TB lethality

[kimball_o_hara]

is it deadly? like old school deadly? can you do TPK and just roll new set of PCs? or is it more like BW - you can go down from a single hit but it is little bit harder to kill?

i feel that lethality was an important feature of early D&D. is it present in TB?

[Jared (Jared A. Sorensen)]

Worse. You’ll pray for death. It will not come.

[kimball_o_hara]

ok. that’s pretty rough

but then again if i want to be old school mad bastard axe-killer ‘dm’ will i be able. i know that i am only limited by my unlimited depravity but does TB support that sort of play?

i am pretty sold on TB and will be buying it as soon as it hits the stores this is just me trying to feel out where it stands in the relation to retro-clones and games like dungeon crawl classics.

[Bobo ((Kai))]

Allow me to quote another thread, half in support of Jared and half as an answer to your question:

@Thor

While death is decidedly on the table for characters in Torchbearer, it generally doesn’t come quickly–this is one of the major points of departure from early D&D. In Torchbearer, you can get beaten down to the point where your character will probably wish she was dead because the laundry list of conditions she’s accumulated feel pretty debilitating. To quote one of our play testers in a session after running into monsters tending a massive cauldron on a fire: “I just get in the cauldron.”

This tends to come about because parties overestimate their capabilities, underestimate monsters, or push on too hard for too long without finding a place to rest. You can be doing fine, and then before you know it, a few poor decisions will snowball on you and you’ll find yourself in a world of pain. Combine this with the fact that novice players tend not to think about accumulating checks until they’re already in trouble condition-wise, and, well, you see where this is going…

Someone else will have to answer your question fully; I have only seen a few bits and pieces of TB. That said, I know there were some TPKs, so yeah, that kind of thing can happen.

– Kai

[stormsweeper (Anthony)]

You can do TPKs by just piling on conditions. It won’t really be fun for anyone involved.

[Aramis]

Assuming the same rules about death as in MG…

Death only comes when you either take one for the team, or when the intent of the other team was explicitly to kill you.

There is no “accidentally killing” PC’s. Either the GM opts to kill one or more as a conflict goal, or, in a conflict barely won, a PC dies to prevent injuries to the rest.