Death, Dying and Entitlements.

[Max1mus]

Death...

I agree with the old adage here at Enworld, "It's up to you as a DM and how your group plays."

That said, I think death, or at least the fear of it, is very important if you want tension and exciting battles or traps. If the players don't fear failure or the consequences, then they will never get excited by the game.

The 4th edition rules I think are a great step towards balance between player enjoyment and consequence. When playing 3.5/AU our party members would be absolutely nerfed to the point of useless if we died and revived. If we created a new character, then the plots and character relationships feel cheapened and shallow. I would rather have a revolving door of death/raise dead, than a revolving door of new characters. We ended up adopting a 4ed style of death rules in our 3.5/AU game that feel severe yet fair.

The ideas of creating plot hooks around player death sounds great to me too.

 

[eamon]

Your friends are entitled to know what kind of game they'll be playing. The player with the DM role is not entitled to ignore the wishes of others.

The key here isn't the rules; by "the rules" the DM could trivially kill the PC's or never endanger them. The key is communication: everyone should be OK with the kind of game they'll be playing.

Personally, I like the grittier kind of story you suggest. I just think that whatever your preferences, having the idea that players' sense of entitlement is unreasonable isn't going to end well. Everyone's entitled to their opinions--and hopefully you can find enough common ground to play an enjoyable game!

 

[Riastlin]

In an ongoing campaign, I'd hate for just pure bad luck to kill a PC, but if they make some bad decisions and compound that with bad luck, they very well might die.

Personally, I think that this is one of the great things about 4ed. Its hard for luck, and only luck, to cause a PC death. Sure, the dice can really turn on the players in a given encounter or session, but if I properly design my encounters, then the PCs will still always have an out (i.e. running away is always a valid tactic, if not a particularly enjoyable one). I've been DM'ing and playing 4ed for some time now and I've yet to see a death that couldn't have been avoided (no longer is a single lucky crit by a monster against a low level PC likely to kill said PC for instance). Each of the deaths were a combination of bad luck and bad decisions. Even in my SOW game where the party triggered the White Shrine encounter at the same time as the encounter before it, I gave the party an out through three different portals (albeit one would have sent them to the Shadowfell). This encounter took out three PCs, but none until the second encounter was triggered. Thing is, nobody even seriously considered running away until three characters were already dead and/or dying. There was plenty of time in there for them to get away (or at least more of them anyway). Unfortunately, this encounter fell into the category of a poorly planned encounter as well in my book, particularly since there was no radiant damage in my group but I didn't realize it until it was too late.

 

[KidSnide]

I'll join with the chorus that says that it depends on the group and the style of game. I run a 4e game, but with variant rule that make resurrection difficult and uncertain. In the game world, death is usually real death. In the 11 years I've run the game, I've killed two PCs permanently - one a player's full-time character and the other a beloved NPC being piloted by a player during a battle. Both characters died doing something significant, and although the players were saddened, it seemed dramatically appropriate.

It's also worth noting that a third character died because the player didn't really understand the rules and how many round the character had to escape the trap. That character was resurrected. In my game resurrection is far more likely if the deceased had not yet "fulfilled his or her destiny", (which is an in-game reason for making it more likely that a character to comes back if he or she died due to OOG stupidity). One other PC lived, but only because the player made his stabilization roll at -9 hit points (back when the game was 3e).

I think of my game as cooperative story telling. As a result, I want death to be mostly permanent. However, some of my players have been playing the same character for over a decade. I don't mind if a character dies taking a risk to accomplish something important, but a character like that is almost like a pet. It would be a terrible shame if a 10-year-played character died due to the random whims of the dice without the player first having taking an unusual risk.

I certainly don't think that's the "one true way" of running an RPG. However, I also think 4e is excessively focused on the RAW, and that the game would be better served if the rules supported a broader range of gaming styles.

-KS

 

[Ajar]

This is not how we play. We play by the RAW and that is, death happens and it's just a part of the game. We let the roll of the dice decide the fate of our characters like the game was designed to do.

This isn't incompatible with the view that character death should be rare. If your RAW play extends to things like recommended encounter balance, then characters won't die all that often, since your encounters will generally push them to the brink of death -- not over it, at least until you get to epic.

If you're killing characters left and right in 4E, you're doing it on purpose. There are lots of perfectly legitimate playstyle reasons to do it, as others have discussed already.

