Character Killing... sometimes necessary?

[Belen]

No. It would suck to do that to a player, especially if they worked hard on the character.

Now, if you worked it out with the player beforehand, then it could work.

Or, you could kill off an NPC that the players know is more powerrful than they. Maybe have the strongest PC duel them an lose handily, then kill off the NPC later where they can see..and fear....

 

[WampusCat43]

After year of DM'ing with my group, I had my first two fatalities within a 3-session span (same player too). This was after several near misses, most of them involving a crazy mage who kept separating himself from the group. I avoided those by having the opponents fail Listen and Spot rolls, etc.
After the 2nd death I felt bad and emailed the group, offering them the chance to have their patron (a high level cleric) send them some Raise Dead scrolls that their paladin *might* be able to use.

They unanimously turned it down, saying if death wasn't a possibility, there was no tension to the combat.

On the other hand, I agree with the previous posters that you should not go out of your way to kill off a PC - that would be unfair and they'll know it. Just let the chips fall where they may - one of them will get waxed soon enough!

 

[Umbran]

I think this is a case for the Golden Rule - that whole "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" thing.

Let's imagine you were playing in the game. You do everything right, you use your wits, you ask the right questions, get the right details. You have no reason to think that you can't handle the situation. Your character dies anyway, and you find out that it was designed specifically to prove the point that people die. The DM puts you in a Kobyashi Maru scenario without a reset button, just to make everybody scared.

Personally, I'd think that would stink. Character death through my own stupidity ro miscalculation or through actual bad luck is one thing. Being put into a deathtrap that has no escape is not an entertaining part of the story.

I mean, honestly - the player already knows that the DM can arrange character death at a whim. That's not under dispute. The question is if the DM will allow character death under normal story circumstances - and an arranged death doesn't answer that question, because it isn't normal story circumstances.

 

[jerichothebard]

Further, it might just backfire. I imagine a scenario like this:

You set up a certain death, fool-proof, way-over-their level trap/ambush/setup. The players, using the ingenuity bred over years of gaming, wriggle out of it in some unforseen but totally brilliant manner. (This happens ALL... THE... TIME...)

You are then faced with one of two possibilities.

1) Kill them anyways, by bringing in reinforcements or setting some critical DC way too high, or whatever. This is bad, because it is totally obvious and everyone will know what you are doing. Yes, this will reinforce the lethality of your game, but it has nothing to do with the setting - only your plotline.

2) Let them get away with it. This is bad, because it send exactly the wrong message to your players - that this setting is soft!

It's a lose:lose situation for everyone concerned.

My suggestion to you is to play it low-key. Put them in tough, setting-appropriate encounters, don't pull any punches, and let the dice fall where they may. If they die, then they die. Resistance fighting isn't easy. If they live, well, then, they are heroes, which is, after all, the point of the game.


jtb

 

[Rel]

Actually this is the first time I think any of them have played in a setting like this where the forces of evil are in charge of pretty much everything and the PCs are on their own. If they treat it like our FR game then I'd imagine that someone will either die from violence or get turned in by some commoners to keep their village from being destroyed if they are found to be resistance fighters. Charging right in is pretty much the surest way to die in this setting.

I think you may have just answered your own question.

IF they treat it like your FR campaign then they'll be careless, rush in and die. If they don't and they take to heart the deadliness of the setting, then your mission was already accomplished without you having to "teach them a lesson".

As a rule, I never try to "teach my players a lesson". I just run the game the way I planned it and if they learn some lessons along the way then good for them.

 

[saturnin55]

I always roll combat-dices (attacks and damage) open. If I don't do that, I know I'll fudge way too many rolls and that's BAD. DO NOT FUDGE COMBAT ROLLS!!! (But I ask them for their AC and do not give them the total of the dice roll + atk bonus. Monster A has attack bonus of +15, I roll openely an 8, PC X says he has AC 22 and I say "I hit". Usually, after a couples of miss/hit, they are able to guess the strenght of the monster... )

Players have to learn when it's dangerous and when they have to run away. Not all monsters are there to be kill or a killable for their level (at least in my campaign). I do not fudge any combat roll (attack or damage), but sometime will use less efficient tactics with the monsters to give them a chance to notice their are in deep troubles and run away.

