Your players have done it again. They've pushed their luck to the limits, made all sorts of extreme and havoc-inducing decisions, and despite your best efforts (and fudged dice rolls bordering on an obscene insult to the Game Gods) they've found themselves in a situtation where the sure death of their characters is the only likely result. Do you conjure up your most glorious narration to describe the characters violent end, or activate deus ex machina once more to allow the characters and the player an escape route?
Certainly storytelling, creative social interaction, and allround fun are paramount to the game, but at what point does the genuine fear of a fatal conclusion disappear, driving players onto even wilder desicions, game-hijacking, or unchecked powergaming? Something like a television show where the viewer knows that none of their favorite characters will EVER die for real, campaigns where a healthy respect for the possibility of death doesn't exist suffers from a collapsing 4th wall. This could be argued to even hamper the ability for players to embrace losing themselves in a character by encouraging anachronistic thinking. There are campaign and game groups where this is absolutely the kind of game they enjoy playing, and this thread shouldn't be confused for an assertion that that is somehow wrong. It's all about fun.
Yet for the DMs who run games that exist in a "realistic" universe, this is a dilemma that can easily present itself every single combat or encounter. Even when everyone is onboard with character death from the get-go, it gets hard to seperate oneself from a beloved character when the time arrives. Hard feelings can bubble up from even the most even-keeled players if they feel like they've been treated unfairly. In larger groups a characters death can often be avoided in permanancy simply through game mechanics that allow for ressurection and magical healing, but can also have great value as a storyteling tool. An adventuring party forced to deal with the aftereffects of losing their beloved cleric and leader, or a gang of deceptive crooks silencing a snitch can lead to some great entertainment and player interaction, not to mention the joys of auditioning new "recruits" after the players have rolled up a new sheet.
Personally, I prefer to run realistic games, and always make it clear from the start that death CAN happen, but that I'm not going to play favorites or entertain myself by maliciously taking lives. With my regular players this is generally understood and nearly everyone has rolled up a couple of characters (we play Shadowrun and one players grizzled street samurai has had so many rookie runners join him that he's become quite the cold bastard, and given the player ultimate bragging rights having survived even a change of editions), and when new players join up I encourage them to come up with two character ideas right off the bat just to get them thinking about it in case the worst happens.
So let's hear you thoughts on the issue. Do you play in or run a game where death can lurk behind every dungeon door or up the sleeve or every "helpful" stranger? Or is your party filled with the same proud heroes that were there in session 0? Do you handle character deaths with a unique house rule, or allow characters to play clones. What's your opinion on PC vs PC deaths, or have you used a character death to remove an overpowered or game-breaking character? When is it right to kill a character?
Your players have done it again. They've pushed their luck to the limits, made all sorts of extreme and havoc-inducing decisions, and despite your best efforts (and fudged dice rolls bordering on an obscene insult to the Game Gods) they've found themselves in a situtation where the sure death of their characters is the only likely result. Do you conjure up your most glorious narration to describe the characters violent end, or activate deus ex machina once more to allow the characters and the player an escape route?
Neither. Their deaths were not the point of the encounter. If one of them happens to drop, the monsters can probably just complete their goal and move on. If the players want to kill their characters, I can offer them something along those lines, trade for success, or another chance at it, or somewhat mitigated failure.
Let's not kid ourselves about games that involve a chance for player death being more "realistic." Even assuming that one small aspect of them is now more "realistic," that's setting aside a truckload of stuff that's not, even without getting into magic, or dragons. If we're already saying that the PCs engage in multiple fights per day, I'm going to go ahead and say that the enemies in those fights have "realistic" agendas that don't directly benefit from the deaths of the PCs. There: realism preserved.
Other questions: Character death is always the choice of the player, if it ever comes up. Character on character conflict is fine and appropriate, but no dice are rolled. It's done by narration and agreement, and each player decides the results of any action toward his or her character. It's never right for the DM to kill a character, but it may often be right for a player to state that a character should die.
[N]o difference is less easily overcome than the difference of opinion about semi-abstract questions. - L. Tolstoy
I've posted before about this and I know it's anamalous so I don't mind if people completely disregard it:
Death is absolute in our game. A few months back we came up with a "you die, you reroll, literally" plan. Basically death means you roll 2d10 for a race and 2d10 for a class. We have a chart and everything with certain races and classes given a larger percentage of the numerical possibilities. A Human Cleric is far more likely than a Wilden Swordmage|Rogue.
