Who Kills Your PCs?

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Either that or PCs just do not die in many of those campaigns.

I've been in a lot of campaigns like that. Furthermore, it's actually quite hard to kill PCs with a few levels under their belts. NPCs rarely pause to CdG someone; they're too busy trying to drop someone else.

 

[Piratecat]

In Sialia's game, this exchange became a veritable catchphrase:

<paladin is being grappled and mauled by monster?
Wizard (to party cleric): "do you carry raise dead?"
Cleric: "Yes, why?"
Wizard (to DM): "I chain lightning both of them."

Eventually, all the players in that group had T-shirts made: "I got killed for the good of the party."

 

[Kularian]

One thing I noticed with this poll is that it looks like many people ignored my first post.

Well, it's not necessarily that. I just kinda got sidetracked after reading everyone else's. If you want to take it that way, then PC deaths due to accidents by other PC's or simple stupidity is much lower. The wizard I mentioned is 'Fireball happy,' to say the least, and the rogue is overzealous when it comes to disarming traps, etc. That's just the crew, though.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Doesn't that take much of the edge-of-the-seat challenge out of the game, if you know you can't die?

Having played in many campaigns prior to the set that I gave numbers for here - absolutely not.

I'm just as capable of suspending disbelief about my RPG character's chances of survival as I am about a novel or movie or electronic game character's chances of survival.

Character death only occurs in my games if a) they're basically dungeon crawls and the PCs are avatars of the players or b) the player wants it to happen. Because of the group I'm currently playing with, it's been a whole lot of the latter, but with other groups it's been exclusively the former. I have no interest in seeing my or anyone else's character die because of a bad roll.

 

[Keith Robinson]

Rarely, but it does happen from time to time. The most unusual one was when a necromancer, after having cast kiss of the vampire on himself (from Libris Mortis), was unconscious and received a cure light from the party cleric... and he promptly died (as, of course, cure spells have the same effect as they would against undead). Oops