Weak Deaths

[Dannyalcatraz]

If my character lives, great.
If it dies, I have a fantastic opporturnity to create a new one.
Whether the death is heroic or weak, matters not.

Reminds me of a song:

There's a time in our lives
we start again on writing our part
as the story goes on it's the rule that we remember our lines

I know everyone would want me to say
that I'm not afraid to be alone

I'm gonna live I'm alright
I'm gonna die it's alright I'm okay
Lai dai dai
I'm gonna live I'm alright
I'm gonna die it's alright I'm okay
Lai dai dai

 

[Hussar]

Yeah I guess OTOH sometime a death of just pure failure is going to be memorable and cool in its humor. "Remember that time Jimmy couldn't roll above a 4, tripped off the cliff, caused an avalanche and landed on his sword? That was hilarious! How can you suck so much? "

I just don't like something like that happening to a character with a lot invested in him, and who's very involved in the plot.

Like Huskar said, I guess it depends on what kind of game it is: plot-y or not.

BTW, that's Hussar.

Elephant brings a point up though that should be addressed. Why does, "You're character cannot die" suddenly make the game pointless? That's only true if the only failure in your game is death.

If you play a game where there are all sorts of ways to fail, then losing out on fail by dying suddenly doesn't seem very important. In my mind, only games which are primarily combat driven does failure automatically equate with death.

 

[Nagol]

BTW, that's Hussar.

Elephant brings a point up though that should be addressed. Why does, "You're character cannot die" suddenly make the game pointless? That's only true if the only failure in your game is death.

If you play a game where there are all sorts of ways to fail, then losing out on fail by dying suddenly doesn't seem very important. In my mind, only games which are primarily combat driven does failure automatically equate with death.

In my mind, death equates to failure in almost all roleplaying games since you lose the ability to continue roleplaying your character.

Some games have methods of recovery such as Resurrection so that death becomes an inconvenience / setback more than loss.

A very few genres treat death as a transition state and character play continues.

I will grant it is a mode of failure that is most prevalent in combat-heavy games since the possibility of death in the intrigue-laden diplomatic marriage game is much lower.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I'm playing a game. If the dice come up, "Go to Jail. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200.00," then that's what happens.

Agree!

The problem with protecting a player from 'weak deaths' is that it puts someone at the table in the position of deciding when the character should die.

Yup. No problem with a game having fate points or action points, to be used wisely or unwisely. An unlimited number of fiat action points -- or even one fiat action point -- destroys the game for me. IMHO and IME, fudging never results in the best possible game.

Although I admire the intent here, my one experience with trying something like this immediately underlined the problems with it. I strongly suspect I'll never do it again.

I strongly agree, although I wish I had caught on as immediately as you did!

I let the dice fall as they may ...although there are many situations where I won't call for a dice roll if it is just doing something inconsequential, thus bypassing some 'weak death' scenarios.

Agreed, and same here.

Well, sure, it wouldn't pass off very well in a novel, but I consider that sort of random chance in the game to be one of the draws of the game.

Agreed!



RC

 

[prosfilaes]

Your party is on their way to the island fortress of the Demon King for the final epic battle. It's gonna be awesome. The entire campaign has led up to this. You have to swim across a river to reach the castle. You roll a 1 on your swim check. You get another chance, and roll a 2. One more chance, roll another 1. You are swept away and drown. Your character is dead. You miss the final epic battle, because you had a bad stroke of luck, and the greatest hero the world has ever seen drowned in rather unheroic fashion.

You're totally fine with that?

Either this challenge had to have some chance of thwarting the PCs in some way, or it was meaningless. In some ways, the way the DM handled it strikes me as the Rolemaster way; instead of letting him wash out or lose some stuff, she let a series of escalating roles kill the character. I'm not sure I would have done that; given the lack of mechanics here, I might have dropped him downstream, unconscious, on the side of the river, without most of what he was carrying. But the PCs tried to cross a river that was too strong to successfully swim, and instead of getting a boat, or having the strongest swimmer take a rope across and make a rope bridge, they choose to jump in and swim it. If there were to be no consequences for their haste, there should have been no rolls.

