Fair point, but I would want a fair, unbiased DM in any situation (regardless of mortality issues). Lack of mortality doesn't imply the DM's isn't shooting down brilliant ideas, and vise-verse.
There's no lack of mortality in a game where the player decides his characters' fate in a given situation either, provided the player is being true to the fiction. And if he's not, well, his loss. The DM doesn't enter into this at all as it is the players' choice and can actually less biased as a result of that rule i.e., no need to fudge, ever.
Exactly my point... it becomes less heroic if the odds become completely probable. Death should be a possible consequence in the dangerous situations that we enjoy, and one's actions should have an effect on that probability.
Every stupid plan should at least have a chance to succeed. Stupid plans that work despite the odds or great plans that go awry are the things that people remember years later. And, as above, death has not been removed from the equation. It's simply been made a choice for the player. If, as a player, you're playing to find out what happens and to tell a good story through the lens of your character, the dramatic timing of your death will be self-evident.
FWIW, here's my actual house rule:
Death When you would normally die according to the rules, you decide whether your character dies or not. In any event, you are effectively “taken out” of the current scene. If you decide your character lives, tell us what happened, how it will physically or mentally affect you going forward, and what knowledge you brought back from The Other Side. If you decide your character dies, tell us how and why the death is meaningful.
No amount of tips, tricks, or gimmicks will ever be better than simply talking directly to your fellow players to resolve your issues. Reduce DM Prep & Increase Player Engagement:Don't Prep the Plot | Structure First, Story Last | Collaborative Roleplay | "Yes, and..." | Prep Tips Games I'm Running on Roll20: Island of the Frog | Vanguard of Dis | Star*Juice | Tesseract | The Crucible | Fimbulvetr | The Delve | Draj, City of the Moon Follow me on Twitter:@is3rith
If characters die, then characters die. I try to make it interesting, but the death is not always forseen - so sometimes it just is what it is.
The last character death we had was quite interesting. The rogue (a large fat man), was being held be a tribe of centaurs who planned on executing him for the deaths of some of their members. The party did not interceed and one swipe of the centaur's great sword severed his spine - the player himself let that be his fate, as he was not restrained but allowed the sacrifice to happen - and it actually saved the party as the leader of the centaurs refused to fight against them seeing that they had paid for their transgretions - though the more sinister faction of the centaur proceeded to demand the lives of the rest of the party and battle commenced. If the rogue had not sacrificed himself it would have been a much harder battle and there may have been more than one death.
I do not pull any punches, and this is because I find that with 4E player death is hard to come by unless you are purposefully putting them in an overly hard encounters (which I save for climatic battles - the ones that really matter). My campaign is centered around a demongate, and so many of the encounters have been with demonic foes, who have no mercy - and this is when death is most likely.
With the access the players have to healing (and with just one leader they do just fine) and the ability to cast rituals such as raise dead (which my party can do once a day for free) death is not a permanent road block. I personally do not like the raise dead rules and would opt for a form that gave more control to myself and was more reliant on story, though because I know players like to have that to fall back on in case their beloved character dies I stick with these rules - if just to be consistant and have the players know what their options may be. But at the same time I do not pull any punches and the encounters I run (even on level encounters) can be quite difficult, and death is always a possibilty, forever loaming in the background.
I find the best way to create a more intense feeling (as death bears down) is to have a good grasp and fine control over when the players are allowed to take an extended rest - this often makes the players push past when they might have otherwise tried an extended rest. and this is when things get interesting.
As a final note, in the current group I run there has only been 3 player deaths (been running the same campaign for about a year). One voluntary (though he was later resurrected), and the other two were the same player but different characters, the first she decided to let die and the second the party was able to raise.
So I guess we just play it by ear and take it as it comes. If the player wants to keep the character I make sure there is an option to do so. If not then the character dies and we find a way to incorporate their new character into the story.
"The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us." - Friedrich Nietzsche
If characters die, then characters die. I try to make it interesting, but the death is not always forseen - so sometimes it just is what it is.
Ok. Sounds like you'd be cool if a death was the result of something you expected to be a minor encounter. Is that right? Not everyone, DMs or players, even those cool with the concept of character death in general, would be cool with that.
The last character death we had was quite interesting. The rogue (a large fat man), was being held be a tribe of centaurs who planned on executing him for the deaths of some of their members. The party did not interceed and one swipe of the centaur's great sword severed his spine - the player himself let that be his fate, as he was not restrained but allowed the sacrifice to happen - and it actually saved the party as the leader of the centaurs refused to fight against them seeing that they had paid for their transgretions - though the more sinister faction of the centaur proceeded to demand the lives of the rest of the party and battle commenced. If the rogue had not sacrificed himself it would have been a much harder battle and there may have been more than one death.
