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Two days ago The Rules Lawyer posted a YouTube video called Why there’s a DM shortage in D&D. The cover picture shows angry young people exclaiming, "You Killed Us! You're a bad DM" and a subtitle, "Player Entitlement & The 'Illusion of Difficulty' Problem in D&D".
I do not seek to talk about Dungeons & Dragons, but I am curious about the Illusion of Difficulty, because I have not experienced it. Does it happen in Pathfinder?
The Illusion of Difficulty is the GM setting up an encounter that has little risk of killing a PC but gives the impression that the party is in great danger. The issue came up because a DM posted about his unease in having killed a PC in a challenging encounter against a lich. The lich cast Power Word Kill. A lot of players commenting in the forum advocated that a lich should never use Power Word Kill despite it being in its stat block. Apparently, if the enemy is capable of killing a PC, then they should hold back because killing a PC would be going too far.
I have not had a player death in my campaigns since an unlucky pair of dice rolls during Spires of Xin-Shalast, the 6th module in Rise of the Runelords, back in 2012. My players prefer teamwork that protects their teammates. If a player character is at risk, that character is encouraged to back off and let the rest of the party take the brunt of the enemy damage, and if a player character is down, they will defend and heal that character immediately.
Furthermore, my players love tactics, so they are excited by a challenge in which straightforward hack-and-slash combat would lose, but a little cleverness in exploiting an enemy's blind spots quickly turns the tables. In evaluating those blind spots and weaknesses, they accurately judge the true difficulty of the encounter.
My wife did point out that she can rely on me to give level-appropriate encounters, so the players know that they can beat the challenge no matter how scary it seems (or that if I intended for them to run, then I would have foreshadowed warnings). I view that as Balanced Difficulty rather than Illusion of Difficulty. And she would expect a lich with Power Word Kill to cast Power Word Kill.
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I'm not a fan of player deaths because of lone bad rolls or randomness, but if the PCs are fighting a higher level boss opponent (especially in PF2) the chance of death isn't out of the question.
That said, as a GM and player I usually prefer there to be some in place narrative reason that the PCs can quickly overcome death (if the player wants). It sucks to lose a character you're invested in, and I don't want to see a treadmill of characters coming in because of PC death.
So...don't pull punches but also have something set up so that death isn't permanent and doesn't mean losing the character (unless the player wants) and also that the time the player doesn't have access to their character is minimized. Because no one wants to wait 6 sessions for their character to be resurrected while the party is having fun and you sit on the sidelines.
Ideal game rules:
Even encounters with low risk of character death have enough stakes and tension that it causes engagement. This could be the 'illusion of difficulty' type of idea to use that terminology.
Personally I don't like the idea of setting up something where a character dies due to random chance. It should be a deliberate game decision - by the player ideally, or by the GM if the GM wants to go that route with their game (which would justify the accusation by players that the GM is doing something wrong if the players are not on board with a gritty game where character death is something that can happen without player's acceptance).
All games have the illusion of difficulty because they have a GM. The GM chooses how many enemies and hazards the party faces and what kind. They can kill the PCs at any time, but choose not to in order to maintain the illusion of the game.
Yeah, that is absolutely true.
It's mostly the "gentleman's agreement" that keeps a GM from saying "Here's 6 Terrasques, have fun!"
Of course that would be a very obvious example of GM trying to kill players and not keeping the illusion of difficulty. That's obviously overkill for any party.
But a GM can be more subtle and give challenges that look like they can be beaten, but cannot.
But ignoring that a GM can do anything they want, and assuming the GM is trying to follow the "normal" expectations for the game that is setting reasonable challenges....well you might call that the illusion of challenge.
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Unlike some of you, I've never had a player death.
I have had a GM death though, and the whole campaign died right along with him. :(
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Dude, there are so many "random and bad dice" deaths happening in the real world... if I tell you what happens here in Rio de Janeiro you'll freak out lol! But come on, the villain must kill the hero. It's stupid to see this opportunity arise in the media and not be executed by script and not by the hero's cunning or preparation (hi Batman!) On the contrary, sometimes the hero dies and people (especially RPG players) say: "What a stupid thing!" and point out (correctly) countless ways to get rid of such a fate. Let's delve deeper into the hobby, well, the basis of RPG, and RPGs use dice of various numbers, generally these numbers go from a lower value (which usually means s!&&!), to a higher value (which usually means "suck it GM!"), this randomness must be respected and accepted, the moment you sit down to play or narrate, no crying, or as we call it here in Brazil "whining". Now, getting to the poor Lich, regardless of whether I know or how this magic works (and I really don't), the only thing I'm against is there being no way for the character to escape the death effect. If it deals damage or reduces the damage, and the character still dies, ok, it happens. Now if it's something like, "Look here. You died," then I get irritated. If it's something narrative, the story and the GM must have a way to indicate the path to such an outcome, death, since this is a game and "we're watching from above" what happens, there has to be a way to at least try to get rid of death. Well, I don't know if you understood, there's the translator issue that can complicate things and I don't know if that's exactly what's being discussed, but it's also my fault, I didn't read your entire text, nor the answers from other users. Sorry. Well, that's it.
