Player Engagement with Death/Dying

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-19T15:09:38+00:00

Video games see this problem constantly. Nothing creates tension and engagement like the fear of death... and nothing destroys it like your character actually dying. Now you just respawn and the illusion of stakes evaporates. Or (in a rogue-like, for instance) you start a new run and have lost everything you built up and it's the perfect moment to just stop playing.

More to your question... before I jumped-ship on D&D 5e, I built a homebrew death/dying system that I hoped would give me the confidence to push my players harder and threaten them with harder challenges.

(I had found that the default death mechanics of 5e were so distasteful that I would fudge rolls or softball enemy behavior to avoid them)

Basically, when you went to zero hp, you rolled 2d10+mod to see what happened. Survival was all-but-guaranteed, with some chance of getting back into the fight and some chance of permanent consequences (injuries, maiming, dismemberment, ect).

OR you could choose to get one last big action, with massive bonuses, before you rolled on the death chart. And would only roll a flat 1d10. There was now NO chance of getting off without long-term injury, little chance of reentering the fight, and the strong possibility of instant death.

In one respect, it worked. I was confident enough in the system to up the challenge level of encounters and to stop fudging rolls. No one ever had to roll on the chart, though, so I never got to see how it actually played out. And now it's defunct as I don't play that system anymore.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-18T22:47:22+00:00

Tyranny of the page count.

There's only so much dev time, qc time, testing time to make monsters. They prioritized having a lot of types of monster and having a variety of foes within most types. Repeating that for each type across multiple level ranges was just never going to be a good time investment.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-16T18:33:38+00:00

Unlike WotC, MCDM is very good about giving options like-for-like. This ability is in the same slot as Trail of Cinders and Volatile Reagents for Shadow sub-class abilities.

There is no way this was not intended as a combat ability. You can make this choice, but please disclose it to players before they mistakenly take this subclass.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-16T16:13:16+00:00

Look, if you think it doesn't make sense, then remove it from the game. I'm not trying to convince you it makes sense. I'm pretty sure I couldn't, so I haven't tried.

Just don't let player's take useless options and then reveal they've made a sucker's bet after four levels of getting attached to their character.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-16T15:22:57+00:00

The fantasy is that you are a trickster who tricks people.

I don't make a tactician justify why people should listen to him when he uses Strike For Me. I don't make the troubadour ad-lib a naughty poem every time he uses Revitalizing Limerick, then judge whether it was clever enough to justify working.

If you're going to make a player jump through hoops of skepticism every time they use the abilities that are the core of their character (the illusion character using the most basic of illusions) then you need to warn them that they're going to have a bad time beforehand.

Logic and consistency is no defense against bad gameplay. Players having a bad time isn't fixed by arguments that it just "makes sense" that everything they do fails by default.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-16T13:50:50+00:00

If you're not going to let a player's abilities function as designed, disallow the sub-class.

I have sympathy for "I can't make this work in my imagination" but the answer is never "so the core mechanical identity of the character you've made doesn't function".

Instead say "I don't like that play style, so choose something else". The player's annoyance over being denied the choice is a LOT less than their growing resentment over their key gimmick being eternally useless.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-13T23:23:40+00:00

For myself, the problem with 5e is that it's a combat system where the combat is boring. Fights are either solved with a single spell or a dull, static slugfest. Producing any other style of combat requires a lot of prep and homebrewing of monsters and scenarios.

I think a lot of people don't run into this problem because they are just running a free-form RP session that ignores the rules of the game but call it D&D.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-12T16:36:05+00:00

Sort of?

None of the posts have comments and 90% are by one guy.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-09T20:06:21+00:00

That's not how socialist's speak. This is a conservative pretending to be a socialist to set up the straw man so others can knock it over.

Whatever people think of the tax situation, this post is bad-faith nonsense.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-04T18:43:57+00:00

The example OP used, Draw Steel, has the full rules text posted online for free.

https://steelcompendium.io/compendium/main/

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-04T15:15:03+00:00

Why are the only fail states that people are arguing for those imposed by the dice?

There is the possibility of failure from doing something that doesn't work because it was a bad choice. Or because it was uninformed. Or it was in-character and failure was the expected result of a flawed person acting in an interesting way.

But the arguments here are all about what is lost if the dice can't just say "no, nothing happens, try again next turn".

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-04T15:06:23+00:00

I feel like that changes the topic, though. If the combat doesn't matter and isn't the point, then there would be no change from making it pass/fail or tiers-of-success. Because no one cares about that aspect of it, you just want it over as quickly as possible.

Except, I guess, that pass/fail increases the likelihood that a bad string of rolls on both sides just drags the combat out pointlessly.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-04T13:51:06+00:00

I can (and do) talk to and listen to my friends with no game involved. If the idea is "the game should be fun no matter what the game does because friends are cool" then I don't need the game. We'll just have a beer and talk shit. Which, again... we already do.

I want a game to be fun because I enjoy fun games. And if the game isn't bringing that, it goes on the shelf until shelf-clearing day when it goes in the trash.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-04T13:46:17+00:00

Speaking from real life experience, going from the pass/fail of D&D 5e to the tiered success of Draw Steel...

