-2 points

Can you tell the male wombat fuckers by the rectangular penis?

Wombat poo

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1 point
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22 points

Needing to fudge dice usually means the rules have failed.

A common trope is “I don’t want my PC to die!”. Fine. Reasonable. You can have rules about that. Look at how Fate handles “concede” and getting taken out. Look at how DND does jack shit.

Many games also have a fail forward mechanic. You don’t need to fudge their check if the rules have mechanics for “if you really want to succeed but luck isn’t on your side, here’s what you can pay to succeed”

DND kind of sucks.

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5 points

In video game design there is the MDA framework. Where mechanics (rules) create dynamics (gameplay flow) that express aesthetics (genre and emotional expression). Thus in d&d the rules change the actions players take and these actions determine the tone and feel of the game. This is why Silvery Barbs is miserable, the dynamic it creates diminishes the roleplaying aesthetic by breaking suspension of disbelief.

When looking at 5e the fact most players don’t just homebrew a few rules, but gut large mechanics (light, encumbrance, gold, travel) of the game. This has completed removed WotC’s control of D&D’s dynamics. This breaks the aesthetics of the system. 5e in it’s current state is not a heroic fantasy game, but everyone thinks it is. Which is why so many tables fail and new DMs burn out.

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15 points

Youre right. Its not like death was part of the mechanics from the start, they also could be ignored.

Also, there totally isnt like 5 different ways for the players to rez a pc.

And lets forget about habing NPCs do the rezing as a sidequest.

I say all that, but I love death. I WANT my PC to die if he dies. Thats how you get thrills. Suspense. Tension. Playing with cheats on is fun, but gets boring fast.

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6 points

Also, there totally isnt like 5 different ways for the players to rez a pc.

Depends on character level, setting, game tone. Not a universal solution to a universal problem.

And lets forget about habing NPCs do the rezing as a sidequest.

Not every game lends itself well to an unexpected sidequest. Also what is the dead PC’s owner to do in the interim? This introduces a lot of questions and is also not a universal solution.

Did you read how defeat works in Fate? You can have death.

https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/conceding-conflict . If you don’t want to go look it up, I’ll summarize here:

In a conflict, before a roll is made, you can Concede. This is a Player action, not a character action. It means that you give up the conflict, but you get a say in what happens. You don’t get whatever you were fighting over, but so long as the group agrees it’s reasonable you can get something like “taken prisoner” or “left for dead.” You also get a Fate point, which is nice. (D&D also has an extremely lackluster meta currency system, but that’s a separate discussion). Note that it’s not the DM just deciding what happens to you. That’s for getting Taken Out.

If you instead let the roll happen, and you take more stress (damage) than you can hold, you instead get Taken Out. When that happens, you have no say. Barring normal social contract stuff, whoever was coming at you has free rein to just be like “And the spell explodes your head.”

This is in the rules. To me that’s much better than D&D’s wishy-washy “maybe the DM will do this or that” standard. I don’t want to hash this out at every single table I join from first principles.

D&D kind of sucks because it leaves a lot of important things up to the DM, so you get wildly different experiences depending on whatever half-baked whims this table has. And you have to have these conversations over and over again. And some people never will know there’s other ways things could be, and leave the hobby or just be unhappy.

Some people might say “leaving more up to the DM is better” but that’s wrong. Clearly going maximum calvinball “whatever the DM says in this moment” is not the platonic ideal of a game. At least not for me or anyone I know. Some rules are important. D&D is missing some important ones. And has too many rules in other places.

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2 points

No system is perfect, has every rules and isn’t relying on the master to some degree. But then, if you dont like death as being part of the game, why play dnd at all then ?

It would be like not liking horror and picking CoC.

If you want your PC to always survive no matter what, either play a system with it in the rules or make a deal with the DM. But blasting dnd because its not part of the core rules (besides all the ways to bring a PC back from the dead that are already there) isnt fair.

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8 points
*

Played a control/support wizard for almost two years. Died to a power word kill and BBG used his soul as a bargaining chip. Party was too full of themselves and newer players, they called his bluff, my wizard was perma dead. The rest of the session was them as players and characters coming to terms with his death. It was god damn beautiful and one of my favorite memories in gaming.

Please DMs, kill your players player’s characters. For the character development.

Edit: being neurodivergent I sometimes forget that people can have personal feelings that I find illogical, so as the comment under mine says; please make sure your player or players are not going to be traumatized if you kill their characters. As a DM I have always done this, because even if they are killed off I want the players input on how it goes, but that is for narrative reasons and I had not considered how badly it could have gone if I hadn’t been asking. I have never been asked by a DM, it just doesn’t bother me because to me it is a part of the fun and magic of TTRPGs.

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2 points

I’ve also seen players devastated by character death. The correct advice is to check in with your players about what they want to do with possible character death. Don’t just spring it on players who don’t want it.

I had two player characters foolishly break into a vampire wizard’s office to try to steal something. It was a series of incredibly foolish decisions, starting with “let’s split the party”, and it escalated to violence. When it was looking especially grim, I asked them if they would be okay with character death. They said yes. The two characters died.