That's a great example of the player choosing death. I don't know that he knew that the alternative would be harder for the party, but he appears to have agreed to the death of the character and it turned out to be noble rather than lame.
I do not pull any punches, and this is because I find that with 4E player death is hard to come by unless you are purposefully putting them in an overly hard encounters (which I save for climatic battles - the ones that really matter). My campaign is centered around a demongate, and so many of the encounters have been with demonic foes, who have no mercy - and this is when death is most likely.
It's likely whenever the monsters have nothing better to do with their time than to smash the PCs. Even demons might have a larger agenda.
With the access the players have to healing (and with just one leader they do just fine) and the ability to cast rituals such as raise dead (which my party can do once a day for free) death is not a permanent road block. I personally do not like the raise dead rules and would opt for a form that gave more control to myself and was more reliant on story, though because I know players like to have that to fall back on in case their beloved character dies I stick with these rules - if just to be consistant and have the players know what their options may be.
That 24/12 hour casting time for Raise Dead gives the DM a lot of control. A lot can happen in that time. Do they stick by the ritual, or do they do their job? (Of course, I would expect that the player with the dead character would still get to participate in some way.)
I find the best way to create a more intense feeling (as death bears down) is to have a good grasp and fine control over when the players are allowed to take an extended rest - this often makes the players push past when they might have otherwise tried an extended rest. and this is when things get interesting.
Very much agreed except, I think, on method. I would try never to flat out restrict when a group can rest, but I'm firmly within my rights to set an in-game countdown that allows for, say, one fewer rests than the number of expected encounters would usually have. Do they plow through, pushing on without a rest, or do they get clever and avoid certain encounters in order to conserve their resources. I'd be happy with either, and both can be intense.
[N]o difference is less easily overcome than the difference of opinion about semi-abstract questions. - L. Tolstoy
Very much agreed except, I think, on method. I would try never to flat out restrict when a group can rest, but I'm firmly within my rights to set an in-game countdown that allows for, say, one fewer rests than the number of expected encounters would usually have. Do they plow through, pushing on without a rest, or do they get clever and avoid certain encounters in order to conserve their resources. I'd be happy with either, and both can be intense.
I guess I should be a bit more clear here. I do not outright tell them that they cannot rest, and in most cases they do get a short rest after an encounter, but I do let them know if it is going to be dangerous to try, or on the other hand if they are in a place that is likely safe. This puts the ball in their court - try and rest and risk another encounter (one that for all intents and purposes is avoidable) or continue on in and move the story forward. I take decisons like this into account when I design the adventure, and their decision has an effect on what happens next. My players know that if they push on, they will be pushed to their limits but are rewarded for their tenacity. The game tends to be pretty fast paced - with only about 3 weeks of in game time having transpired between 8th and 15th level (taking us nearly a year of about 1/week 4-5 hours of gaming). There are powerful forces mobilizing, and even if they do not know all the forces in play or their goals they realize that pushing forward is in most cases their best option, but in all cases the decision is theirs. And to their credit they choose to move forward rather than hunker down (of course it helps that they have the ritual that lets them redistribute surges and with half the part at 14+ surges this really helps those that have quiet a bit fewer surges).
As for your question about the raise dead ritual: there is an essentials cleric in the party, so he has the ritual as a daily power, so as long as he remains living then they have the ablility to raise one party member a day after an extended rest. We play it as during the extended rest the cleric is chanting (think Conan the Barbarian - just minus the demonic spirits - though considering the setting maybe there should be some demonic sprits to fight) to store the soul to the body. It is not so intense that the cleric also gets his extended rest.
And as for the demons just pounding them into the ground, at this point they have not run into anything but minor demons who have been release to sow chaos - though there are others around that have greater plans in mind. But there have been several factions of demonic cults that take other tactics past just the slaying of the party - obtaining something guarded by them or their allies, capturing or slaying of important NPC allies, attempting to wreaking havok on the party's reputation within their own guild etc...
"The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us." - Friedrich Nietzsche
However, dishing out punishments would, to me, be one of the least rewarding, entertaining, and fun ways to spend an evening with a group of friends and family who are thinking outside of my box, or doing something I judge to be "stupid".
If my job as DM is to sit around looking for reasons to punish my players, then count me out of that job and the game, because it's not for me.
And what happens when I, as I DM slip up and do something "stupid"? What do the players do to punish me? (Come to think of it, that might explain a lot of the DM complaints about PCs killing innocent NPCs, spoiling plots, destroying friendly villages, and that sort of thing....)
For what it's worth, the RPG that eventually changed my mind in favor of PC deaths as part of the fun of the game was Call of Cthulhu, where the unearthly fates of those poor, doomed Investigators was all part of the fun, and a cool death or fate worse than death was something to brag about... sometimes, we remembered the awful things that happened to the characters more clearly and fondly than their names.