 

[Spibb]

DM's Duty

I don't agree that the DM's dice have the final say about what happens, especially regarding the player character's life. That's why we roll our dice behind the screen. Its the responsibility of the DM to ensure that when the climactic battle comes and a PC is on the ground at the feet of the villain, when the villain brings his sword down upon the PC, instead of it hitting (even if it's a critical) the PC blocks the crucial blow with their shield and is able to continue to fight. Eventually winning and remembering this battle forever. It's the DM's job to ensure a fun, epic story plays out. There's nothing awesome about a story where the protagonists get jumped by a group of goblins and die.

Granted, the DM also has to keep the players afraid of death. If they do something really stupid, then it's ok to kill them (but try and hint them away from it). Also, its necessary instill the terror of death into the players by making an example. Perma-Kill one of PC's in the Heroic Tier in what seems like a fair fight they could have one.

Basically, I disagree with your idea that the dice are the arbiter of fate within the game. That job falls to the Raven Queen. But more directly it falls to the DM. The dice, in certain climactic situations like death, are more like guidelines.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

With 4e, I just don't care. The dice fall. If you die, you die. I've killed 2 PCs in about 30 sessions of 4e. (If you don't count my complete TPK in our second session of 4e that I turned into a "you got captured, now escape!" scenario...) Sure, it's not insanely lethal, but the players know if the dice tell me you're dead, you're dead.

The cool thing about 4e. It is the first time i really try to "kill" the PC´s... I try to employ good tactics within capability of the enemy...

The combat system is so robust, from level 1 on, that to kill someone, you really need to work for it. My players love those fights.

 

[mneme]

Ajar: Indeed. RAW, monsters don't coup de gras downed opponents unless they have a damned good reason; instead turning to attack the next target. This makes it really difficult to kill PCs unless they simply run out of resources or don't bother to saved downed comrades (or a monster crit takes a PC from bloodied to dead, of course).

 

[Badwe]

For me, the constraints of death revolve more around player consideration. While I have given up on story considerations for when players can't make a session, I still try to make sure that character death/departure/joining has some place in the story.

However, my particular group is a bit constrained: some of the people are traveling to our session via a 2 hour drive, and we play for 6 hours per session, with sessions generally occurring no more than twice a month, sometimes once a month and even (much to my sadnass) missing a month.

We play 4e and generally the combats are fairly lengthy. This is due to my players being very strategic and just a little bit meta-gamey (and getting distracted by laptops, but that's neither here nor there). Having a character outright die is first off going to take them out of that combat, which could potentially just be getting started. Next, the adventure itself derails. If the PCs are trapped in, for example, a "pyramid of shadows", if you will, access to ressurection may be difficult. Therefore, a player would more or less have their session ruined if they die, and worse still if they brought their laptop they may divest from the game completely. Even that is almost preferable to the worst case scenario: they get up and go home. For someone that drove all the way from a neighboring state, for me that just wouldn't be worth it.

Now, this is not to say I wouldn't LIKE to create a campaign where death is more common, but I just don't think it would be a good fit for my current campaign. I even tried to experiment with death by sending my PCs on "spirit journeys" where they experiened fights in which death would not be permanent. Of course, knowing they had time to spare, the party rested after each fight and expended all their dailies. Just the same, I was able to nearly wipe them out in a few of the fights, and other posters have correctly noticed that just dying, even if it's of no consequence, FEELS a lot like failing. When the blue dragon a few levels higher than the recommended max level for an encounter used an AOE to deal damage equal to the wizard's bloodied value to half the party, the table got extremely stern.

 

[Riastlin]

[MENTION=87912]Spibb[/MENTION] That's certainly a perfectly legit way of playing the game. Its just not what my group (and me personally) prefer. I think the problem I have with the "character death only happens when they do something stupid" is that one person's "stupid decision" is another's "obvious decision". This can get particularly problematic when you, as DM, decide to let one character live because it was just "bad luck" but then kill another because it was "stupid decisions". In these situations, the player of the dead character is going to be understandably miffed. Letting the dice be the arbiter does, in general, avoid these problems. Although I've had several deaths in 4ed, none of the players have been the least bit upset with how I handled it. In some cases they were miffed by what the other players did (like the Invoker who lit up the unconscious warforged to push him over negative bloodied), but never with my decision making.