Our current campaign involves a motley band of 50 heroes trying to save the world from 9 evil tyrant BBEGs. We are a party of 6, when one of us dies, we bring in our alt (rolled ahead of time). 4 sessions in and we've already lost 3 characters. (note: the campaign fails if we run out of heroes)
Our game is devastating, a poor roll at the wrong time can, and will spell your demise. However the treasures are equally insane. A few weeks back we had an orb that dealt a flat 100dmg (no roll) and last week we used a trident that dropped vuln 25 (save ends) on our enemy.
It's definitely a unique group, doing unique things, and I think most players would not enjoy it for very long. But please understand none of this happens without the players consent, and none of this is haphazard or arbitrary.
We as players know what we are getting into, and so do our heroes, and they are built accordingly. Combat makes up less than 1/3 of our weekly sessions thus far (though we did battle a beholder this week that took a while). We spend most of our time exploring and poking things, solving puzzles, talking to the dead, etc. It's a good time, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.
It depends entirely on the system and the style of game. I'll give you three examples of systems I've run games in:
Call of Cthulu - Death is outright one of the themes of Call of Cthulu. Going insane or dying is the expected outcome of your average character, and only the most exceptional luck or planning will ever see a character survive a CoC game. Let the dice fall where they may.
The key I find in Call of Cthulu is to have an NPC or two handy for the character to play. Let them interact with the other players in a more assistance/adversial manner. Then let them come back later as another character, in the next session, but different. Perhaps have them play NPCs for several sessions if they want. The feeling of death and a more permanent state of it adds to the horrific atmosphere of the game. CoC is supposed to be creepy and unnerving, and it's hard to feel too creeped out in the equivalent of a haunted house ride.
Dresden Files (FATE) - Like all Fate games, death is rare and narrative based. Players typically consent to their own deaths, or at least the possibility of them before they occur. From a narrative perspective, losing means failing objectives, letting important people die, losing resources, and getting stuck in crappy situations. In fact, getting stuck in bad situations is part of the theme of the game. In Dresden Files, at least, the heroes are always the scrappy underdogs, and to really be scrappy underdogs, they have to get kicked a lot - but never enough to kill them (unless that's part of the theme). Characters die off when players feel that they've completed their arc and it's a dramatically appropriate time to take a life or death risk - or just a deadly sacrifice.
D&D 4E - Characters are far more powerful than characters in either system, but the challenge of winning and losing, the game, is a huge part of 4E. And realistically, you can't have a game where there are no penalties. Winning is a challenge, and the challenge should have rewards, and risks.
As for TPK, well, sometimes if I see one coming I'll head it off, especially if it's at an especially dopey time to have a TPK. Other times, it's time to let it happen. I have an interesting one planned for my current campaign if they ever get themselves all killed.
Character death is always the choice of the player, if it ever comes up.
Character on character conflict is fine and appropriate, but no dice are rolled. It's done by narration and agreement, and each player decides the results of any action toward his or her character.
It's never right for the DM to kill a character, but it may often be right for a player to state that a character should die.
That sums it up for me.
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
In my experience it's quite rare for the players to want their characters to die. I have had players drop in for single sessions and they seem more likely to either make extreme choices that end with them going out in a blaze of glory or sacrificing themselves during an act of betrayl/rescue, but most of the groups of regular players have been more inclined to run characters until they become very powerful and then occasionally retire them.
Granted, all of this assumes a game where the group has agreed prior to the campaign starting. If the game is intended to run completely in a limited number of sessions, then an unexpected character death can be used as part of the story, especially when there are extra characters available to be picked up (kudos to the players that make reserve characters to start). Long term campaigns benefit greatly from deciding how the character deaths will be handled as a group at the beginning, and then, well, whatever works for that group right?
I never kill characters as a malicious act, or force a player to sit out if it happens to them, but it has encouraged a ton of great roleplaying when I've let the dice fall as they may and characters are slain. It's also not something that happens in every session, or more often than it should to make for an interesting twist, but it's far less effective when the players get to decide if it happens. When I'm playing, part of the entertainment comes from the things I don't expect, seeing how things play out when critical desicions are required.
Centauri, it sounds like you run a story rich game, and I respect that. I've had a great time playing games like Vampire or Chtulu where there's a clear influence on group storytelling, and those are stories that come up everytime there's a Remember When... conversation. As I've progressed as a DM I've also enjoyed developing stories where I can weave in seemingly disconnected characters in order to build a living history inside the campaign world. My regular group still plays regular sessions in a campaign where more than one player is now playing descendants of previous characters. Of course it means having less and less original source material lore to draw from, but I can always redesign something that hasn't been touched on before to fit the new timeframe.