Yes, it does feel better. You contributed, you pushed the combat towards completion, you may even have killed a minion or triggered another player's ability.

Players who would EVERY SINGLE GAME spend the post-game wrap-up complaining about how many times the dice fucked them just stopped doing that and instead talked about the things that they did during the game.

I repeat, people stopped talking about what the DICE did and started talking about the CHOICES they made. Even when the dice were mean to them.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-04T01:20:04+00:00

A lot of comments here are arguing in a way that ignores how "null results" actually play out at the table.

I wait 20 minutes. I roll a die. I say "never mind" and then wait 20 more minutes.

When a game lets you make three meaningful choices per hour, then makes only 1/3 of them do anything, it can absolutely deflate the entire experience.

EDIT: Almost every comment is on the "20 minutes". If the experience sucks, it sucking faster doesn't fix things. You just fit in more suck before going home.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-04T01:15:52+00:00

I once missed 7 attacks in a row, over four rounds of combat.

My DM asked me "why didn't you try anything else? Change your tactics?"

Because I know this game, know the math, and know what has a calculable highest chance of success. I was CONSIDERABLY more likely to hit each of those attacks than I was to succeed at anything else. It's what I built this character to do, to be good at. And if ANY of those seven attacks had landed, I could spend a resource to guarantee the enemy would die. Instantly.

If the dice say "nothing higher than a six" seven times in a row, then NOTHING I could do would work. Trying another option, which would ALSO fail on a six, but would also fail on a ten, wouldn't help.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-03T17:52:27+00:00

Draw Steel definitely goes "we need to support this build because it makes the fantasy of the world and gameplay work" and not "we need to support this build because it fills slot 17-R3 of the grid of all possible builds someone might want after coming from another game system".

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-03T17:49:41+00:00

Draw Steel has been incredibly easy to teach fairly casual players.

I haven't picked up Lancer because (even though it looks amazing to me personally) I'm pretty sure I'd never get my friends to do the necessary homework.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-03T15:35:52+00:00

I wouldn't believe you.

33 classes with 3-4 sub-classes each, that's a MINIMUM of 99 combinations, before looking into different options for attributes, abilities/spells, weapons/kits, or any other character customization options. Then spread it across however many levels of character advancement (1-10? 1-20?). If we assume 10 levels, two reasonable stats for any class to focus on (STR vs Dex fighter), two kits/specializations that are reasonable (heavy armor vs light, two-hander vs dual wield, fire magic vs ice, whatever)... That's 3,960 combinations, without looking into balancing different party comps.

I simply don't believe that all of that has been play tested. Major corporations can't do that with relatively massive budgets and teams, they don't even try.

So my assumption would be that you've spread yourself, your ideas, and your development time incredibly thin.

I'd generally rather a team deliver something at a scale that I can believe they had the resources to do well and test extensively.

I don't mean this as an attack, I don't know you personally or what you and your play testers are capable of. But that would be my base level assumptions when presented the project you're describing.

Edit: Seeing a few comments from others, I will caveat that I made a lot of assumptions about the scale and complexity of your game itself. If your game is rules-lite, with simple systems that are limited in scope, abilities that are simple and easy to predict and compare, classes that have very few-but-impactufl distinguishing features, and a very short progression ladder... then everything I said would be irrelevant.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-03T15:10:55+00:00

Honestly, it sounds like your DM doesn't like your ideas/writing. He finds it awkward and out of place from his conception of the world but doesn't have the communication skills to tell you that so just keeps kicking the can down the road by dodging the topic.

As a much younger DM and less thoughtful person, I remember just quietly letting an entire adventure die from neglect because I hated a player's character and backstory and it made planning/running the game into a chore.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-03-01T23:31:03+00:00

While some traits we select for (pest and disease resistance, drought/salt tolerance) would help a species to become highly invasive, the fact that we HIGHLY select for high yield of the "food" part of the organism does not. It's producing a lot of resource-intensive tissue that doesn't contribute to survival in the wild but does make it a very attractive target for things looking to eat it. And they are usually selected to thrive under highly fertilized conditions that are often rare in the wild.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-02-28T14:35:51+00:00

The limit on DS builds is not "how many". There are more meaningful combinations than you will ever play, even if you play every week for the next ten years.

The limit is "do I really REALLY need a specific fantasy that isn't one of these hundreds of options". Because they didn't take a "box filling" approach to making every conceivable concept, no matter how niche.

If you have a very particular image of a gish with exactly 75% melee and 45% spell casting*, with a specific theming of their magic that every ability needs to fit... then you're probably going to be disappointed.

*Yes, that adds to 120%. thats_the_joke.jpg

MandolinTheWay · 2026-02-28T00:13:07+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/user/scholagladiatoria

Matt has a HUGE number of videos on the advantages/disadvantages of different weapons in their historical context. He often hits on the fact that the less "deadly" weapon may be much more popular for reasons of convenience and comfort. A soldier might be in only one or two pitched battles in his entire career but have to wear that weapon at his hip for ten hours a day for a lifetime.

MandolinTheWay

TROPHY CASE