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I like deadly encounters personally, when I GM I do say from the start that character death is on the table. I will play the enemies as I think they would do, like zombies just attacking the closest thing of them while trained mercenaries would be targeting healers and using more advanced tactics.
Last character death... last month, against drug smugglers that the boss had a trained red wyvern, the Barbarian critically failed the fireball breath and took some more blows as it was the only one in the front.
But I am aware that most others tables GMs avoid players deaths at all costs.
Well, I would say the closest thing to the illusion of difficulty in this game is players trying to do everything by themselves and ignoring that this is a team game that requires tactics and working together to overcome challenges.
And while I have not had PC deaths in my campaigns that I have ran, I have had PCs die, and I have seen other PCs die in gameplay, and part of that is because I am aware of two of the biggest things that cause PC deaths.
The first is Attacks of Opportunity. If you have both injured PCs as well as spellcasters and healers in range of such foes, it basically becomes a war of attrition where the PCs have to burn the threat down, since the PCs can't retreat or sustain themselves without reprisal. When the entire party gets surrounded by a bunch of Rune Giants who hit hard and have a ton of Reach and reactions on the first person to trigger, it's a death sentence. And before we claim "well, only 15% of enemies have AoOs," the scaling is lopsided based on party level.
The second is Absurd Spellcaster Enemies. The ones that have such high of Spell DCs and access to super strong Incapacitate spells that they can literally shut down a group of PCs in a matter of two turns. Or, if the PCs do manage to survive the initial onslaught, become so debilitated and weak that they can't serve a serious threat to the enemy.
Was this more relevant to paid GM/DMs and the expectations of their services?
I dont see this applying to groups that are just friends playing the game with a GM thats also just a friend playing the game.
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Unlike some of you, I've never had a player death.
I have had a GM death though, and the whole campaign died right along with him. :(
I had tried to write "player character" instead of "player" when talking about character death, but alas, I missed a case. :-)
Also unfortunately, I had the death of a player. A player who had played the fighter Kheld in my Iron Gods campaign made a champion Ishmael for my Ironfang Invasion campaign that began October 2019. Six weeks later he was in the hospital with brain cancer and three months after that he was dead.
Death is on my mind today. My mother died yesterday. She was 90 years old and in hospice care for cancer.
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Unlike some of you, I've never had a player death.
I have had a GM death though, and the whole campaign died right along with him. :(
I had tried to write "player character" instead of "player" when talking about character death, but alas, I missed a case. :-)
Also unfortunately, I had the death of a player. A player who had played the fighter Kheld in my Iron Gods campaign made a champion Ishmael for my Ironfang Invasion campaign that began October 2019. Six weeks later he was in the hospital with brain cancer and three months after that he was dead.
Death is on my mind today. My mother died yesterday. She was 90 years old and in hospice care for cancer.
My condolences Mathmuse.
Losing a parent is painful.| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Was this more relevant to paid GM/DMs and the expectations of their services?
I dont see this applying to groups that are just friends playing the game with a GM thats also just a friend playing the game.
This related to Dungeons & Dragons' Challenge Rating system. Back when I ran Pathfinder 1st Edition games, I knew that Pathfinder's CR was not perfect. I would compare the abilities of the opponent to the strengths and weaknesses of the party and adjust the CR accordingly for accurate encounter difficulty. Apparently, the CR system in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is even less accurate.
The Rules Lawyer added in his Discord group that D&D 5e DM's often have to adjust the difficulty of an encounter in the middle of combat. Thus, the particular DM who made the original post about tyhe lich felt guilty about playing a lich at full power rather than nerfing it with an idiot ball in the middle of combat. The main point of the video is that Dungeons & Dragons 5e had very heavy expectations on their DMs, even the casual ones running the game for fun.
My one outing in running a Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign was running Jewel of the Indigo Isles by Battlezoo. The opponents and monsters in that adventure were all created by the Battlezoo people. I adjusted a few encounters for flavor, but Battlezoo's CRs seemed accurate. The errors in the CRs might not be innate to the D&D 5e rule system.
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First: My condolences Mathmuse. Losing close family members can be rough (I've been through it with my father and my sister).
Second, some context: I started gaming back in the early '80s when character deaths were considered as an expected possibility. Even the "Gygaxian" no save/no returning to life types of death such as in the original Tomb of Horrors. There was even the whole "try to get your character killed so you can roll up a better one" with some groups.
To some extent, I am still of the opinion that the possibility of "failure" (to include character death) is a necessary thing; otherwise, there is no sense of challenge or any real "success." That doesn't mean that a GM should actively try to kill characters (they will "win" in the end, but it often causes out of game problems), but they shouldn't try to be over-protective of the PCs either.
As far as the example of the lich with power word kill goes, high level characters will have options for being raised or resurrected when they are killed. All that a "random" death does at that level is burn some time/resources.