Bohrdum, I really like the idea of the set number of characters used kind of like a number of available lives in medium to long campaign. I think I'll be suggesting something like that to my group when we start our next campaign.
I've only seen character death due to combat happen in 4e once. We were playing a series of single-session adventures and trading DMs every week last summer, due to having a reduced group size. Even with a DMPC, it was typically a party of 3, and we were playing on low levels. We had an encounter with a string of bad rolls for us / good rolls for the monsters, and two of our three characters ended up unconscious. Then, both of those characters failed three death saving throws before the one who was still standing could get close enough to help. That left a lone Kobold in the room, with only one remaining enemy: A dire wolf that was higher level than her (I don't remember how high). The wolf had been let out of a cage, which we'd failed to prevent. The wolf was at full health. She was unwilling to retreat and leave her slain companions behind to get devoured, so acting in typical Kobold manner, she rigged a spike trap and lured the wolf into it. She finally got some good rolls, and ended up killing the thing single-handedly.
At that point in time, for the DM to have invented some plot twist to keep the characters alive after things took a sharp turn for the worse would have felt cheap and artificial. No, we didn't want to die, but we'd already accepted the mechanic that if you drop to 0 hitpoints and then fail three saving throws, that's what happens. It's a very rare occurance in this particular game, but I don't think anyone I play with would want things to be rigged to make it impossible. We still talk about the Kobold killing that wolf. And here's the point -- there's a definite thrill for everyone involved (even those just watching for the last bit) for pulling off a victory like that within the confines of the combat rules you've already agreed on. Yes, some house-ruling was involved in figuring out how the spike trap worked, but it would not have felt remotely as epic if she'd just said what she was trying to do, had the DM say okay, that happens, the wolf is dead. We did have the option afterward of inventing a narrative reason for her to have sraped together enough gold to resurrect us, but we elected not to.
We did have the option afterward of inventing a narrative reason for her to have sraped together enough gold to resurrect us, but we elected not to.
In other words, given the option to live or die, you chose death. Interesting...
I offer that choice by default without a raise dead hoop to jump through. Players still choose death quite frequently. Risk or thrill is not diminished at all and the player gets to decide, for whatever reason he wants, whether he's taking that heroic death and goes into that Good Night or shrugs off a lame death and presses on, rather than the game system deciding that for him or forcing a bunch of pointless table transactions to get around it.
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
Eh, it wasn't that heroic in this case. I was playing a Gnome Warlord named Nacklewocket who should have needed a bag of holding to carry his ego, and cared more about his camel than he did the other party members, who he thought of as his minions. He was entertaining for a few sessions, but at that point I was ready to drop him anyway.
I get what you're saying though, that sometimes players will choose death because it's dramatic or whatever. In a more recent campaign, someone did so. (It was not death by combat, but death by ritual. Also, in a twist we didn't anticipate, he kept playing that character afterwards. Complicated storyline I won't get into here, lol.) But maybe my group is just different from yours, in that we've essentially given prior consent for our characters to be killed, in the event that the die rolls turn against us in such an incredibly bad and unlikely manner to cause that to happen. (Because let's face it, 4e characters past about level 5 are almost immortal.) Assuming the DM isn't just ramping up combat difficulty until someone dies, if things really do turn that badly for the worse, chances are it's going to create circumstances dramatic enough for a character death to feel appropriate.
On the other hand, there have been two occassions where I, as a DM, failed to anticipate amazing synergy between my monster and/or terrain choices, and fudged the mechanics to avoid a total party kill. In both cases, players who knew I fudged were not upset by it, because the encounters were not winnable. Although, in the second case if I'd thought things through I might have let it proceed and forced a party retreat (which would have been easy for them to do), because coming up with an alternate solution for that situation would have been very interesting. Regardless, I felt that player death due to a mistake in DM planning was stupid and shouldn't happen.
But maybe my group is just different from yours, in that we've essentially given prior consent for our characters to be killed, in the event that the die rolls turn against us in such an incredibly bad and unlikely manner to cause that to happen.
The bodycount in my games is significantly higher than in every other game I've ever been a player in*, save one. I've got consent to kill. I still give the power to make that kill "stick" back to the players. It's bad design to take a player out of the game with mechanics, "take out" being here defined as sitting out the rest of the session, being forced to play or create a new character, or jumping through hoops or resource drains like getting a raise dead cast.
* I believe this is due to the fact I have no story and character death doesn't really impact my "plot" at all since I don't have one.
Regardless, I felt that player death due to a mistake in DM planning was stupid and shouldn't happen.
Also obviated by simply letting the player himself or herself choose.
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
