Data queried September 29, 2026. The data grows weekly; we will rerun everything around 1,000 tallied sessions.
22 of the 237 player characters in this data are dead. That is 9 percent, or one death every 20 recorded sessions, which for a group playing every other week works out to losing somebody about once a year. One campaign in three has lost at least one character.
286 knockdowns across 422 tallied sessions, against 22 deaths. Someone drops to zero hit points in 40 percent of sessions and the worst single session put party members down seven times, so going down is routine and dying is not. Death saves, healing and a friend with an action to spare are winning thirteen times out of fourteen.
52 of 422 sessions record at least one moment the table's own notes describe as nearly losing everyone, 55 of them in total, which is 12 percent of sessions or about one every eight. Not one of those turned into an actual total party kill.
696 named kills across the tallied sessions. Two thirds of sessions record at least one, the median session records exactly one, and the busiest recorded ten. The other 34 percent record none, so a third of recorded play is talk, travel and scheming. The party loses people too: the same tallies log 158 named allies and NPCs lost along the way, and 147 NPCs across these campaigns' codexes are marked dead, which is six dead NPCs for every dead PC.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| PC death rate | 22 of 237 PCs (9.3 percent) |
| Campaigns with at least one PC death | about 1 in 3 |
| Rough death rate | 1 PC death per 20 recorded sessions |
| Sessions where a PC goes down | 40 percent (170 of 422) |
| Knockdowns per death | about 13 to 1 (286 downs, 22 deaths) |
| Sessions with a near-wipe | 12 percent (52 of 422) |
| Named kills per session | median 1; 90th percentile 4; max 10 |
| Sessions with zero kills | 34 percent |
237 player characters and per-session battle tallies covering 422 of the 439 recorded sessions, through September 2026. A knockdown means a PC dropped in the fight; a near-wipe is a moment the session's own record describes as a brush with losing the whole party; kills are the notable named kills the record credits to the party, not a body count of every minion. Deaths come from each campaign's codex, where a death is marked by the GM or detected from play and confirmed. Battle tallies are AI-extracted per session from the live transcript or the GM's session record, and GMs can correct them. Known confounds: the sample is self-selected campaigns on one platform, kill counts are notable named kills rather than a complete body count, and older death flags carry no timestamps, so the per-session death rate is approximate. Test and demo campaigns are excluded. If you want a cut we didn't run, ask: hello@thread-fall.com and we'll run it. The data on this page is licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse it freely, credit Threadfall with a link.
In our measured data, 22 of 237 player characters are dead: about 9 percent, and that is a floor, because a character can only die once it has been played. One campaign in three has lost at least one character, so most tables have lost nobody and the deaths concentrate in a minority of them. Across all recorded play it comes to about one death every 20 sessions.
Constantly, compared to how often they die. Someone drops to zero hit points in 40 percent of the sessions we tallied, and the data shows roughly 13 knockdowns for every death that sticks. Death saves and emergency healing are doing a lot of the work at real tables.
We measure near-wipes rather than completed TPKs: moments the table's own session record describes as a brush with losing everyone. Those show up in 12 percent of tallied sessions, roughly once every eight sessions for a typical campaign. A completed total party kill has not yet appeared in the recorded data.
The median session records exactly one notable, named kill, and about two thirds of sessions record at least one. The busiest recorded session logged ten. A third of sessions record no kills at all, so a lot of D&D is talking, traveling, and scheming.
Threadfall is the tool that produced this data: it records your session live and turns it into a written chapter. What is Threadfall? · More measured data: how long sessions run · how often characters die · how long campaigns last · how many quests parties juggle · what a real party looks like