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The Illusion of Difficulty is the GM setting up an encounter that has little risk of killing a PC but gives the impression that the party is in great danger. The issue came up because a DM posted about his unease in having killed a PC in a challenging encounter against a lich. The lich cast Power Word Kill. A lot of players commenting in the forum advocated that a lich should never use Power Word Kill despite it being in its stat block. Apparently, if the enemy is capable of killing a PC, then they should hold back because killing a PC would be going too far.
I don't like player death (on either side of the GM screen) and try to tune encounters so it's unlikely... but this is silly. If the enemies aren't trying to win the encounter and there's no risk of the PCs losing, why does that encounter exist? There's no reward in victory if there's no risk of failure.
The illusion of difficulty is to make it feel like the risk is higher to the players than it actually is. That makes players feel good. But players aren't fools: the illusion only works if there is enough difficulty to make it believable. If a Lich isn't using its abilities to try and kill the players to win the fight, then that doesn't work.
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Was this more relevant to paid GM/DMs and the expectations of their services?
I dont see this applying to groups that are just friends playing the game with a GM thats also just a friend playing the game.
This related to Dungeons & Dragons' Challenge Rating system. Back when I ran Pathfinder 1st Edition games, I knew that Pathfinder's CR was not perfect. I would compare the abilities of the opponent to the strengths and weaknesses of the party and adjust the CR accordingly for accurate encounter difficulty. Apparently, the CR system in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is even less accurate.
The Rules Lawyer added in his Discord group that D&D 5e DM's often have to adjust the difficulty of an encounter in the middle of combat. Thus, the particular DM who made the original post about tyhe lich felt guilty about playing a lich at full power rather than nerfing it with an idiot ball in the middle of combat. The main point of the video is that Dungeons & Dragons 5e had very heavy expectations on their DMs, even the casual ones running the game for fun.
My one outing in running a Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign was running Jewel of the Indigo Isles by Battlezoo. The opponents and monsters in that adventure were all created by the Battlezoo people. I adjusted a few encounters for flavor, but Battlezoo's CRs seemed accurate. The errors in the CRs might not be innate to the D&D 5e rule system.
I was thinking if my friends and I hired a GM there would be different expectations we would have for that GM than they would have for me running the game. For this I mean basic professionalism and understanding of the system to provide the experience that is expected from the outset of the game or understood by the way the paid GM says they run games. The expectations on me are far less than that.
That said the specific example of the litch using power word kill is a legit death. Its a litch, super intelligent undead wizards should utilize thier spells as best as they can to kill the players. Its on the players who decided to engage in this encounter to survive it and win the day. it has the spell and had an opportunity to use it. Nothing wrong with that.
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As a player:
If I can't fail, then I can't succeed.
If death is off the table, why do y'all need me here?
As a GM:
I'm somewhere between a storyteller and a simulationist. I have a story that I want to tell, but then I'm going to run everything else with as much verisimilitude as I can muster. That means that there may be some "unfair" things that happen if you mess with the wrong people and get in over your head.
But this is one reason I go with published APs rather than homebrewing encounters -- I am trusting the professionals to provide balance. Then I just run the adversaries with the tactics and approach that make sense for them, without worrying about holding back.
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The binary being set up here is really goofy to me.
Why can't I make a difficult encounter that doesn't necessarily end in character death? There's a lot going on in an adventure, killing a character is not the only way for the party to have a setback or fail.
It's kind of disappointing, especially for a major content creator promoting the game, to suggest that's the only way to create difficulty and seems remarkably uncreative.
Second, the specific example here is especially extreme. Can I be okay with trying to kill players normally but not a fan of PW:K? For anyone unfamiliar with the mechanics of the spell, Power Word Kill costs an action and if the target is under a certain health total they die without any save. It's a raw health total, not a percentage, so a player with a low enough maximum HP may always be vulnerable to the spell.
Am I being a fraud if I'm okay with the Lich casting finger of death or fireball but don't really like the spell that automatically kills someone in a run of the mill encounter?
Third, are we really supposed to believe that this is the cause of GM shortages? That we'd have hordes of willing GMs, unintimidated by the overhead involved, as long as they had plenty of opportunities to kill player characters without judgement?
Fourth... Player entitlement, really? The use of 'entitlement' here implies some unjustified demanding of undeserved benefits, but is it that unreasonable that some players might not want to play in a high-risk game? Or any other feature of tone or style that fits their preferences? The phrasing and juxtaposition suggests that the hypothetical player in this case is somehow playing the game incorrectly, when what's actually being described is more of a mismatch of tonal preferences.
On every level here the premise just strikes me as remarkably stupid and setting up an either-or that doesn't actually exist.
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The illusion of difficulty is to make it feel like the risk is higher to the players than it actually is. That makes players feel good. But players aren't fools: the illusion only works if there is enough difficulty to make it believable. If a Lich isn't using its abilities to try and kill the players to win the fight, then that doesn't work.
That.
