Life and Death Consequences (Forked: On the Value of Uncertainty)

Forked from: On the Value of Uncertainty

Fenes said:

One addition: There's also the limited uncertainity. So, a fight may be fully uncertain for the players, but they might know that their characters won't die - even if the exact consequences of a lost fight are unknown and reach from captivity to the loss of countries.

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What are your games like in regard to PC death?

Falling where they may, let the dice bodies be.

Not in my #@%&*@! coffee, so long as it is.

Live by the dice, die by the dice. Basically, the rolls determine your fate, I, as a DM, will not fudge those rolls as a general thumb of rule. Then again, all rolls are made in the open, in full view of all players, so opportunities to fudge are fairly non-existent...

Most of the DMs i've played with don't want to kill the players. They tend to pull punches when a character is about to die or figure out some interesting way to get a character(s) back if somthing really bad happens.

Determined strictly by the dice.

Determined by the dice, but, that doesn't mean that my game is very lethal. My players are attached to their characters, and would rather see them humiliated and defeated in ways other than actual, permanent death.

This may change once we get to a level where raising the dead is plausible.

Speaking strictly from a game and narrative sense, absolutely not applicable to the real world, and strictly my opinion:

Selected "Other".

Neither me nor my players enjoy random, senseless death. If that was what we wanted we'd read the paper or watch the news rather than playing a game. However, character death is not outside the realm of possibility. My players know that if they have their character do something stupid, especially when they know it's stupid before they do it, they run a good chance of killing their character. I won't fudge for intentional stupidity. In other words, if their character wants to jump off a cliff because they think they have enough hit points to survive, they are probably going to die. If they fall into a pool of lava, they are going to die. However, I won't take advantage of accidental mistakes or poor judgement.

I won't kill a character unless it's dramatically or heroically apt and narratively memorable. I don't like death in novels unless it is part of the story, adds to the story, or becomes a unique and extraordinary part of the story. For example: the death of Spock, the death of Chewbacca, the death of Neo, etc. If a character sacrifices themself in a truly heroic and dramatic fashion, I won't fudge it out, I'll let it happen. If it's just a random occurance, I just don't see the drama in it. Besides, there are so many other things a DM can do other than, or even worse than, death.

As SNL once quoted the Surgeon General: "The adage that 'What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger' is incorrect. The revised statement is 'That which doesn't kill you, leaves you messed up for a really long time and you're never the same again'."

How about "only with DM approval"?

I try to let the dice fall as they may, but if I think a player's done well and just be done wrong by the dice, I might bail 'em out with a cheap res or something. If I think a challenge was too hard, I'll cut them all kinds of breaks. If not, no.

And beyond this, there's the question of how dramatically appropriate the death is. Bottom line is that if the dice say a PC dies, the DM still makes all the calls.

While I don't make "with PC approval" explicit, I don't want it to be "A random table says rocks fall from the sky and you die", either. Most of what happens in the game should be driven in reaction to player actions; randomization is a way to model the results on a small scale adding up influence the big picture over time.

Given this, if a player dies without being well aware of the possibility at a point where there's still alternative options, the problem is almost certainly that I'm doing a poor job of communicating the in-game situation.

Alternately, if a player dies and I didn't expect it, it's most likely a flaw in my encounter design. I'm not above readjusting the encounter on the fly to fix that mistake. This isn't "cheating", since I designed the encounter in the first place and since I'm only running one game, it's not like I had a chance to playtest it before.

Last few times someone in my games died was when they decided to attack a "wolf god" instead of giving said wolf one of the items it wanted, which would have actually hurt it severely or killed it. It ended in a near TPK with one of the characters being traumatized for the rest of her life, and then the game kind of fell apart. I perhaps should have made the situation a bit more clear, but nobody bothered to do any more superficial research on the items and I normally maintain a laissez-faire stance on what I allow the players to do.

I don't go out of my way to kill player characters, in fact I am rather lenient in the favor of the PCs and almost never use things such as CdG. People normally don't die unless they do something to warrant it (like the time someone decided it would be a good idea to jam open a space dock access door while a ship was preparing to launch), or for some reason they fail their death saves or whatever the system calls them.