I think this topic has been broached before, but I couldn't find a thread with a quick search that would address this particular point. In another thread, a poster mentioned that Pendragon's system is lethal. And I admit, it is, but only up to a point. And it very much depends on your assumptions.

In the campaigns I have GMed, the PK death has been a relatively rare occurrence, by and large. It is also pretty clear to see the trends what have lead to those deaths. So I will try to talk about the lethality of Pendragon system based on those GMing experiences, and invite others to post their experiences and comments.

First of all, something to underline a lot: in Pendragon, unless hit by so massive amounts of damage at once that the GM simply declares that you got turned into pink mist, you are not dead as soon as you reach 0 hit points. You are simply DYING. And you have, by the rules, time still sundown or something like that to get to a healer or more likely, your friends to get a healer to you.

Secondly, you can perform first aid on each and every wound you have suffered in that particular fight, which hasn't already had first aid tried on it. Yes, this does mean that a good healer (particularly first aid), is a life-saver, something that my players have noticed and in one group, even budget for (shared 'combat healer' with good horsemanship to keep up, very high First Aid and a high-ish Chirurgery for those times that they are stuck in the middle of a forest somewhere). In the other group, they have a healer lady player character, who is even better than a hireling.

Thirdly, there is the unconscious buffer, HP/4. So any hit that is able to kill you will have to pretty much cause at least that much damage, since otherwise, you'd not be up fighting anymore but already unconscious. (Oh, I should add, that we use a house rule that you do not take 1d6 of damage when falling from horseback, if you are already unconscious. This doesn't skew the results too much though, since the PKs all have Armor of Honor (3 pts), and usually do not either take damage or have whatever minor damage first aided afterwards.)

These all three points lead to the situation where you are unlikely to get 'nibbled to death' by many small wounds, since all of those wounds get first aid and you are unlikely to hit minus hit points before going unconscious first. Instead, it is the big hits that kill you.

In our campaigns, the deaths have been overwhelmingly due to:
1) Enemy rolling a critical when you are already at low hit points, usually when you have gotten into a fight already badly injured from previous combat (thus, those minor wounds have already been first aided and do not provide an additional buffer).
2) Enemy being a monster hitting well above the human norm (8d6+) and/or even rolling a critical. Even then, it usually takes a couple of hits unless it is a critical.
3) Group healer not being present and someone failing their First Aid skill of 10.
4) There was a one case of 'enemy has no mercy' where the fallen PK was pretty much executed by a fiend.

Numbers 1 and 3 are something that the player / PK can (try to) control. Points 2 and 4 are fully in GM's hands, and the GM can influence 1 and 3, too.

So if you feel that Pendragon is too lethal for you, my advice would be:
1) Encourage players to think about whether or not it is smart to fight on if they are already barely clinging to consciousness, or if they are already at half hit points to even start with. This connects to number 4, below.
2) Use 'normal' opponents. Other knights, bandits, Saxon raiders, and so forth. Their damage is much more forgiving. Note, Saxon Berserkers with Great Axes are starting to be in the monster category...
3) Make sure that the PKs have access to a healer. If they don't have their own one, there could be a manor close-by, with a lady of some healing skill. Or perhaps a beautiful damsel who would make a good Amor for the healed knight...
4) Introduce enemies who are unwilling to just kill the defeated PKs. Knights are worth money in ransom. They might be used as political counters, hostages to get treaties or something else. Enemies that have some measure of honor are also more fun to play with: not every villain needs to be a psychopath. Even many villainous knights in the tales kidnapped and imprisoned good knights rather than killed them (although counter-examples exist, too).
5) The more fights you have in a game-year, the more chances per year you have that a character dies in a fight. It is a tautology, I know, but worth mentioning. A couple of the characters in our campaign have died due to a 'random' duel: one simply got insulted at a party and things escalated from there, while another, a Lustful pagan, spent a few days waiting for another player character in a harbor town by trying to seduce local ladies. After some unfortunate rolling, the husband came barging in with his morning star, catching his wife and the PK in flagrante delecto, and in the ensuing fight, the philandering PK got smashed up without his armor on.

With our houserule of the Glory Point (fate) save negating enemy criticals, and with expert healers available to the PKs, it is actually pretty hard to die in our campaigns without hard hitting opponents, like, as it was said, monsters. This is especially true in the later periods, when the plate armors start becoming common, increasing the protection that the PKs enjoy past 20 points.

What are your experiences with Pendragon lethality?

We've played the first nine years of the GPC and I have yet to lose a PK. But I may not be the best one to judge. For the first seven years of the campaign there was only one player! For the last two years of I've had two. One of the PKs (my wife's character) has a "resurrection card" to play when he eventually snuffs it — the blessing of the Needy Boy on p. 401 of the GPC.