There's always a bit of illusion of difficulty, as most GMs will sometimes pull their punches for a reason or another (or just give some bonuses to players, like giving a HP to the player who rolled only 1s).But for the illusion to work, there must be character deaths. Without them, you have to constantly trick your players and it won't forever work. Killing a PC during combat is an important act and moment, it must be done properly, but if it never happens then there's no more feeling of danger and that's worse than a character death.
There's a lot going on in an adventure, killing a character is not the only way for the party to have a setback or fail.
You'll have to be massively imaginative, because failing a mission, having to run away or other similar setbacks are nothing compared to a character death. Even losing most of your equipment is a mild setback.
Besides character death, the only way to say "You failed!" that really resonates like a failure is level loss. Well, you also have the sadistic types of failures, like mutilation, attribute loss, feat removal and other things like that but I find these solutions more creepy than effective.
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The issue came up because a DM posted about his unease in having killed a PC in a challenging encounter against a lich. The lich cast Power Word Kill.
So, this almost kinda sorta happened to me in a campaign.
In our case it was PF2, it was a demilich, and it cast Wail of the Banshee.
We were a level 13 party, it was a level 15 enemy ("Moderate") and it has extreme spell DC (strong caster theme) and it's using a 9th rank spell so actually reaching a shelf higher than it's monster level would suggest.
Because of the way the Foundry game was set up, I could see by how much I missed or made the save. I had to roll a 10 on the save not to critically fail. I didn't do that. I hero pointed, and still critically failed. Well, there was a roughly 1/4 chance of that outcome, that happens. It was enough damage + drain to take me from full health to dead. I felt a bit bamboozled.
Except that's not the whole story.
We walked into the room. Saw the monster. Made a Recall Knowledge to know what might happen. And then had a choice - back out before the thing gets a turn and lets loose, or try to swarm it and hope one of us crits the AoO to block the wail. (And we didn't quite know the wail would be quite that bad.)
Well, unlucky. We hit some of the AoOs but no crits. So I took enough damage to go to 0HP and die immediately, because it's a death effect. The witch with Breath of Life couldn't help because it's a death effect.
Later on, I realized that actually the champion's Retributive Strike would have been just enough to keep me at single digit HP. In any event, I got raised and life went on. It was actually the only PF2 death I've seen in a looong time.
So when you look at how many layers there were to that death, you can hardly call it a blind shot out of nowhere. And I think that's the important thing. It's not fun to just randomly die because you lost an initiative roll. But if you made multiple chances and you were just unlucky several times in a row, that's another thing.
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You'll have to be massively imaginative, because failing a mission, having to run away or other similar setbacks are nothing compared to a character death.
You really don't. Like you literally just listed a couple of options that work fine, and often even lead to more interesting outcomes than character death. It's pretty easy.
Even calling them alternatives to character death I feel is misleading, because I wouldn't put character death at the top of the list in the first place. Sometimes it can be dramatic or impactful, but other times it's just kind of annoying.
Depending on how you're handling replacement characters it might not even really be a setback at all.
But for the illusion to work, there must be character deaths. Without them, you have to constantly trick your players and it won't forever work
Like I just can't agree with this at all. It might be partly a mindset thing though. The idea that you have to kill characters or "trick" your players. Like, why are you tricking them in the first place? Just give them hard, interesting encounters and good story beats, the difficulty, challenge, and tension comes naturally. No tricking required.
The idea that you need some kill quota to maintain tension in a game is just really bizarre to me. I don't think I've ever experienced anything like that as a GM or player, outside a couple games in the mold of Tomb of Horrors, but those types of games tend to make death cheap, not meaningful.
Continuing my previous thoughts - I got pulled away for IRL stuff.
Pathfinder2e:
It isn't necessarily an ideal set of game rules for this topic. There are things like Power Word Kill that can kill a character just from a couple of bad dice rolls without much warning , or recourse .
However, I think that PF2 is pretty good at it.
There are things like Hero Points and Heroic Recovery. Which RAW may not prevent character death, but is an easy houserule hook to say that you can use it to prevent character death entirely from that encounter as long as the character stays unconscious for the remainder of the fight. There is still the possibility of TPK, but barring that, the rest of the characters can use their normal recovery means to patch up their critically injured but not dead allies.
And PF2 is pretty good at signposting the difficulty of a battle. The wording of the Combat Threat ratings and Choosing Creatures table descriptions could be a bit clearer that they are serious that when you pick an extreme difficulty (for either the encounter as a whole, or for a particular creature in the combat), the risk of character death is pretty high.
The binary being set up here is really goofy to me.
Why can't I make a difficult encounter that doesn't necessarily end in character death? There's a lot going on in an adventure, killing a character is not the only way for the party to have a setback or fail.
It's kind of disappointing, especially for a major content creator promoting the game, to suggest that's the only way to create difficulty and seems remarkably uncreative.
This is an excellent point. My players are so good at defense that they risk death only on incredibly bad luck. Instead, their true risk is failure at their mission.
