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6 years ago ::
Sep 12, 2007 - 11:24AM
#11
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Date Joined:
May 22, 2006
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I too think that ressurection is too easy. How do a DM explain that some important NPCs dies permanently, when the death for the players is merely a small disadvantage.
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6 years ago ::
Sep 12, 2007 - 8:38PM
#12
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Date Joined:
Aug 10, 2009
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Morganti weapons.
>.>
<.<
:D
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6 years ago ::
Sep 12, 2007 - 8:57PM
#13
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Date Joined:
Dec 13, 2003
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I too think that ressurection is too easy. How do a DM explain that some important NPCs dies permanently, when the death for the players is merely a small disadvantage.
Make death harder, and resurrection can be a lot harder too. That handles that sort of problem easily. If done right, it will also make the PCs getting captured easier (they'll get taken prisoner instead of getting killed).
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6 years ago ::
Sep 12, 2007 - 9:09PM
#14
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Date Joined:
Aug 17, 2007
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Death and dying are difficult to deal with, even in a game. It is true that the more often it happens, the less impact it has, and the less incentive the player has to really role-play the character. I've been playing this game a long time, and I've probably only had about six characters permanently die with no hope of recovery. That compares to about twelve characters that I have played up to level 14. So I'm about 1/3 or a 33% death ratio.
BUT, the higher my characters have gotten, the less likely they have been to die. And the more painful it has been to lose one. I think the highest level character I had die was level 8. And that was really painful.
Since the game is designed to be fun, I tend not to try to kill players when I DM. In fact I have only killed a few. I'm probably too easy, but I don't see any point in killing a character because of a few unlucky dice rolls. At low levels I have nerfed critical hits that would kill a first level character outright simply because it did not advance the game or the enjoyment of the game. I consider it my job as DM to keep the game fun and interesting, and rolling up a new character every third or fourth session is neither fun nor interesting.
I actually really like the negative hit points equal to constitution score to die rule. That's a very clear, powerful and easy to apply rule. And it makes sense. In fact I think I'm going to adopt it for my future 3.5 campaigns.
I hope dying in 4.0 is more or less comparable to 3.5. I did not think dying was one of the broken parts of the game.
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6 years ago ::
Sep 12, 2007 - 10:47PM
#15
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Date Joined:
Nov 17, 2003
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Think of it this way ... how many stars of the show (aka PCs)actually died, in combat, during the six Star Wars movies? I can think of one: Qui-Gon Jinn. (Maul was a bad guy and thus not a PC.)
A high PC death count is BAD. Death should be infrequent in gaming.
1. If a PC dies, the rest of the group has to either drop the adventure entirely and go back to civilization to recruit a new member (which frequently takes a long time, to say nothing of the player making the character itself), or continue on the adventure with their numbers cut.
2. A high death count works against character development. If a character cannot be expected to stay in play, there's no reason to give it an interesting personality or put any effort into it, because you're going to die in two sessions and have to make it all over again.
3. The more frequent death is, the less of an impact it has. There's no drama, no interest ... you might not have even gotten to know the guy, IC, before his farm was bought. It goes from 'death of a comrade in arms who struggled with me against all odds' to 'we lost another redshirt'.
To each his own, but in the good fun of a forum debate:
I grant you that books and movies rarely have a main character die. I absolutely loathe that. The greatest movie ever made (Saving Private Ryan) had main characters die, the main character died. 300 ended in a TPK. Horror movies routinely kill off folks. This is not to say that my games have high death counts or that I even enjoy it when one does die. However, I do like the ever present chance that one will. Saga rules pretty much mean everyone keeps a force point back in case they are whacked, and so, cannot die as long as one of the party members survives, unless the DM is feeling particularly cruel and intentionally has NPCs perform a coup de gras over and over until the knocked out party member runs out of force points.
In response to your numbered points:
1. Or the party can meet up with someone in the middle of the adventure, like Qui Gon coming across Jar Jar.
2. High death count? DnD has never had a "get out of death free" action like Saga. If games did not have a high death count in 1e/2e/3e, why would they suddenly have them in 4e? I have certainly invested in my character's personality up to this point, why would the continued lack of a "get out of death free" action change that?
3. I am not advocating higher death counts than the game already has, which is pretty much determined by DM style anyway. My experience with Saga is that death of an individual character does not happen, only with TPK. There are no stories of "death of a comrade in arms" as all of the comrades die or nobody does. There are no stories of how one of my old PCs saw his twin brother (another PC) felled by a giant, and so, embittered him for the remainder of his career. No stories of another of my PCs who gave his life trying to rescue a village's babies about to be sacrificed by kuo toa. All stories are about success or the very rare occasion where the whole party dies and the whole campaign ends. Maybe I am just different in this, but many of my fondest memories of characters is not in how they lived, but rather, in how they died.
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6 years ago ::
Sep 12, 2007 - 11:32PM
#16
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Date Joined:
Aug 10, 2009
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BUT, the higher my characters have gotten, the less likely they have been to die. And the more painful it has been to lose one. I think the highest level character I had die was level 8. And that was really painful.
I've found this to be the exact opposite...the higher the level, the easier it is to die. With all the blasted save-or-die effects (which is debated elsewhere) and the sheer amounts of damage that can be dealt, the 10 HP buffer below 0 has less of an effect.
