more done per game session.

BTW I don't see it as a bad thing if getting to T4 is a rare and difficult achievement. I just think the assumptions driving your calculations are implausible, which means reaching T4 in a deadly-ish campaign is not as rare as your numbers are predicting.

Quick napkin math is quick napkin math. And using a well-established baseline.

XP from treasure isn't even a variant rule, it's a nebulous house rule with possible variation >>>>>>> any other factor. "Quest awards" also vary, but I've rarely seen them worth more than 1-2 medium encounters. And more risk means that you're not staying at 5%. The further you push, the more exponential that death rate grows.

And that second set of numbers is for a death rate per encounter. Which is what you pushed for (except you said 50%, not 5%). And any appreciable death rate per encounter means that either your "encounters per level" number is way off the standard or you're running the campaign of Theseus. Even 1% per encounter means that your chances of reaching level 11 (let alone higher) are minimal. Unless, of course, you play the "new characters come in at the same level as the old one died at and there aren't narrative consequences" card. In which case death is absolutely trivial and meaningless.

As a note, I don't personally use XP at all. Not even quest XP. Current policy (which is a bit too fast IMO, but I'm not changing it during a campaign) is 1 level per 3 sessions of active adventuring (except levels 1 and 2, which are 1 and 2 sessions respectively). Doesn't matter if they have 2 encounters or 25. More about simplification than anything (letting me use homebrew monsters for which I don't bother calculating CR for one thing, as well as giving incentives to avoid the "farming XP" mentality). Next set of campaigns I may either

1) actually try using XP stock. I've been wanting to do a "baseline" campaign (no feats, no multiclass, sticking to the DMG's guidance on treasure & XP, etc) for a while.
2) Pull back to something slower. Probably "sessions to next level == current level" through T1 and then 5-ish sessions per level after that.

[MaxWilson]

Quick napkin math is quick napkin math. And using a well-established baseline.

XP from treasure isn't even a variant rule, it's a nebulous house rule with possible variation >>>>>>> any other factor. "Quest awards" also vary, but I've rarely seen them worth more than 1-2 medium encounters. And more risk means that you're not staying at 5%. The further you push, the more exponential that death rate grows.

And that second set of numbers is for a death rate per encounter. (A) Which is what you pushed for (except you said 50%, not 5%). And any appreciable death rate per encounter means that either your "encounters per level" number is way off the standard or you're running the campaign of Theseus. Even 1% per encounter means that your chances of reaching level 11 (let alone higher) are minimal. (B) Unless, of course, you play the "new characters come in at the same level as the old one died at and there aren't narrative consequences" card. In which case death is absolutely trivial and meaningless.

(A) I think you're misremembering. Pushing for 50% per encounter doesn't sound like me. It would make all encounters the same, which is boring, and prevent you from having interesting social encounters. It sounds like bad pacing, and so I don't believe I ever said what you're saying I said. I said, "As a player I like games where 50% chance of death-from-math every single session exists."

(B) Or unless you're using character trees. (Originally popularized by Darksun in 2nd edition but still good for deadly 5E.) Or have access to resurrection.

Let's assume that you have a 50% chance to die each adventure with poor decision making, and a 5% chance to die from sheer bad luck even with good decision making. Assume further that each adventure takes one or two game sessions and yields enough XP for two levels. These numbers are reasonable because they approximate games that I run myself, although fitting an entire adventure into one or two game sessions requires good pacing and is still somewhat aspirational for me. (I'm still learning how to DM better.)

Then perfect play gives you a 0.95^10 = 60% chance of reaching 20th level after ten adventures (think: a ten-novel series), about fifteen game sessions. Terrible play gives you a 0.5^10 = 0.1% chance of making it to 20th level anyway. Perfect play is not likely achievable, but on the other hand death mitigators like Revivify can make up for imperfect play, so let's say a skilled but imperfect player can make it to 20th level about 40% of the time, after about fifteen sessions, if real life doesn't kill the campaign off first and if he doesn't get tired of the character.

I don't expect you to agree but to me that sounds like a fun campaign. It makes 20th level achievable but not something to take for granted, and answers the question of why the world isn't full of 20th level archmages: they died before they could get there, and lots of other people never even tried because they would rather stay home and grow crops than die too in crazy-dangerous adventures. In character, nobody sane wants to be Harry Dresden if they can help it.

[Tanarii]

Personally I'd rather have such a deadly campaign still progress only level 8-9 after 15 sessions (3-4 hours each), but your math does make some kind of sense given your inputs. Becoming a demigod that fast never feels right to me. OTOH that would only be 4-5 weeks by my standards. I might feel differently if it was monthly play.

Furthermore combat XP would be higher. As an example, if you feel that Deadly x3 combats, three times per "adventuring day" (long rest), two adventuring days per adventure, is really only a 5% chance of death per character ... combat XP alone would be significantly faster than a DMG 'standard' difficulty campaign.

[MaxWilson]

Personally I'd rather have such a deadly campaign still progress only level 8-9 after 15 sessions (3-4 hours each), but your math does make some kind of sense given your inputs. Becoming a demigod that fast never feels right to me. OTOH that would only be 4-5 weeks by my standards. I might feel differently if it was monthly play.

Wow, fifteen sessions in 4-5 weeks? For me that's more like a year and a half of play, or more if you don't focus exclusively on that one PC the whole time. Would you do ten adventures in those 4-5 weeks? I can't imagine writing ten adventures in a month. I don't have that kind of time or creativity.

Ideally, those ten adventures cover 5-10 years of game time. Like a series of ten novels or ten movies, each with an individual sense of closure but sometimes with connections back to previous adventures. The adventure is about the most bonkers week of the PCs' year, skipping over the 51 relatively calm and easy weeks where everything is under control.

That's how I like it, anyway. YMMV.

[Tanarii]

Wow, fifteen sessions in 4-5 weeks? For me that's more like a year and a half of play, or more if you don't focus exclusively on that one PC the whole time. Would you do ten adventures in those 4-5 weeks? I can't imagine writing ten adventures in a month. I don't have that kind of time or creativity.

Realistically as a player, probably more like 7-8 weeks, assuming i could find a DM running twice weekly or it was offical play.

And 1 adventure per session is my norm and the offical play norm when I last ran it. Also one long rest per session. Because its pickup and you'll never know who'll show up. And in 3-4 hours IMC most players could handle roughly 1-1/2 DMG adventuring days before they were at risk due to low resources. Otoh they also were at low risk once they'd stopped playing like it was AL and just waltzing into encounters blindly. (Mostly because assessing encounters, or even researching areas before going to them, meant not walking into Deadlyx3 encounters back to back, and they could pull out of the area before a TPK.)

I suspect if you'd played IMC you'd have been advocating to go in over your head, even if it meant you might have to pull out of the area early. ;)

4e had their adventure paths that were multiple sessions for official play, I ran a couple of those but the stopped in the weekly game store fornat at level 3. 5e has them published too but i never got to play or run one.

Ideally, those ten adventures cover 5-10 years of game time. Like a series of ten novels or ten movies, each with an individual sense of closure but sometimes with connections back to previous adventures. The adventure is about the most bonkers week of the PCs' year, skipping over the 51 relatively calm and easy weeks where everything is under control.

That's how I like it, anyway. YMMV.

How many encounters in an adventuring day (per long rest) is what interests me. Skipping time forward doesn't really have an impact if theres just one group of players/ characters.

[Cheesegear]

Some D&D players will reflexively use violence as a first choice.

Across my three groups that I DM, almost all players inevitably slide towards Neutral Evil (do whatever they can get away with) or Chaotic Neutral (do whatever is most advantageous for them).

My players - for the most part - are also incredibly poor role players. In a previous thread I asked how I can encourage my players to use a non-combat method to destroy monster in a room, and the response was simply 'Don't put something your players can tangibly fight, in the room.' It sounds obvious when you say it out loud.

The problem that the combat systems of D&D have always had is how to balance the amount of verisimilitude/realism, and how much pure gamism and abstraction to toss in for the sake of playability.

The problem with the combat system is that it's very clearly the most well-realised and most thought-out part of the rules. When all else fails, go to combat. It's just numbers.

When you're roleplaying your way through a social encounter; A lot of players simply wont know what to say. They wont know enough. They wont have the real world player intelligence or charisma to think up what to say to an NPC. It's guesswork a lot of the time.

The same with a puzzle. The players have to think like the DM. The DM has had all the time in the world to pre-plan and prepare their perfect puzzle. But the players can't solve it. So they get frustrated by the sandbag, and they resort to 'I want to break the puzzle.' and then the Barbarian uses his Greatsword to try and shatter the crystal orb that is the centrepiece of the puzzle.

Combat...Isn't that; Roll a dice. Hit. Deal Damage.

It's the easiest part of the game:
You don't have to interact with the DM, you don't have to guess how the DM has fudged a social DC.
You don't have to think your way through the problem or use environmental clues, or read dumb handouts that the DM gives out.