For example, in Assault on Longshadow the PCs defend the city of Longshadow from the Ironfang Invasion. If Longshadow fell, then the PCs would probably escape alive, because they are the toughest people in the city. They won't die. But they could lose. They could even have a pyrrhic victory in which the city is ravaged despite driving off invaders and many of their friends die.
Of course, this requires that the PCs care about their mission. In Jade Regent, my PCs truly wanted the Amatatsu heir on the Jade Throne of Minkai. In Iron Gods, my PCs wanted to stop Unity from gaining godlike power. In Ironfang Invasion, my PCs wanted to stop the invasion. In Fistful of Flowers, A Few Flowers More, and two homebrew chapters, they wanted to save people in trouble or stop a disaster. In the Skitter Shot and the rest of that Starfinder series, they wanted to rescue people or perform scientific research. In Strength of Thousands, um, they want to study magic and pass their classes at the Magaambya Academy. Well, we are in the 1st module, so they have time to develop a heroic goal, probably involving magical support to communities in the Mwangi Expanse.
My motto as a GM is that my job is to give the players opportunities to demonstrate that their characters are awesome. They can still do that without risk. Fistful of Flowers begins with detective work. The all-leshy party is not at risk, but some leshy children disappered and could be at risk. So the PCs combined their abilities and tracked down the childre, with some combat and some risk along the way. Success at detective work was awesome. Though ... that success did require improvisation on my part because their efforts did not always fit standard rules. Fortunately, that improvisation was selecting skills and DCs for their checks rather than deciding on success or failure.
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The binary being set up here is really goofy to me.
Why can't I make a difficult encounter that doesn't necessarily end in character death? There's a lot going on in an adventure, killing a character is not the only way for the party to have a setback or fail.
It's kind of disappointing, especially for a major content creator promoting the game, to suggest that's the only way to create difficulty and seems remarkably uncreative.
Second, the specific example here is especially extreme. Can I be okay with trying to kill players normally but not a fan of PW:K? For anyone unfamiliar with the mechanics of the spell, Power Word Kill costs an action and if the target is under a certain health total they die without any save. It's a raw health total, not a percentage, so a player with a low enough maximum HP may always be vulnerable to the spell.
Am I being a fraud if I'm okay with the Lich casting finger of death or fireball but don't really like the spell that automatically kills someone in a run of the mill encounter?
Third, are we really supposed to believe that this is the cause of GM shortages? That we'd have hordes of willing GMs, unintimidated by the overhead involved, as long as they had plenty of opportunities to kill player characters without judgement?
Fourth... Player entitlement, really? The use of 'entitlement' here implies some unjustified demanding of undeserved benefits, but is it that unreasonable that some players might not want to play in a high-risk game? Or any other feature of tone or style that fits their preferences? The phrasing and juxtaposition suggests that the hypothetical player in this case is somehow playing the game incorrectly, when what's actually being described is more of a mismatch of tonal preferences.
On every level here the premise just strikes me as remarkably stupid and setting up an either-or that doesn't actually exist.
Well, what was presented was the idea that players are saying "Apparently, if the enemy is capable of killing a PC, then they should hold back because killing a PC would be going too far." People are largely responding to that, because it's pretty ridiculous, and that's what almost every reply is effectively about.
But yeah, there's nuance. PW:K as designed in the other system is a poor design because it can simply go "I cast this, you die." That's not fun or dramatic.
GM shortages have tons of reasons, though I don't think "I don't get to kill enough players" is very high on the list if its on there at all. Players expecting things to be asymmetrical where they can use instant-kill spells but the GM can't might be, though. I know my regular GM has a couple of spells where we have a "if you don't use these, I won't either" agreement because they're problematic in some way like that, but if we suddenly decide that now we're going to bust it out, it doesn't make a ton of sense for the BBEG to decide to treat us with kid gloves.
It can definitely be a point of friction between players and GMs on where difficulty should be, though. Players may not want a game that is super stressful or overly difficult, especially if they don't want to worry about optimization. GMs may find that limiting or boring, since if they need to make things constantly "you can't possibly lose" easy, is there a point in running these encounters at all?
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Storytime from me.
I think the most egregious 'your character just gets to die through random chance' that I saw was from a houserule. A D&D3.5 houserule: Crits didn't need to be confirmed, but you would also fumble on a nat-1. The fumble chart was mostly humorous, but did involve damaging allies or self. And most notably, the fumble chart had '00-0 - 00-5 = character dies from self-inflicted injury'.
So... a flat 5% chance of nat-1 followed by a flat 5% chance of character death. Results in a 1/400 chance, or a flat 0.25% chance of the character spontaneously self-destructing.
Crude estimates - Assuming that you are making 1 attack roll per round, that is only 400 rounds of combat that you are expected to survive through. Considering how AO and iterative attacks are a thing, that is probably quite a bit less. And using binomial probability instead of raw probability estimates, about half of the characters would self-destruct before making 300 attacks
So if a character is making 5 attacks per combat and you need 10 combat encounters to level up, that means that half of the characters will die to the fumble chart before they reach level 6 and most of them will die before they reach level 8.