PC deaths happens in my games. Have played for ~15 months in the last campaign (a Necromancer Games product), there is 6 PC deaths so far. The good thing is that they have learn to respect the monsters/dungeons/villains and do more planning, are more cautious and run away when they have to.

Sometime, when the PCs are doing stupid things like going back to town in the middle of the night or resting in an unsafe place in a dungeon, they deserve an encounter in those situation.

They learned to "respect" the adventures/monsters I am running and everybody is enjoying their time

 

[Janx]

The monk in my campaign died on the first session (and the rogue was KO'd), leaving just the paladin. And that was just bad luck while fighting a single bugbear.

They didn't retreat when they could have.

I don't recommend actually targetting a character for death (in terms of rail-roading it so it happens). Now there might be a story where that PC is targetted for assassination or something, that's a bit different. But a normal game shouldn't have any single PC targetted specifically to kill them off.

Now I've been in games where before we started, the GM said, "This session, everybody dies" and we knew then that the kid gloves were off. We've gotten 50% survival out of those (helps being smarter than the GM). In those games, the GM wasn't targetting specific characters. He was only making a declaration that this game was designed to kill our PCs (because the bad guys were actively trying to do just that).

Keep a clear conscience, kill PCs because it was fair, not because you can make it happen.

Janx

 

[pdkoning]

What if PC's want to kill a PC?

In our homebrew D&D campaign, a problem has risen. The PC's (I am one of them) want to kill another PC.

There is a good reason for this, the PC is a Wizard that does very evil and annoying things, like killing 224 commoners that gathered outside their village he previously set on fire.
Or just flying arround (yes he flies, so we can't follow him) and dropping fireballs on places and creatures he thinks he should drop them. Or if we try to open something, and fail to do so, he simply says: I won't help you.

The other characters of the group are quite tired of this, because it annoys us as players, and it annoys our good-aligned characters. So recently we decided to kill him, mainly for roleplaying reasons, our Paladin and Druid are really mad on him.

We have not killed him yet, and we did not even inform our DM of our intent, what do you think? Should we kill the wizard? Should we inform the DM, or just do it anyway?

 

[rogueattorney]

I'd never plan any encounter where the characters had no chance of survival. Some encounters will be tough, some will be easy, most have the potential to be deadly, but all planned encounters should be surrmountable.

Why do I stress "planned"? Well, as DM, I do not assign all monsters below a certain toughness to a "1st level ghetto" filled with only kobolds and giant rats. Things like Dragons, Vampires, Demons, etc. have a place in my world - they're the numero uno villains, and need to be accounted for in the setting from the very beginning of world design.

It is up to me as DM to give the players enough information about the setting for them to avoid the biggies until they are of a level to take them out, and it is up to the players to be aware enough of their own characters' powers to know what they can handle.

An example from my recent campaign: The party was all at 1st or 2nd level. The player's home village was under siege from a group of goblins. The players escaped the siege and sought out nearby villages to warn them and get help. One particular village, Molokov, had a long history of trying to conquer the other villages. After a series of particularly violent skirmishes between the area villages about a 100 years ago, there had been no contact with Molokov since. The characters had this information, but decided that the risk to their village was such that it wouldn't hurt to go there for help.

Molokov was the home of one of the setting's big villains. I half-expected the characters to check it out, and laid contingencies if they did. I wanted to give them a good dose of the setting's background, but didn't expect them to confront the villain, because they were in no way ready to fight him yet.

Upon arriving in Molokov, the characters quickly surmised that things weren't quite right. The burgermeister was completely unconcerned about the goblins, even though some had been seen less than 10 miles away. Said that "Lord Volkov" would protect them, and suggested that the residents of the characters' home village should join them in Molokov. One of the smarter player characters recognized the name, Volkov, as that of one of the warlords from 100 years earlier. When confronted with this, the burgermeister assured the characters that the present Lord was the previous Lord's grandson.