I just hope neither of my PK bites the dust before their heirs take over!


T.

I am very happy with the system. Actually, I sometimes think the players are too powerful (but that might be because of the way I am running my campaign and how the dice rolled).
I had two deaths from combat so far (one died fighting a bodyguard of Gorlois and the second one was a loyal knight of the then-deceased duke, who killed his murderer). Those deaths came kind of unexpected to the players but after some short-lived frustration they were very quick to accept it and move on.
Then, there was the infamous feast of St.Albans, where all the PK's died of the poisoned wine (They had pretty much won the battle on their own, so I saw no other way than to invite them to the feast). I played it out for a whole session, knowing all of them would die at the end (of course i let them roll the mandatory temperance, but none of them hit a critical). I expected anger, argumentation and the sorts, but this didn't happen. They were fine with it - and as Mr. Stafford said in another thread, their families now have a story to tell about the evil Saxons.

That aside, the fact that one of my players has almost no family left to take over (as well as having his now-deceased character cursed by a witch) causes a big deal of suspension and enriches the game in a way that I have not experienced from any other rpg i have played so far.

So it was me who mentioned that the game was lethal on the other tread. The reason was mainly that one of my players lost his first knight during the battle of Mearcred Creek and again at the battle of Lindsey.
And as you say both cases were an unfortunate crit rolled against him. And in both cases he was more or less unharmed. He didn't have a chance to break off at a point when the battle was turning against him. Just one roll boom your dead.
I am well aware that he have been very unlucky.
But crits are incredibly dangerous, and as you can do nothing to defend against them, every hit point counts when trying to survive one. My player was so annoyed that he had chosen to go for random social skills the winter before instead of constitution, as a single point of health would have saved him.
I know that this is highly specific but said a bit more generally: during the first round of combat you will during the early battles have a 1 in 6 chance of meeting wotans men, if one of them crits against you, most of my knights would have 25% chance of surviving.
Each point of hit points however increases that by about 6 %-points.
That is why i'm saying that my players one opt out of min-max builds when every point makes that much of a difference.

That being said i think that its a problem that apart from crits a lot attacks doesn't make any damage at all, resulting in every battle being either your dead or else you're unscathed.

Disclaimer (i might be exaggerating a bit but this i my experience with the game)

But crits are incredibly dangerous, and as you can do nothing to defend against them, every hit point counts when trying to survive one. My player was so annoyed that he had chosen to go for random social skills the winter before instead of constitution, as a single point of health would have saved him.
[snip]
I know that this is highly specific but said a bit more generally: during the first round of combat you will during the early battles have a 1 in 6 chance of meeting wotans men, if one of them crits against you, most of my knights would have 25% chance of surviving.


One thing you can do to make criticals still hurt but not instantly veer into the pink mist territory... and also to take some of the advantage of minmaxing damage off... is to make it a flat +4d6 damage bonus rather than doubling it. This makes a 8d6 berserker a much more survivable opponent with 12d6 on a crit rather than 16d6. That 4d6 reduction is quite significant, but still keeps the humble spearman able to poke damage to a knight on a lucky roll.

Not having the Book of Battles or the Book of Armies, I cannot comment on Wotan's Men. However, if they are able to oneshot knights on a critical, sounds to me that they are in the berserk territory when it comes to damage. After all, most knights have armor 10 + shield 6 = 16 of armor. Assuming a 6d6 basic damage, that is 42 on average when using doubling crits. That is 26 points past the armor, which should still be survivable. At 7d6 or 8d6, I can see how that is a problem. Using the above houserule will make it much easier to survive, though.

Nice topic, Morien.

Unfortunately I do not have axcess to most of my material (packed away in barn in the Swedish equvivalent of Arkansas), so I can't draw on all my campaigns.

My second to last campaign was the whole PGC. About 20-25 PKs died (and no players), roughly one every fourth session. That may sound a lot, and I admitt that it's a bit to bloody, but they were not evenly distributed. Many PKs bought it in the battles in the first half of the campaign, and there was one TPK-session. So there were a few decades in the second half were PK deaths were few and far between.

Quite a few got killed in battle against saxons, one was beheaded after a duel, one murdered by another PK (!), one commited suicide (!!), at least three killed by huge monsters. I had for regular players, one lost one character, another eleven (!). Yeah, the player was reckless. I rembered that I did some statistics after the campaign finished, and that the conclusion was that 1/3 of all PK death occoured before the age of 27; PKs who made it that far had a good chance to survive into thier 50s, 60s or older.

I should add, regarding your four points, that I in this campaign:
... seldom had more than one combat per session.
... that every fifth or so session had no combat.
... that whenever it made sense, I had ladies or physicians at hand, rolling First Aid and Chirurgery at skills of 18 or 19.
... didn't fudge a roll.