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I don't like death that comes out of nowhere.
For example. Plenty of monsters can hit you and put you to 0HP. Not ideal but part of the job.
Some monsters use death effects. If you're fighting a monster that's doing death effects right from the start, you know that you really need to watch your HP because this combat is extra dangerous.
But you could also have an enemy that after five rounds of fighting normally suddenly pulls a Vampiric Touch out of a hat and does a death effect to you. I don't like that one.
Storytime from me.
I think the most egregious 'your character just gets to die through random chance' that I saw was from a houserule. A D&D3.5 houserule: Crits didn't need to be confirmed, but you would also fumble on a nat-1. The fumble chart was mostly humorous, but did involve damaging allies or self. And most notably, the fumble chart had '00-0 - 00-5 = character dies from self-inflicted injury'.
So... a flat 5% chance of nat-1 followed by a flat 5% chance of character death. Results in a 1/400 chance, or a flat 0.25% chance of the character spontaneously self-destructing.
Crude estimates - Assuming that you are making 1 attack roll per round, that is only 400 rounds of combat that you are expected to survive through. Considering how AO and iterative attacks are a thing, that is probably quite a bit less. And using binomial probability instead of raw probability estimates, about half of the characters would self-destruct before making 300 attacks
So if a character is making 5 attacks per combat and you need 10 combat encounters to level up, that means that half of the characters will die to the fumble chart before they reach level 6 and most of them will die before they reach level 8.
Wow that's bad. I don't know why people think rules like that are a good idea.
Worst one I saw was when I was a GM in 3.5. Party came into a room, didn't notice the advanced wyvern that was hiding in there. They didn't notice it enough that it got a surprise round, which it used to close to melee distance. It won initiative, so it went first.
It did a full attack, and I rolled four nat 20 crits in a row. That was enough to take the player being attacked from full to dead. Bear in mind this is round 1, turn 1, of a fight they didn't know they were in until the creature appeared next to them and started swinging.
I fudged the last crit down to a hit, leaving the person down but not dead. That at least gave people a chance to either grab them and run, or heal them back into the fight. It kept the tension up and kept the player engaged. Dying like that is basically a "pull out your phone for the next while" situation, and when you had no way to avoid it except "roll better", thats just lame.
It's also why I'm upfront as a GM about reserving the right to fudge rolls. I almost never do it, but if something that ridiculous happens, I might. Some players hate that and they know not to come to my table, heh.
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Wow that's bad. I don't know why people think rules like that are a good idea.
It doesn't even have to be a house rule. There are game systems where this happens. I played ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System) for a while as a caster. I eventually determined that I had a better than 1 in 400 chance of my caster blowing themselves up every time they cast a spell. I pointed this out to the GM and he didn't seem to think it was a problem. Eventually I did something heroic to save another character and my character literally lost his sanity. I had to do a hard walk away from that game. The GM in question still doesn't think there is a problem. Which is frustrating as the issue is real and a total blocker for me.
Later game updates have created options where you can avoid the problem but only if you really know what you are doing and only in particular circumstances. The general case is still stuffed.
These sorts of game mechanics are only a good idea for short run games.
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Wow that's bad. I don't know why people think rules like that are a good idea.It doesn't even have to be a house rule. There are game systems where this happens. I played ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System) for a while as a caster. I eventually determined that I had a better than 1 in 400 chance of my caster blowing themselves up every time they cast a spell. I pointed this out to the GM and he didn't seem to think it was a problem. Eventually I did something heroic to save another character and my character literally lost his sanity. I had to do a hard walk away from that game. The GM in question still doesn't think there is a problem. Which is frustrating as the issue is real and a total blocker for me.
Later game updates have created options where you can avoid the problem but only if you really know what you are doing and only in particular circumstances. The general case is still stuffed.
These sorts of game mechanics are only a good idea for short run games.
I pulled out Arms Law and Claw Law the other day to show my current players the insanity of Rolemasters combat system. (Separate combat tables for *each* weapon. 5 levels of crits (which also applied to fumbles) in several different flavors. Death is always at least a 1% chance if you went to the crit table, and there were permanent injuries which might even have been worse.)
It's fine if that's what you're signing up for, but you know, back in the day we didn't even *name* characters until they hit 2nd level. I've definitely seen characters die in a shorter amount of game time than it took to create them in the first place.
It is a reasonable approach, but I prefer some harder mechanics as well. Personally I think it is necessary for more technically minded players. We need a range of games.
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I pulled out Arms Law and Claw Law the other day to show my current players the insanity of Rolemasters combat system. (Separate combat tables for *each* weapon. 5 levels of crits (which also applied to fumbles) in several different flavors. Death is always at least a 1% chance if you went to the crit table, and there were permanent injuries which might even have been worse.)
