I killed my first PC

My level 2 party of seven characters was up against a group of eleven kobolds and a bugbear with a chokepoint on their side. The rogue started a distance off from the rest of the party and decided to loop around and get the kobold's attention in order to draw some off.

It worked.

I even tried to fudge the damage to keep him negative and alive, but I didn't remember exactly how much HP he had and I ended up killing him by one damage

A question though, what do you generally do when a PC has a dead character and the party has no easy access to raise dead? Give him an NPC to control?

Depends on if the player wants to start working on a new PC or wait for the rez. IME, they start to work on a new PC, so that occupies them until I can introduce the new PC.

I used to just give them the opportunity to make a new character, which I would introduce in the least contrived manner possible.

After a while I started noticing that one player was killing off his characters whenever he got bored or thought he could make a more powerful build, so I started penalizing him one level each time. This worked out just fine (since raise dead would also dock one level.)

Happens to everyone. Your wizard fails his save against feeblemind, and thinks bull-rushing the ogre is a good idea...

Oh, you mean you killed someone else's PC.

Welcome to the club. My personal experience involved a bizarre chain of occurrences which left me thousands of RL miles away from the TPK I caused. Suffice it to say, I'm no longer allowed to design encounters and villains in absentia anymore.


Anyway, you can either
A) Introduce a new PC. This may be temporary or grow to become the player's new character. There a million and one ways of doing this, ranging from "convenient coincidence" to "powerful prisoner", and the limit is basically your creativity. If there's any way to get them to temporarily have the same goal as the others (hunting the same kobolds, or something like that
), you have an out whether or not the original PC gets resurrected. May or may not be a level lower than party average - depends on your group.

B) NPC upgrade. Suddenly Biggs is flying better, and grows plot armor.

C) Give him control over some monsters.

E) Have a coincidental scroll of raise dead / magical artifact/ high-level and extremely frail cleric just around the corner. Perhaps introduce some complications (must serve Pelor in a quest, sort of thing. Sky's the limit)

F) Give them control over animal companions, familiars, cohorts, and other miscellaneous pseudocharacters

One issue is having stats for A/B during the same session the PC dies. Google (or unused NPCs) to the rescue. As long as the character sheets represent vaguely the same type of guy, there shouldn't be much in-game dissonance between Hawk-eye the imprisoned half-elf fighter 7/ ranger 3 and Hawk-eye the human fighter 5/barbarian 5.

Arcane spellcasters are more difficult, due to spell selections.

I killed my first PC

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YOU KILLED JOHN HODGEMAN!



Congrats.

This is the first, but certainly not the last..

I killed a whole lot of characters.. they just don't learn..

- One player killed himself while trying to run away with a cart full of stuff of the other players (the others killed him)

- One player killed himself when he was a wizard and jumped on a table and a hobgoblin with a double sword jumped next to him..

- One player killed himself cleaning himself with dark water that kills..

- And off course the famous "The monsters are at full hp, the party is at 1/4th and we are charging in and not backing up till 1 player is left standing..

Welcome to the club

Nightson said:

I even tried to fudge the damage to keep him negative and alive, but I didn't remember exactly how much HP he had and I ended up killing him by one damage

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Congratulations! Have some XP!
You may want to stop fudging - I've found it generally improves the game. In 4E there's almost no negative impact, anyway. So, there's a lot speaking for killing pcs once in a while, especially when they're behaving stupidly.