Dealing with highly lethal gameplay

[Wind Chime]

So assuming your campaign turns up to have a high degree of lethality because your GM wants things to be dark (because why not) and uber serious other that setting up a death-pool and generally finding morbid humour in it what other ways do you think Grizzled vets would find to distract themselves from the fact they are probably going die before the year's out?

[Torbyne]

Story reasons to be risking their lives? Is adventuring the only way to save someone, themselves, the only way to move stations in life etc. etc. Maybe they crack a little bit and cant stop. Maybe they know their violent tendencies would get them killed if they weren't out "saving" people by clearing dungeons.

Look at Darkest Dungeon, there are a lot of different motivations for the classes in the game but they all suffer for what they do.

[Oxylepy]

My players tend to die a lot. I don't try for them to die, they just tend to have very poor strategies when going into combat (I keep telling them they need to work on field control, not doing stupid things like walking into the clearing full of lizards, and working outside the notion of dealing damage as the only means of resolution). If your GM isn't just sadistic you may find a lot of options to come back from the dead. Otherwise you may just be up the creek and want to keep side characters you really want to play ready at all times (which works for my players well as they have ADHD).

On the side of coping with your characters dying, don't get too attached to them and view how long they survive as a testamont to their builds and your luck. Number of sessions survived becomes the target and bragging rights to the winner. Build OP characters and see who can push the envelope until they explode from being too powerful. Oh, and don't forget to get other characters killed in your place, one of my PCs holds a friends group record because he tends to survive because others die, or he does his best to get other PCs killed (usually because he has a drawback like zealot, a distaste for undead, is xenophibic, etc, which then leads to him trying to get others killed with his own hands clean of the crime).

[Wind Chime]

I generally play defensive builds and defensive character who tend to stay back and not die, this means my character has watched 3 of his original buddies die, as well as two of their replacements and I am wondering if I should start roleplaying my character as being affected by all this death and how to avoid going down a melodramatic PTSD route for it.

[Oxylepy]

Skip to acceptance. Begin to feel others are merely temporary, start considering them as little more than corpses in waiting. Become detached from the notion of life and death, and likely detached from others in general.

[DM_Blake]

Oxylepy wrote:

My players tend to die a lot.

How awful!

You must have a lot of empty chairs at your gaming table.

It can take me weeks to find a new player. Sometimes months. Lucky for me, almost all of my players have remained hale and healthy for a very long time now. Although, given the quantities of pizza and junk food we consume, maybe that won't always be the case...

[Oxylepy]

I think the problem may bd that they are not resistant to the rat poison I put in their food. Silly players.

[Gulthor]

"Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer."

Yeah, Darkest Dungeon immediately sprang to mind for me as well.

I assume they would distract themselves much as the heroes in DD do - gambling, lusting, drinking, flagellation, repentence, prayer...

[Larkspire]

Has your DM considered Hero points? My games are fairly dangerous, and generally over CR...but player's don't usually Die completely unless they are really unlucky or haven't been saving their hero points.

[Cacarrot]

A player of mine keeps having his character almost die, I haven't once gone out of my way to save him. This was like three different characters.

First time, he (the squishy caster) decided splitting the party was a good idea and got ambushed. It was him and an npc class merc vs a couple of constructs. He got knocked out and the merc had to carry him to safety.

Second time, he thought rushing ahead of Martial O'Stabigan to deliver a shocking grasp was a good idea.

Third time, he ran to the front of the battle, delivered a cone attack (for not much damage) against some enemies, and then was critted to be knocked to -6 hp. He then botched every stabalisation check. He only survived because the thief gave back what he stole to the robots, so the party stabalised him at 1 away from death.

Fourth time, party walks into room with tigerhawks. "Let's run past them instead of standing our ground." entire party gets wrecked. Almost tpk. Only survived because they managed to get to the other side and close the grate.

[Arbane the Terrible]

A theme song for your game. :D

My group also has a reckless player in it - his latest escapade involved his monk diving into a group of 'Adherers' (flypaper mummies, basically), relying on Freedom of Movement and sky-high AC to protect him. He got away with 6 HP left (out of 70-something) and no pants. I dunno if character or player will wise up before death...

[DM_Blake]

Reminds me of a time when 3rd edition was still shiny and new. My players opened a door and saw a room full of a half dozen girallons. Large 6-armed apes. The monk had just gained a level that gave him one more attack so he used his surprise round to jump into the middle of them. I even told him that he would get zero attacks in the surprise round and those 36 arms looked pretty big and strong and damaging.

He said "Bring it, they can't hit my AC!"

He was almost right. I think I only got something like 4-5 hits on the monsters' turn and he was still alive, though he'd lost at least 2/3 of his HP. So he decided to jump back out. I reminded him of the AoO rules and I even said "Well, given their difficulty hitting you, maybe the AoOs are not too much danger." But he decided not to risk it and full attacked instead.

And found out (again) why Flurry of Blows is often called Flurry of Misses (3.0 monks really, really sucked compared to core Pathfinder monks).

On round 2, none of the girallons were down yet. The wizard didn't fireball because that would have fried the monk, too. The group just watched as the 6 girallons pounded the wounded monk into Monkpaste (tm).

My friend rolled a new character that day. A fighter. He was MUCH happier with his fighter.

[PCScipio]

"There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots"