D&D 5E Killing a Teammate

[Saeviomagy]

If the following are all true:
1. You've determined that one character is useless, effectively unable to participate in the game.
2. You've then also determined that the player cannot replace that character until it dies.
3. You've also determined that the character can't be healed.
4. You've informed the other players that their characters will suffer major penalties for intervening.

Then you're just being a dick. If you wish to not be a dick, change one of the above (preferably 1, 2 or 3, because forcing players to metagame for another players enjoyment doesn't sit well with me).

My personal choice would be to change 1. Let them play on as a hovering ethereal brain with the limited ability to direct and communicate with their body, let them play on as an alien possessing entity in the vacant body, or as an alien creature that their brain has been relocated to.

Make it a "remember that time your brain was eaten AND THEN..." story, not another PC death to be forgotten.

 

[n00b f00]

Besides the fact that sitting out for months basically means you're kicking the player from the group.

From an in universe perspective, how likely is it to spend months in the Underdark with someone who can't take care of themselves, someone can can't move and can barely talk? Forget the fact that the character is a liability. Let's just compare the likelihood of the victim being eaten alive at best vs being successfully dragged around for months in what's supposed to be a hellishly dangerous locale.

I'm not saying you can't have a story about such a mission. But you can't pretend it's like camping out for a few days while it blows over. Or like making a difficult journey through the woods. It's a virtually hopeless endeavor more likely to result in an agonizing death than rescue. That doesn't automatically make it right to kill them. But it's not an act comitted out of blase inconvenience.

 

[Eltab]

A Paladin of the Red Knight - his main thing was about championing civilisation itself, he was a general at heart. The decision would come down to maintaining the tactically sound thing to do (which could be to maintain morale by dragging around the victim, but its unlikely). The Art of War was a holy book for this guy.

That could almost be ME - but Brisbane (you) is on the other side of the world ...

 

[Eltab]

After cogitating for a few hours, my inner Alchemist finally came up with a meaningful solution:

Let somebody rack their brain and make an Arcana check or a Medicine check, to remember this tidbit, which they thought they would never have to use:

If you kill an Intellect Devourer swiftly after it absorbs / eats somebody's brain, you can make stew out of ITS brain - and some magically potent herbs &c - and dribble the stew onto the victim's bloodstream. After a few days his mind begins to come back.
(Make "Death" Saves, 1/day, +1 INT on a success, if you need a mechanic.)

The Paladin has Lay on Hands. The Cleric ought to have a Channel Divinity or something else appropriate. If he completely empties himself on one target - like the "cure poison" LoH option but bigger - he might be able to get more impressive results. Both the Paladin and the Cleric should be praying for help in their endeavor, and for their friends' healing, anyways.

 

[hejtmane]

IIRC devotion Paladin requires protection of the innocent and helpless. Oath of ancients requires that you preserve light and life in the world, but destroy perversions of that light(might be wrong on that part). Vengeance is pretty obvious, but PC vegetable most likely did nothing wrong to pally, so vengeance would not apply. Cleric has options however, due to the any deities, as well as how those deities might interpret a given situation. OTOH, I do not personally agree with forcing the Paladin fall rules upon a player, since that would be the only class with such a punishment. Cleric can change deities, but only the Paladin gets stripped of all powers whenever the DM feels like it.

Yes but a vengeance Paladin is all about his vengeance if they are getting in the way of that solution the ends justifies the means so that can be twisted and warped that he is giving them an honorable death.

 

[Maxperson]

Another point of view I see coming up is that killing this vegetable is ABSOLUTELY evil, no doubt about it. I feel like those who say this do not consider mercy killing a thing. If I were a useless vegetable, a husk of my former glory, and did not have the intelligence to know I could be saved, I would be begging for death. Now, if the party says "we kill the vegetable, because we don't want to drag the body around for months" That is most definitely a cruel thing. But what if the party said "I feel horrible seeing my old friend this way, and cannot guarantee I can get to a settlement in time. Maybe a dagger through the heart will be better than being mauled by trolls, when the poor guy can't do anything to defend himself." That paints a very different picture, and does not read like an evil act at all, IMO anyway. Yes, a quest could be made for this, and it could be made into an interesting story, but I don't think morality is simple enough that one could say "yes, that is evil, you should lose support of your God" and be fair about it. Even a life cleric could argue the killing side, on the basis that this is no life at all. It is a twisted perversion, one that should be removed from suffering.