The in-game funeral for them was fantastic. Real tears. But the important thing is they consented to this. If they had wanted these characters to live, it would’ve been a dick move to be like “nah they dead”. There’s no reason to make the players real-life extra upset. I don’t have the hubris to think I know better what kind of story they want.

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1 point

I read the second paragraph first and interpreted it as “kill the person playing the character and make someone else play them so that the character will have a different personality.”

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7 points

It’s fine so long as everyone’s on board with PC death, but this is just an example of D&D struggling to hold onto a giant audience with conflicting views. If they get rid of death, the people who actually play D&D the way it’s meant to be played get pissed off. If they don’t, the more narrative-focused players (who really shouldn’t be playing D&D in the first place) will get pissed off. So they just ignore it.

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1 point

Rules don’t have to fail to fudge dice. You do it to curate the experience - the dice give us the illlusion of fairness but that’s about it. Just because we expect them to roll somewhere in the averages doesn’t mean a common bandit won’t roll four crits in a single encounter or one of your playera won’t have a session where they cannot roll above 6.

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13 points
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Deleted by creator
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37 points

Fun fact

I roll in front of my players during combat

It adds to the tension

I can always fudge enemy HP though, and often I do

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8 points

Oh, that’s good. Thank you. I’ll use that

The real life pro tip is always in the comments.

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6 points

I’m just starting to DM, do you disclose how much HP creatures have to your players? Just did a combat sim with my guys last week to see if we understood the combat system and that probably affected how they played.

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3 points

Usually not until they’re below half or unless a player asks, I never give them the actual numbers though as I feel that would detract from the experience.

For me the players having a fun experienceb and building a character’s story is more important than explicitly wargaming

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13 points

4e had a specific status called “bloodied” that creatures gained when they dropped below half HP, this represented that one of the attacks on them has been a telling enough blow that they’re showing signs of injury. I brought this with me to 5e, because it’s a useful contextualizer for players to get a feel for how well they’re doing.

One advantage of this system (especially for new DMs) is that if you massively overspec an encounter and the players are in trouble, you have some time to realize it’s going badly, and can drop the monster’s HP pool a little to compensate.

One advantage of this system (especially for experienced groups) is that if the party are doing badly, and haven’t realized it - the moment you say “right, the enemy is bloodied” they realize that they’ve “only” done half the dragon’s HP, and are reminded that retreat is an option they can take. Remember that if the whole party decides to retreat, it can be good to drop out of combat, and make the attempted retreat a skill-based challenge, rather than trying to run the retreat on the combat grid. 5e makes it very very difficult for creatures to “outrun” other creatures that are trying to kill them, and the combat system doesn’t handle retreating well.


If you want a mechanic for it, ask the player who wants to know to make a medicine check - this can add value to the medicine skill (which doesn’t see a lot of play):

If they beat 10, you give them a very rough idea, like “they’ve been hit a couple of times but they look like they’re going strong”

If they beat 15, give them a loose fraction to the closest 1/4 or so “they’ve lost about 1/4 of their HP” etc

If they beat 20, give them a number to the nearest 5 or 10 (depending on if you’re low or high level.)

Increase these DCs by 5 if the monster is something that they’d be unfamiliar with the biology of - how easy is it to tell how hurt an air elemental is? not very.


An important thing to always remember is, every table is different, if one thing works for your group - do that, don’t think that you have to follow any piece of advice just because it came from someone who sounded authoritative, or gave you a lot of numbers.

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1 point

4e had a specific status called “bloodied” that creatures gained when they dropped below half HP

This is in 5e, below half health an enemy or NPC is described as showing injury, below 25% is described as seriously injured, and below 10% is described as near death.

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2 points

This is all extremely useful info, thanks! I want to implement something like this, because I feel like it would help my guys roleplay. It’s the first time we ever do ttrpg, and I’d like to give them every help I can get.

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19 points

A common way to get around explicitly giving the HP of a monster and telling them nothing is the "They look… " rule. When they ask how many HP the baddie has left, tell them “They look injured, but not enough to hinder them” or “they look bloody and totally messed up” etc. As a rule of thumb, you can decide their health into quarters and come up with a common phrase for each, or come up with them on the fly depending on the situation: “Grog’s hammer has left some of its ribs broken, but it looks healthy enough to keep fighting for a while.”

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4 points

Huh, interesting. Thanks! How do you keep track of health? I was using Owlbear’s character text window but, well, I think I’ll adopt that system you mentioned.

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5 points

I fudge enemy stats all the time, or at least I used to. These days I play blades in the dark, and before that I no longer needed to fudge much after years of practice.

The argument about fudging usually presumes some sort of pity for injured players and creates a strawman out of that. I don’t fudge hits or misses to save people, I fudge to keep the fight moving along. Six rounds of “your sword clatters against its scales but it seems to be holding up okay” gets old really fast. If the fight is taking too long I whip out some kind of tension ramping effect and drop the enemy hp. “Oh no, it dumps over a cauldron of acid! (But it only has 20 hp left not 60 because this is getting slow)”

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12 points

There’s some legendary reverse psychology being performed by Satan here.

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2 points

Classic Satan

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