And they still died in droves.

In my last campaign, which ran from, 485-499, there were two PK deaths, so one every seven-and-a-half years. I don't think I really did very much that different. I did fudge the rolls twice, but thats about it.

Now, PK death is not an ends in itself, It is needed, I think, to make combat exciting and to make player choices in the game important. And without the risk of death, it is really no achivement to reach Extraordinary Glory, become a Round Table kninght or whatever. I think it increases player appreciation of what their characters have done.

I must confess that I'm far more happy with a lethality in the region of one PK death every seventh or ninth session or so than one every fourth or fifth. That is what I would aim at today; death in combat would still be a threat but PKs would stay along for longer, giving more time to develop their storylines. It might even lead to less min-maxing from my players! I don not know really how to achive this. I would probably have even fewer combats. And I am considering the crit-ruling that Morien mentions above or some variant. That might be enough to do the job, don't you think.

I love the idea of a fixed value on crits. I actually think it solves all my problems i had been toying with reducing crit damage but for some reason hadn't come up with this rather simple solution i'm going to ask my players if they like it and then introduce it to the game tonight.
I do actually like that it is quite likely that you might die what i didn't like is when you die in one roll.
This way my players will have to fight to retreat out of the kill zone of battle when they get wounded.

Up until know I have not had a PK death (we are at 501 atm). There have been several close calls in the first years. It could be I have been too friendly lately. They did not have much combat. This year they are going to battle against King Idris so things may change.

As for the crits being the killer. I like it like that. Being killed by a master stroke is better than getting nibbled to death I think.

As for the crits being the killer. I like it like that. Being killed by a master stroke is better than getting nibbled to death I think.


It usually still is the critical that kills. Little hits are not enough to push you to the negative values, thanks to armor and shield, before you fall unconscious. Criticals can be very annoying since there is basically nothing that you can do about them in rules-as-written (RAW), and the chances are relatively high: 1 in 20, or even more if you have a high skill. Especially with enemies with high damage and using the double damage rules in RAW, this results in one-shot killing the PK, no reprieve possible. Of course combat should be dangerous, but one-shot kills, especially in a battle where you can't really refuse to fight whatever opponent comes your way, are annoying. There is nothing for the Player to decide or react to: it is fully the random luck of the dice. That is what irks me in that, and I am sure I am not alone.

In our campaigns, we have alleviated those rules, as it was ohh so annoying to get the knights dropped by bandits or lowly spearmen lucking in with a critical roll. Since you'll need more footmen/bandits vs. knights to make the fight challenging, this unfortunately means that the number of criticals goes up as well, with more dice on the table. So currently, we are using these houserules for fumbles and criticals:

Fumble: Roll again at Skill-10. If successful, it is simply a failure. (This also applies to skills 20+, since we make a roll of 1 a fumble at that point, rather than making them immune.)
Critical: Roll again at Skill. If failure, it is only a 'half-critical', counts as a critical but only does +2d6 damage. On a success, it is a 'full-critical', doing +4d6 damage.

Those little changes make high damage opponents much less insta-kill (due to a flat +2d6/+4d6 bonus rather than doubling), and halve the chance of a lowly skill 10 bandit hitting a full +4d6 critical. They still get a hit, and +2d6 is nothing to sneeze at, but it is much less likely to result in a major wound than a full +4d6 critical.

Of course, the main mechanism for PK survival (or avoidance of Major Wounds) is the use of Glory Points as Fate points, as I have mentioned before.

I think this topic has been broached before, but I couldn't find a thread with a quick search that would address this particular point. In another thread, a poster mentioned that Pendragon's system is lethal. And I admit, it is, but only up to a point. And it very much depends on your assumptions.

You get a gold star for your insights.

We are in year 489 and I've had two PKs die. In both cases, it was using the Book of Battle rules. The first died during the Battle of Mearcred Creek, the second during the naval "Battle of the Wash." There are some *very* dangerous opponents in those army lists (even the "beginner army") and if the opponent gets a crit (which is easy because a lot of them have passions), they can easily "one-shot kill" Knights. I consider the BoB rules to be very lethal.

The standard rules aren't that bad. I've had Knights go unconscious on two occasions during standard combat, but I wouldn't say I've found that to be particularly dangerous compared to other tabletop games that I've played.

That being said, the characters and plot lines that we've been able to introduce as a result of the player deaths have been fantastic. Anyone that is purposefully fudging the dice to "save" their Player Knights is missing out on some potentially amazing stories. One of the most difficult challenges I have with the GPC is making the story feel personal, and player deaths are a fantastic way to make a personal plotline that does not railroad the players.