"Hey, remember when the disfigured gangster found his way down into the trapdoor in the basement of his grandfather's house, into the ruins of that hidden, subterranean city, and found out about his ancestry, and went stark raving mad from the revelation? The last thing you heard before he started the cave-in was him laughing and screaming, 'At last - I'm HOME!'?" "How about the delivery truck guy, whose bones got eaten by insects when he split up with the party to investigate the weird noise in the attic? The bugs left just a ragdoll heap of crying meat behind!" "Oh yeah, I don't know why, but that was one of the few things to give me nightmares! 'PLEASE - KILL ME!' How about when the alcoholic newspaper reporter discovered too late that his wife had 'come back wrong' after he cast that ressurection spell? You guys told me not to cast it, but I couldn't resist - that's the way he would have wanted it!" "Yeah, that was creepy! That would be from The Evil Dead, right? But my favorite was that singer, what's-her-name, you character, who found that shape-shifting spell in that creepy old book? Then, she accidentally started turning herself into a mutant horror when she lost control of the shape-shifting ability...." "Yeah, she thought she was making herself beautiful! She finally cracked when she saw herself in a mirror, and became a recurring villain NPC...." "The 'Dreaming Party'! When the characters all took that weird potion, and accidentally dreamed themselves to death!" "Oh, yeah, I didn't expect a total-party-kill in the Dreamlands! Narrating what happened when your replacements found your remains the next morning was too much fun!"
Investigator deaths in CoC weren't a punishment - they were a ghoulish reward for getting into the spirit of things, and prying into secrets man wasn't meant to know, and doing all the awesomely ill-advised things characters in horror stories do as a normal part of their wretchedly short lives!
Trying to solve out-of-game problems (like cheating, bad attitudes, or poor sportsmanship) with in-game solutions will almost always result in failure, and will probably make matters worse.
Gun Safety Rule #5: Never point the gun at anything you don't intend to destroy. (Never introduce a character, PC, NPC, Villain, or fate of the world into even the possibility of a deadly combat or other dangerous situation, unless you are prepared to destroy it instantly and completely forever.)
Know your group's character sheets, and check them over carefully. You don't want surprises, but, more importantly, they are a gold mine of ideas!
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's a problem if the players aren't having fun and it interferes with a DM's ability to run the game effectively; if it's not a problem, 'fixing' at best does little to help, and at worst causes problems that didn't exist before.
"Hulk Smash" characters are a bad match for open-ended exploration in crowds of civilians; get them out of civilization where they can break things and kill monsters in peace.
Success is not necessarily the same thing as killing an opponent. Failure is not necessarily the same thing as dying.
Failure is always an option. And it's a fine option, too, as long as failure is interesting, entertaining, and fun!
"Broken or not, unbalanced or not, if something seems to be preventing the game from being enjoyable, something has to give: either that thing, or other aspects of the game, or your idea of what's enjoyable." - Centauri
That's it EXACTLY, YronimosW, as freaking usual. Good work.
Give me a "cool death or fate worse than death" any day of the week and I will lap it up and ask for seconds.
You don't "win D&D" by surviving till the end. There's nothing there waiting for you.No grand reward. No accolades. Not even the last damn slice of pizza. You win it by being the most memorable character at the table and people talking about it years and years later. And that often includes dying in some interesting way.
No amount of tips, tricks, or gimmicks will ever be better than simply talking directly to your fellow players to resolve your issues. Reduce DM Prep & Increase Player Engagement:Don't Prep the Plot | Structure First, Story Last | Collaborative Roleplay | "Yes, and..." | Prep Tips Games I'm Running on Roll20: Island of the Frog | Vanguard of Dis | Star*Juice | Tesseract | The Crucible | Fimbulvetr | The Delve | Draj, City of the Moon Follow me on Twitter:@is3rith
What are some of the ways that you handle mortality in your game?
Raise Dead. In fact I house rule it to a level 1 ritual. I know that some DMs poo poo "easy rescucitation," but I find that without it I'm too afraid to take my kid gloves off in combat, which in turn leads to bored players.
With the Raise Dead option, combats are tense and death matters, but it doesn't automatically spell the end of a beloved character.
That's it EXACTLY, YronimosW, as freaking usual. Good work.
Give me a "cool death or fate worse than death" any day of the week and I will lap it up and ask for seconds.
You don't "win D&D" by surviving till the end. There's nothing there waiting for you.No grand reward. No accolades. Not even the last damn slice of pizza. You win it by being the most memorable character at the table and people talking about it years and years later. And that often includes dying in some interesting way.
I just have to say it again: I cringe every time I see a DM in these forums talking about punishing players. I've never been about punshing the players for anything - rather, I want to reward them for cooperating with each other and doing interesting, entertaining things with me for a couple hours of my busy week.