It's fine if that's what you're signing up for, but you know, back in the day we didn't even *name* characters until they hit 2nd level. I've definitely seen characters die in a shorter amount of game time than it took to create them in the first place.
Yep just looking at the raw numbers the only way to win the combat is to not play. Eventually it is going to get your character.
That is realistic though probably not deadly enough, but the whole reason we accept the hit point concept in D20 is because it enables heroism the gameplay.
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I like the Death Flag mechanic from Raising the Stakes. It allows each player to choose when they are at risk, with mechanical pros and cons.
I think most games with indepth character creation and heroic fantasy like PF2e should just adopt the Fabula Ultima approach: You choose when your character dies. If you choose for your character to live the bad guys advance plans. If you choose for your character to die it decelerates the bad guys plans as you sacrifice yourself.
Maybe in PF3e we’ll see something like that.
Yeah that's a cool approach. I know I've had character deaths that were utterly meaningless and frustrating. Sometimes we were high enough level to get resurrected, but that resulted in "oh you're taking penalties for the next 4 sessions because of that nat 1, have fun!"
Other times I've been prepared for it and willing to have death happen because it was either that important to my character, or would have been a big dramatic moment. Like we're currently talking about doing a follow up to a previous campaign, and far as my Bard is concerned, that only ends one way... but if you take your ancient, hated enemy with you and free the world from their evil, then it's worth it.
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It might be partly a mindset thing though.
It definitely is. Some players want death to be on the table, some players dislike it.
I recently had a character death in a bounty (no one expected it but level 1 is deadly when the dice are against you). The GM tried to save my character, I refused. The party also refused.
Character death is not funny, it's not supposed to be. It's frustrating and it's meant to be frustrating. Frustration is a core part of game design, there are countless books written about it.
And mission failed or having to run away isn't frustrating, it just happens, sometimes even when you succeed ("Your princess is in another castle!" trope). Also, I've never seen a GM closing their AoA book 2 stating: "You failed the mission, the world is destroyed, it's over. What do we play next?". So if you want to continue the campaign then the players can never really fail the mission.
I'm a competitive player. If death is on the table then the game can be frustrating then there's something at stake then I have my dose of adrenaline. If death is not on the table then I move on (I dislike to play with GMs who don't kill PCs). Obviously, there's the illusion of difficulty that is important: As long as a GM hasn't neither killed nor saved a character the question is still open as if they can kill characters. It's useful at first but it can only go so far as at some point the GM will have to unfold its game.
As a side note, I far prefer to play with a GM who can kill characters but with a low difficulty setting than with a GM who can't kill characters with a high difficulty setting. Difficulty only exists if you can lose, otherwise it's just a bad illusion.
Now, I fully respect players who hate character deaths. To each their own. But when TRL speaks about death, I know why. Death is the ultimate failure, the top level of frustration.
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I think character deaths should be meaningful. They won't always be, but in the best case you know you made a wrong decision (or multiple) and paid for it.
Pathfinder2 is not OSR though, creating a character takes time and effort, and i appreciate GMs telegraphing risks.
Having the whole group limping out of a boss fight victorious feels like the ultimate goal of game balance, and due to how dice work the risk of death has to be on the table for that.
From a certain level, resurrection is something that is possible, and i often experienced that players that were quite angry about their character dying later decided not to be brought back.
It's quite costly and i wonder if GMs silently give out extra treasure to nivellate the costs or if a group with a certain number of deaths + resurrections would just be permanently weaker.
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5e sets you up for illusory difficulty.
Running out of HP isn't as dangerous as it sounds. Instead of going into a death spiral, someone casts Healing Word as a bonus action and you're right back into combat.
Secondly, the difficulty balance is a mess. It's almost impossible to know whether something will be a fair challenging encounter. The only reliable way to make a combat exciting is to leave yourself some wiggle room. Maybe the enemy gets its HP total adjusted on the fly. Maybe you fudge some dice. Maybe there are enemy reinforcements who turn up sooner or later or not at all, depending on how the combat is going.
Pathfinder 2 is more balanced, which sets you up for actual difficulty. (Which not everyone enjoys.)
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I like to walk the line with character death. Not too often, but in major battles I want the stakes to feel like life or death. If you want to refer to this as the illusion of difficulty, then you can call it that. I definitely want a battle to feel like it mattered by pushing the players to the brink.
If you do this too often, it can be exhausting for the players. You want to do it enough that victory feels worthwhile. Or a feeling that the players really had to work to win. However you want to word it.
Sometimes this does lead to player death. I've even had a few TPKs by overestimating what the group could handle. I don't like it when I make a mistake in an encounter design as a DM, so I will often hit the reset button if I screwed up causing a TPK. I don't mind an occasional death or near death, but a TPK is usually an encounter design mistake by the DM.
I do tend to like to push the players even if my plan with the encounter design is they live after a very tough fight. I do not actively build encounters to kill my players and it is imprecise encounter building that leads to player death more than how you play an enemy or bad rolls.