For instance, one of my favorite PCs, a Half-Orc Barbarian Cleric, died twice in one gaming session. I think he was around 12th level at the time. When you start taking 20+ points of damage per hit, that 0 to -10 mark is easy to miss. At higher levels, the damage becomes even more insane. I've routinely been hit for over 150hp of damage in one round from one opponent (granted, this character once did 119 points of damage with one attack, which is just how 3.5 is balanced). I started at 1st level and I'm around 17th level now and I think I've died 6 or 7 times getting there. Granted, it's partly do to character concept, but in 3.5 at higher levels, one bad roll (or good roll from the DM) can mean instant death to even a fully healed character.
Having said all that, having a get-out-of-death-free card in D&D seems wrong. I hate PC deaths and I think they need to be minimized to make the game fun. But to eliminate the chance of death provided the party survives (ie. Final Fantasy KO status) seems to take away the penalty of doing something stupid. However, the negative hitpoint value at which you finally die should be extended based on level. I'm not sure what a good number would be, but maybe extend by another 10 points every 5 levels or something. This would not effect when a PC becomes incapacitated in battle, but would make death less frequent. You still have to expend the healing resources to the PC out of his hit point debt, so it might not be as simple as throwing a CLW on him to get him up and moving again.
Dying sucks. It's usually not fun (although sometimes it is). But it's important. Playing D&D without death is like playing poker without chips...you're going to push your luck on every hand without worrying about the consequences.
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6 years ago ::
Sep 13, 2007 - 12:23AM
#17
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Date Joined:
Dec 13, 2003
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For people that don't think dying is common, I'm kinda curious about that.
What level do you start playing at? Because at low levels, dying is pretty common if the DM isn't very careful (which means making monsters act oddly) or fudging rolls now and then. At high levels, save or die/lose make dying common as well. High damage can also make death pretty common, which isn't cool.
Also, if the DM wants to capture the party, that is very, very hard without killing them (or making a bunch of guys that only capture people and can't do anything else). It would be nice if capturing could happen a bit spontaneously. Making death a bit rarer helps this (make it easier to knock people out instead of killing them).
Anyhow, imho, it would be good for the game to make expand the area where a person is taken out of the combat, but not dead (e.g. severely wounded). I love the condition track of SW for that reason.
-Drachasor
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6 years ago ::
Sep 13, 2007 - 11:18AM
#18
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Amen
Think of it this way ... how many stars of the show (aka PCs)actually died, in combat, during the six Star Wars movies? I can think of one: Qui-Gon Jinn. (Maul was a bad guy and thus not a PC.)
A high PC death count is BAD. Death should be infrequent in gaming.
1. If a PC dies, the rest of the group has to either drop the adventure entirely and go back to civilization to recruit a new member (which frequently takes a long time, to say nothing of the player making the character itself), or continue on the adventure with their numbers cut.
2. A high death count works against character development. If a character cannot be expected to stay in play, there's no reason to give it an interesting personality or put any effort into it, because you're going to die in two sessions and have to make it all over again.
3. The more frequent death is, the less of an impact it has. There's no drama, no interest ... you might not have even gotten to know the guy, IC, before his farm was bought. It goes from 'death of a comrade in arms who struggled with me against all odds' to 'we lost another redshirt'.
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6 years ago ::
Sep 13, 2007 - 11:20AM
#19
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We still use that rule. I think it is great to take into consideration a characters con when it gets to life or death situations.
A few years back, some people in the forums made up a rule (which became somewhat popular) in which the number of negative HPs was equal to the character's CON score. So for example, an elf with Con 8 had up to -8 HPs before dying, but, say, a dwarf with CON 20 had up to -20 HPs.
This allows characters to have potentially more than -10 HPs. This will make actual dying much less frequent for the majority of characters, but the rules should also make coming from dying/resurrection difficult to accomplish.
However the problems with that are, although the majority of characters will have 10 or more CON, those few that have less will be quite fragile (but then, that's what you get for putting a low score into CON, so don't do that if this character being fragile bothers you). The other supposed problem is that this rule makes above average CON that much more desirable than ever before.
I know that the negatives slightly outweighs the positives with this rule, but I just thought I'd mention it in case it is actually more balanced than I thought.
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6 years ago ::
Sep 13, 2007 - 1:56PM
#20
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Date Joined:
Aug 17, 2007
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Dying is an important part of the game. Or more precicely the potential of dying is an import part. I mean that the PCs must trust their DM to not be cavalier about encounters and nuke the PCs outright, however it should be a challenge. If you walk an encounter was it fun? Maybe the first time but not the next 17. If you jut barely survived or felt that at any moment the battle could turn on a knife's edge was that fun most certainly, but it was also stress full. Perhaps that means some battles should be easy (in current term CR = APL) and some should be tough (CR = APL + 3).
If the aprty goes adventuring and never feels they could have dyed then where was the chalenge why isn't everyone an adventurer? And if your PC does die perhaps that makes for some fun times getting back from the dead. Perhaps your PCs is now ghostly for a time, or the party can animate your corpse and you pay as the zombie version of you until you get back to town. Or you just roll up anew or wait to be brough back to town. Maybe you are eleceted as the guy who orders and picks up the pizza.
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