Weak justifications in order to get away with a murder of expedience. The party knows that the PC can be restored to a fully functional state, so no, there is no good reason to "mercy" murder the poor PC. The PC is not going to desire death because she has a 0 int for a time and will then be fully restored. The idea that there might, maybe, some time be that trolls might possibly kill the PC is also not a justification for murder. Even if the party does encounter trolls, the PC is nowhere near guaranteed to be killed, unlike with the murder of expedience you suggest.

Of course, this all assumes they do not know when the next settlement is. If they KNOW they will hit a settlement in a little while, I can see issue with killing the vegetable, but if all they know is that they are stranded in the underdark, I can understand the choice to kill. As I said morality is not simple, and this falls into a very grey area.

It doesn't matter if it would take them a year. Murdering someone, because it might be hard to keep them alive is evil.

 

[Unwise]

After cogitating for a few hours, my inner Alchemist finally came up with a meaningful solution:

Let somebody rack their brain and make an Arcana check or a Medicine check, to remember this tidbit, which they thought they would never have to use:

If you kill an Intellect Devourer swiftly after it absorbs / eats somebody's brain, you can make stew out of ITS brain - and some magically potent herbs &c - and dribble the stew onto the victim's bloodstream. After a few days his mind begins to come back.
(Make "Death" Saves, 1/day, +1 INT on a success, if you need a mechanic.)...

This is what I did when I was in this situation as a DM years ago. I also apply it to turning to stone and such. A potion made of the eyes of a medusa etc is a great starting point to turning somebody back to flesh. Components + Herbalism + Arcana + Medicine = letting Lesser Restoration do stuff it could not normally.

In my case, I made it so that the PC had their Int returned, but was insane. The potion made from the intellect devourer had the thoughts of all of the people it had devoured. They all came flooding back and the PC was now carrying around split personalities and memories that were not their own. Some of these memories were good plot points that led the group to a village where the PC remembered living, despite having never been there.

 

[n00b f00]

Killing someone because it might be hard to keep them alive and killing someone because it's impossible to keep them alive are two different things. There's an intersection here of setting assumptions and personal morality that means we're unlikely to find common ground.

In my book the Underdark is one step removed from Hell, killing her for being in that state is the equivalent of killing someone being chewed on by a monster you can't stop. Just easing the pain. A unsavory but unambiguously good act.

It seems that some people look at it like getting into a car crash, your friend being critically wounded and leaving him on the side of the road because you don't want to risk a 20 minute drive with a corpse to the hospital. An evil and weak act for sure.

Part of that is how you feel on the spectrum of when it's okay to kill someone from never to always. And how dangerous you think the Underdark is from worse than hell to marginally more dangerous than your adverage forest. There's no real life perfect equivalent, the closest thing we have to this situation is soldiers or refugees with a coma victim in hostile territory months away from safety. In real life I'd likely view it as something unsavory and disgusting, but totally necessary.

These types of semi meta disagreements, like orc prisoners, are fine as long as it doesn't cause rancor at the table. If it does the situation needs to be hand waved away, which is hard to do with the GM actively resisting the option of just handwaving away how easy it is. Just give the player a new character and mention the victim just enough to let them know they're still carrying her ass everywhere.

 

[NeverLucky]

If a PC gets petrified during the session, since they're not actually dead, clearly the right thing to do is to force them to roleplay a statue for twenty sessions until the cleric is high enough level to restore them.

 

[CRJohnston]

Level nine won't happen tomorrow, will it? In the meantime you have somebody in a coma in the wilderness. Also, I always assumed anybody who can cast a spell like true resurrection is pretty rare, to where even a cleric wouldn't be sure they could do that one day.
Most importantly, are you prepared to make that player wait six levels before they can play? that seems a tad harsh.