Our party does actively seek to stop other PCs from dropping or dying. I do put them in situations where if they did not heal or intervene, more players would die. I have zero problem hitting downed characters, focus firing, or dropping an AoE if a player has already fallen. Players must actively work to avoid death or they will get wasted if they focus too heavily on offense at the expense of group well being. I have had players who get too focused on launching their next attack while never bothering to help their fellows PCs. It can lead to some real pain for the group.
As far as using Power Word Kill or similar magic, it's getting used if it's on the list. I usually change out caster lists to higher quality spells when the module or monster designer gives enemies poor spell choices.
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I think character deaths should be meaningful. They won't always be, but in the best case you know you made a wrong decision (or multiple) and paid for it.
In my gaming experience, I've seen a single "meaningful death" for countless deaths without meaning. Meaningful death is the absolute rarity.
But I agree that the death needs to be fair. If your character dies for reasons that seem invalid (that can range from a rule mistake to an unfair spell or a punitive ability) then it doesn't feel right. If your character dies from a series of bad rolls and/or bad decisions, then it's fine.
It forces the GM to be extremely clear about consequences of actions. The rules explain clearly the consequences of the most common actions. But that means a strict and proper application of the rules, the second you start applying wrong rules then you shouldn't kill a PC as the player could be legitimately mad at you.
Similarly, you should always be overt about the consequences of player's choices. If the players end up with a choice that can potentially lead to their character death they should somehow know about it (especially if the chance of death is higher than it should be). Dying for no apparent reason or a reason you were not aware of is infuriating, not frustrating.
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In my gaming experience, I've seen a single "meaningful death" for countless deaths without meaning. Meaningful death is the absolute rarity.
I agree, when you take it as a story defining moment. What i meant is that you can learn about something you made wrong as a player.
If it was just "i rolled a 1, and rolled another 1 with a hero point" it would not qualify - things like this happen, but not too often.
Which WoD do you mean?
I struggle with setting difficulty at times, despite PF2 making it much easier to do than most systems. There's always this "how harsh do I want to be" consideration. Part of that is trying to stay true to the fiction. Due to the space constraints of printed maps, many APs have encounters happen improbably close to each other without chaining together. Sometimes I ignore that and let monsters in the next room join in. Sometimes it is more fun, and sometimes it results in PC death and I feel bad.
I think part of it is that Pathfinder and D&D struggle with lasting consequences besides death. (And even death can be fixed with access to the right options and a hit to the party treasury. When character death is really the only danger, it is hard not to lean on risking it as a crutch.
In contrast, Blades in the Dark makes it really hard to kill a PC without the player deciding to let it happen. Players can always choose to reduce the degree of harm they take, and simply roll to determine how much of their resource pool it burns. This includes turning lethal harm into an incapacitating injury. (Unless you were already incapacitated, in which you probably weren't still throwing yourself into danger.) And even when you die, you can continue playing as a ghost.
This sounds like it lowers the stakes... but Blades risks many other kinds of lasting consequences. Harm requires weeks of focused downtime to remove, and the game only gives you such downtime. Restoring the resource pool used to push yourself also takes a separate downtime activity. If you push yourself too hard, you risk taking incurring trauma, which adds a permanent personality shift and can eventually retire the character. You accrue heat which makes you wanted men. And opposed factions are constantly advancing their own agendas. The game is rooted in the gradual wear and tear a PC takes over time from living the stressful life of a daring scoundrel.
It also doesn't remotely care about balance, instead preferring to focus on the fiction and let the consequences be whatever they are. Which is just a fundamentally different approach than Pathfinder.
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I'm currently okay with the death systems found in PF2e.
They're disrupting enough to feel punishing, but not deadly enough to come down to a single stroke of luck. Unless a GM is going out of their way to attack downed characters, odds are, most characters will survive one or more KO's in a fight.
As a GM, I always strive to play monsters as competently as they can be and think about them as characters, rather than party killers. By that I mean that once a threat is knocked out of the fight, there are far more dangerous enemies standing up that take precedence for any combatant, thus, to me, it makes sense that most enemies (specially smart ones) wouldn't prioritize being whacked by the Barbarian just to land a killing blow on characters that are already dead as far as they know (which as GM, I know they aren't). Unless there are very compelling reasons to go for the finishing move, a personal grudge and a very malicious enemy with time to do so, or an instance of pop-up healing.
As long as you're not going out of your way (A.K.A. using metagame knowledge to kill players), PF2e's current system creates most scenarios where players won't feel cheated when their characters die. Even then, an appropriate death scene or final words might lessen the sting a little bit.
The "avoiding death but paying with enemies advancing their plots" mechanic is quite interesting, though.
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I think part of it is that Pathfinder and D&D struggle with lasting consequences besides death.
In the past editions, there were other consequences: Level loss, equipment destroyed, attributes permanently lowered. But it was feeling bad, sometimes even worse than death. Between a clean death and a new character and the slow downfall of my current character, I'm not sure I'd choose the downfall. This is a very different feeling when you start losing bits of your character here and there.