 

[Nagol]

Scenario: You're playing an 18th level character you've run since first level for over 3 years in real time. He's the leader of the party, and the hope of middle-earth. He's defeated dragons and hordes of undead. His magic weapons are legendary. This character is really part of YOU. You've played with him every week for THREE years.

Your party is on their way to the island fortress of the Demon King for the final epic battle. It's gonna be awesome. The entire campaign has led up to this. You have to swim across a river to reach the castle. You roll a 1 on your swim check. You get another chance, and roll a 2. One more chance, roll another 1. You are swept away and drown. Your character is dead. You miss the final epic battle, because you had a bad stroke of luck, and the greatest hero the world has ever seen drowned in rather unheroic fashion.

You're totally fine with that?

RPGs are a lot more involved then Monopoly. I know Monopoly can take FOREVER to play sometimes, but I don't think I've ever heard of a Monopoly game running for years.

I'm all for letting the dice land where the may, and I will absolutely NOT protect a player from a combat death, but I just don't think a great character dies in a trivial manner.

In that scenario, WHY is the player having his PC in such a scenario AT ALL? Why is such a character taking such stupid risks?

Where is the defensive gear? Where are the reactive abilities? Where are the other members of the team?

 

[Zhaleskra]

I'll start by saying I do get attached to characters. Their reality is a matter of a bunch of stuff on some paper and imagination.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as a stupid or pointless death except from the perspective of the player. When it makes sense, I agree with the "allow another roll or two, usually with a different skill" school of thought.

Somebody built that trap for a reason.

An NPC exploited an excellent opening your character provided.

Oh, and once again: Ass Saver Points. ;-)

 

[the Jester]

Does basic healing magic in your campaign world regrow lost limbs? I always had the impression that cure light wounds wouldn't give you back your apendages. Then why would it cure a ruptured splean?

What?

Seriously- falling down the hole of "what injuries will this spell fix?" is a long, dark rush where you are just kinda floating in mid-air until... splat!

D&D has abstract combat for a reason. Saying, "You're dead, but you're not dead yet... but you can't be healed..." really breaks my suspension of disbelief. Like I said, I've tried this before- and it was a terrible mistake with no way out that both preserved the situation and game world logic. Preserving those two things is much more important to me than soft-gloving a pc death.

If you're in a game world where magic is prevalent enough to cure all wounds, then you are also playing in a game world where death is trivialized by ressurection magic too.

That's an awful big assumption. For years my campaigns had lots of healing but virtually no resurrection magic of any kind.

Perhaps wounds that are grievous enough can't be cured by common magic, which would explain why nobles don't just ressurect their villagers to ensure they can keep collecting taxes.

Er... have you looked at the price of resurrection magic in any edition? There's a much better reason that the nobles don't have all the peasants raised from the dead (ignoring the need to have a priest on hand that is powerful enough to throw resurrection magic around, and who will use powerful miracles to raise the local punk kid at the noble's behest): it's too expensive. Really, taxes on a peasant cannot possibly amount to more than a few gp a year at the most.

The bottom line is that you look at a player and say, "You're character is going to die here. Fate has decreed it so. Do you want to go out with a bang or a whimper?"

To each their own, but I prefer my bad guys' kills to look a lot like the pcs' kills. Good for the goose, good for the gander. I won't institute rules like this that arbitrarily favor pcs over npcs.

Just like there's no in game reason NPCs have to die permanently and PCs don't, but it happens all the time. Sometimes magic just won't help, it's why death is a very real possiblity for 99% of a game world's inhabitants.

Depending on the playstyle, death may be a very real possibility for 100% of the world's inhabitants. Resurrection is not always an option in some campaigns.

Plus, even in high magic game worlds, a deity will only let magic do so much. Perhaps the lawful god of death requires that a sure death remain certain once in a while. Ressurection can't be 100% accurate or it risks trivializing one gods power (life) and weakening another's (death).

Again, you're making a lot of assumptions about the setting. Loot at Eberron- the gods are very standoffish, may not even objectively exist and don't meddle except through their agents (who might be opposed by other servants of the same god!).

There are no problems if you a) don't abuse it, and b) decide as a group how foolproof you want magic to be in your game world.