Sometimes they do that by being the best, most competent, most forward-thinking, most lucky adventurers they can be.
And sometimes they do that by making mistakes, misunderstanding me, doing things that are unexpected or not very obvious to me, deliberately choosing to do things "wrong" because that's what their characters would do, or getting themselves into trouble by going places and doing things that normal, sane human beings would never dream of going or doing, just because it's interesting. And, as long as everyone is entertained at the end of the night and looking forward to the next session, they're doing it right!
Trying to solve out-of-game problems (like cheating, bad attitudes, or poor sportsmanship) with in-game solutions will almost always result in failure, and will probably make matters worse.
Gun Safety Rule #5: Never point the gun at anything you don't intend to destroy. (Never introduce a character, PC, NPC, Villain, or fate of the world into even the possibility of a deadly combat or other dangerous situation, unless you are prepared to destroy it instantly and completely forever.)
Know your group's character sheets, and check them over carefully. You don't want surprises, but, more importantly, they are a gold mine of ideas!
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's a problem if the players aren't having fun and it interferes with a DM's ability to run the game effectively; if it's not a problem, 'fixing' at best does little to help, and at worst causes problems that didn't exist before.
"Hulk Smash" characters are a bad match for open-ended exploration in crowds of civilians; get them out of civilization where they can break things and kill monsters in peace.
Success is not necessarily the same thing as killing an opponent. Failure is not necessarily the same thing as dying.
Failure is always an option. And it's a fine option, too, as long as failure is interesting, entertaining, and fun!
"Broken or not, unbalanced or not, if something seems to be preventing the game from being enjoyable, something has to give: either that thing, or other aspects of the game, or your idea of what's enjoyable." - Centauri
I guess I should be a bit more clear here. I do not outright tell them that they cannot rest, and in most cases they do get a short rest after an encounter, but I do let them know if it is going to be dangerous to try, or on the other hand if they are in a place that is likely safe. This puts the ball in their court - try and rest and risk another encounter (one that for all intents and purposes is avoidable) or continue on in and move the story forward.
Ah, I did misunderstand, but I don't do this either.
What I will do, though, is warn them that the clock is ticking and if they rest they might either fail or risk an opportunity. Defenses will be shored up, troops will be rallied, VIPs and treasure will be evacuated, another group will reach the goal first, etc.
I take decisons like this into account when I design the adventure, and their decision has an effect on what happens next. My players know that if they push on, they will be pushed to their limits but are rewarded for their tenacity.
By hitting them with another encounter during a rest, aren't you taking the option of being pushed to their limits, or not, out of their hands? It sounds like they're pushed to their limits regardless.
The game tends to be pretty fast paced - with only about 3 weeks of in game time having transpired between 8th and 15th level (taking us nearly a year of about 1/week 4-5 hours of gaming). There are powerful forces mobilizing, and even if they do not know all the forces in play or their goals they realize that pushing forward is in most cases their best option, but in all cases the decision is theirs.
Apart from attacks during their rests, what would happen in the world if the PCs didn't press on? That's the kind of thing I try to focus on: not challenging the characters, but challenging the goals their characters might care about.
What are some of the ways that you handle mortality in your game?
Raise Dead. In fact I house rule it to a level 1 ritual. I know that some DMs poo poo "easy rescucitation," but I find that without it I'm too afraid to take my kid gloves off in combat, which in turn leads to bored players.
Sure, but there are other ways to challenge the characters. Death of a PC is a universal threat; every player has a character to lose. Try to look for things you can threaten other than the characters. My players lose, or achieve only partial victories all the time, but they are hardly ever at risk of their characters dying.
[N]o difference is less easily overcome than the difference of opinion about semi-abstract questions. - L. Tolstoy
Man I feel more than a little embarrassed that I used the term "stupid" when really I meant "wantonly reckless", should learn to pick my words more carefully in the future, "stupid" was way too strong and judgmental.
I really like whats been said about death as a punishment being a bad idea or indeed punishments at all being a bad idea. That said I do think consequences for actions can be handled in an appropriate way without feeling like you are "punishing" the players for something. If they do something completely unexpected and they suffer because you didn't want them to do the unexpected THAT is a problem but if something terrible happens because their plan just didn't hold up (bad dice rolls for example) I would want to give them some sort of realistic consequence without discouraging them to try creative plans in the future. Its a weird tightrope to walk sometimes.
Got a little off the mortality topic there, sorry, but I really like what iserith said about having them choose to die or not and explain why and simply be removed from combat. My idea was to take it a step further and have their character wounded in some way, I may be wrong as I haven't tested it yet but with the right presentation I think "Hey remember when that dragon ate my leg?" could be a great memory for the players.
And can I just say I lose this thread? Its given me tons to think about as a DM. I'm not exactly new but Im hardly the seasoned veteran so advice is always wonderful =D