The burgermeister told the party that Lord Volkov was away, but would return to the village some time after dark, and suggested that the players stay at a guest house for free until the Lord arrived. The players originally consented. They looked around the village and came to the Lord's castle. It was a crumbling ruin with two strangely silent guards with graying skin and a funny smell. This disturbed the characters quite a bit. They started talking about leaving the village, but decided to stick it out.

They joined some of the villagers for a feast at dusk. One of the servant girls secretly dropped a crumpled up piece of paper in one of the character's laps while serving wine. It said "Get Out!!!". Well, the party needed no further convincing... They each role-played excuses to leave the table, and then fled the village as fast as they could. One of the players even jokingly said "see you in about 8 levels."

Hypothetically, if they hadn't left - after drinking too much wine, they would have been put in a "guest house" that was more like a jail. Of course it was going to be locked and guarded for "their own protection." Inside, if they had looked around, they would have noticed a blood stain on one of the rugs. Under the rug, they would have found a trap door. Below the trap door, they would have found a basement full of decaying bones. I made sure that the party thief had the requisite resources to pick the lock on the window, such that the party could have escaped out the back.

So the question: If the party had insisted on staying - if, when the vampire finally showed up, they insisted on fighting it, instead of fleeing out the back window - would any of you have blamed me if the characters died? In that case what should I have done short of creating a setting without powerful villains?

R.A.

 

[Neil Aitken]

In our homebrew D&D campaign, a problem has risen. The PC's (I am one of them) want to kill another PC.

This happens occasionally in our campaigns as well. In one case, it was the party wizard who we had entrusted with a set of artifact books necessary for the saving the fabric of the multiverse. At some point he had been tricked into donning a cursed ring of truth and we had exploited that fact for the longest time, knowing he couldn't lie to us about his dealings. Imagine our consternation when we discovered months later (RL time!) that he quietly picked up the necessary feats and spells to remove the ring and had been wearing a fake for some time. In those months he had sold the books for 200,000 gp and purchased an Instant Fortress for himself. (In fact, the actual quote we never heard was "200,000 gp -- &*!# the Multiverse, I'm selling the books!").

What finally tipped the scales was when we found him standing outside of our host's burning house bragging about killing the family after ravaging their daughters. We chased him down, nearly killing him with arrows before he snuck into a commoner's house. The cleric charged in afterward on horseback and raced up the stairs, only to face the wizard who now threw the Instant Fortress at the cleric and commanded it to grow to full height. Needless to say, the cleric died instantly and the wizard died in the ensuing collapse of the building. My character, Lud the Destroyer of Things (a 3.0 fighter specialized in sundering and smashing inanimate objects) arrived at the door in time to witness the final collapse (which he claimed as another notch on his behalf).

Moral: If the character's death is justified under the circumstances and makes sense based on the other characters' alignments, then there really isn't an issue. The problem is when metagaming takes over and your characters act out of knowledge learned outside of game or your reaction is a personal one not roleplaying. The cleric in our case was eventually resurrected, he took the head of the wizard (which he had cast preserve on)and kept it in a bag of holding. Nearly ever session afterward he would pull it out and taunt it

We have not killed him yet, and we did not even inform our DM of our intent, what do you think? Should we kill the wizard? Should we inform the DM, or just do it anyway?

If the plan requires the setting up of specific circumstances or a certain situation, then you should probably inform the DM. We once had a party division which lead to each half of the party trying to kill the other half. Since we had begun a long journey to return to our base, the DM had ruled that the events of the journey could be handled online between sessions. Unbeknownst to each other, we separately sent in our plans and defenses and counterplans. In the end, we still roleplayed out the final night where the pot of chili was poisoned (by two different characters of opposing sides) and one evil party member was tricked into accepting a baleful polymorph spell (became a fish).

In general though, you should think carefully about the reprecussions of murdering a party member (in reality, that's really what you're doing -- premeditated murder). Most good-aligned characters will have problems if there seems to no attempt to turn the offender from his path of wickedness. The player running the offending character will likewise feel like he is being singled out -- especially if there has been no warnings given. However, a LN or even NG might not have as many qualms. The more evil the character, the more likely that the judgement will be swift and that the execution will follow close behind. In your particular case, the wizard sounds like he is already well-over the line.