You attack, with the fixed numbers on your character sheet. Vs. the fixed numbers on the DM's statistics which you may or may not even know. There's no guesswork. It just happens.

"Kill the wolf" is one way, but in the riddle game you can't take it. "Kill the wolf" isn't the only way to solve this riddle in D&D, but it generally works.

See; Chaotic Neutral and Neutral Evil players.

"I think you guys are all about to die here," about 75% of the time they don't.

Usually if I let one of these slip out, one character dies.

I personally like to feel like I'm about 50% likely to die this game session

I'm still confused as to where you're pulling your percent chance-to-die from. How do you calculate that?

As a player I like THOSE kinds of situations where you're badly outgunned and outnumbered and probably gonna die if you don't think of something quick.

But people don't think of something quick.
They take half an hour to plan and prepare...Often that represents maybe 1-2 minutes of game time.

I've had an encounter start, where my six players took half an hour before the player with initiative even took their turn. As they were planning - out of game - who was to tackle which hostile, and whether or not it was worth burning abilities and spell slots on each specific hostile.

In game? Less than six seconds. Sure.
But that wasn't quick thinking. Not by a longshot. You might say that the characters figured out exactly what to do in less than six seconds the instant that the room and its occupants were revealed. But that only happened because of a crazy time dilation effect that allowed the characters to spend 30 minutes telepathically talking to each other, where 1 second in the real world equaled 5 minutes inside their heads.

As a note, I don't personally use XP at all. Not even quest XP. Current policy (which is a bit too fast IMO, but I'm not changing it during a campaign) is 1 level per 3 sessions of active adventuring (except levels 1 and 2, which are 1 and 2 sessions respectively).

If I use DMG methods of creating encounters, with Easy/Medium/Hard/Deadly, and 6-8 encounters per day.
...My players level up when I run out of ideas for the area they're in, for the level they're at.

When I run out of different ways to say "You come across six Kobolds." is when my players level up. It doesn't take long.

[MaxWilson]

I suspect if you'd played IMC you'd have been advocating to go in over your head, even if it meant you might have to pull out of the area early. ;)

...

How many encounters in an adventuring day (per long rest) is what interests me. Skipping time forward doesn't really have an impact if theres just one group of players/ characters.

My character would probably be advocating caution and a rational plan. At the same time, I as a player would be asking the DM to blindside me with a totally unexpected and improbable threat that will coincidentally render my precautions mostly useless and give me good war stories afterwards.

But I do want it acknowledged that this is an improbable threat and that those precautions make sense in situations other than this totally messed-up situation in find myself in.

I want to play adventures about... the D&D equivalent of Tremors, Aliens, or Snakes on a Plane.

I'm still confused as to where you're pulling your percent chance-to-die from. How do you calculate that?

A approximately 50/50 fight (by raw math) is any "fair" fight, where you're honestly not sure which side will win unless you know who's playing who. It's a DM's to roleplay monsters which generally means underplaying them to some degree, so this winds up favoring the players, but as a rough example I'll point to three CR 6 Onis and a CR 8 Mind Flayer Arcanist fighting two 7th level Evokers and two 7th level Barbarians. I'd call that a 50/50 fight in the sense that I could enjoy playing either side of it with the expectation of winning. Maybe I'd lose but it doesn't seem like a forgone conclusion. In contrast, a typical Medium/Hard/low Deadly encounter is a forgone conclusion, so slanted in the PCs' favor that the rational thing for the bad guys would be to just immediately run away, if they had all the facts. I don't know what the odds are on those but it's not 50/50.

In game? Less than six seconds. Sure.
But that wasn't quick thinking. Not by a longshot. You might say that the characters figured out exactly what to do in less than six seconds the instant that the room and its occupants were revealed. But that only happened because of a crazy time dilation effect that allowed the characters to spend 30 minutes telepathically talking to each other, where 1 second in the real world equaled 5 minutes inside their heads.

Yep. That's what I mean about players having an advantage over the DM's monsters. Monsters don't think in bullet time. PCs... sort of do. You can rationalize it as offscreen pre-planning, or just a consequence of being old comrades, or not rationalize it at all, or even try not to do it (just as the DM tries not to do it), but it's the one key asymmetric advantage players have, and they should, to keep the game fun. They don't need the math tilted in their favor on top of that via cakewalk encounters, or at least I don't want that.

Although 30 minutes is also way longer than I want to spend coming up with a plan. That only should happen when the players are just starting to get to know each other yet. Once the team gels, it should be closer to five minutes than thirty.

[Tvtyrant]

I prefer to die about once every campaign or two. Twice if I didn't die last campaign at all is fine.