Well, different playstyles and all that, but in my experience there are PLENTY of problems with "you're dead but not" situations.

Scenario: You're playing an 18th level character you've run since first level for over 3 years in real time. He's the leader of the party, and the hope of middle-earth. He's defeated dragons and hordes of undead. His magic weapons are legendary. This character is really part of YOU. You've played with him every week for THREE years.

Your party is on their way to the island fortress of the Demon King for the final epic battle. It's gonna be awesome. The entire campaign has led up to this. You have to swim across a river to reach the castle. You roll a 1 on your swim check. You get another chance, and roll a 2. One more chance, roll another 1. You are swept away and drown. Your character is dead. You miss the final epic battle, because you had a bad stroke of luck, and the greatest hero the world has ever seen drowned in rather unheroic fashion.

You're totally fine with that?

Yes, absolutely. BUT...

If I'm that powerful, why on earth am I swimming and not flying or teleporting or whatever? If the party is 18th level and we're swimming, it's not a trivial swim. It is part of the challenge- clearly we're swimming because we cannot beard the Demon King in his lair another way.

If it is a barrier that never stops anyone, it's not much of a barrier. If the raging waters of the Demon Moat have a rep for annihilating those that dare them but it's the only way in, yeah, death ought to be a real possibility.

If I'm 18th level I probably have options for water breathing, water walking, invisibility, etc. If I'm dumb enough to just hop in and swim, I deserve what I get.

 

[Troll Slayer]

I hope this better clarifies my stance. This isn't a rules crunch type of game mechanic. It's purely narrative:

Sometimes the suffering of death, and what you do with the little time you have left, despite the agony; is what makes the ending worth telling.

I run very low magic games or medium magic very rarely. Ressurection is rarely an option and often leads to bad things in some cases. Healing magic can only do so much, it can't regrow lost limbs or ruined internal organs. There are some rituals that can do so, but the cost and time is great, hardly something that can be pulled off during most adventures. Plus in WFRP these can very possibly lead to the sort of things (mutation, corruption) that land you in the Witch Hunter's pyres soon after.

Most often I run WFRP, so there are Fortune/Fate points there to negate some of the bad death experiences, and "weak deaths" are a major part of the setting. However, burning a fate point takes you out of the fight and prevents the death in most cases. I'm not talking about preventing death, I'm talking about those times when death is unnavoidable (no fate points left) and giving the player a chance to be the narrator for his/her character's death scene.

On occassion, a player character deserves a proper send off. With a simple reinterpretation of the death dealing critical hit, I can give the player a chance to go out in style. (You're bleeding internally, and one of your lungs is collapsed. The pain makes your head swim. Death will come before any significant magic can be of service. You have one round before the pain overwhelms you. What do you do?)

This isn't a time for the character to think about maximizing healing or damage dealing opportunities. This is a window of opportunity to narrate how your character meets his demise. Sometimes in the thick of battle you get one round to make your death a memorable one. If it's a wasting disease that can't be cured, and you have two weeks to live, you might come up with something more interesting.

Being heroic when you know you have a chance at survival is one thing. Being heroic when you know you're a dead man is something that RPGs rarely tap into. It's a really dark, really cool type of scene to explore once in a while.

In the end the death will happen, but not every death is instantaneous. You bleed out, you suffer horribly, hell many chaos enemies would enjoy leaving you to die a miserable death. Most characters would give in to the pain and die. Some are determined enough to do one last thing before everything turns black. It's a purely cinematic moment, as pretty much a thank you to that character for his bravery, and that player for making his PC so enjoyable.

 

[Doctor DM]

Either this challenge had to have some chance of thwarting the PCs in some way, or it was meaningless. In some ways, the way the DM handled it strikes me as the Rolemaster way; instead of letting him wash out or lose some stuff, she let a series of escalating roles kill the character. I'm not sure I would have done that; given the lack of mechanics here, I might have dropped him downstream, unconscious, on the side of the river, without most of what he was carrying.

EXACTLY what I'm trying to get at here. You're not going to kill a character over something like that. There will be a negative effect like losing some gear or something, but they won't die. This is precisely what I mean by no weak deaths. It doesn't mean no consequences.