Do we coddle new Players?

[Velmont]

Dead must be part of the game, or why having hit point? now, the amount is up to the master, but I say, don't fear to kill a player that do stupid things. And don't biased the dices because the Scythe wielding barbarian just got two critical against the Rogue... shits happen.

With my table-top master, I don't count the number of dead I have (yes, I have done many stupid things), but here, in PbP, I had one dead character, and I must tell, I miss the feeling of being getting out of a combat near the dead and survive just because someone had a good idea or did a nice move.

But as I said, there is way to kill a character. Let's just look at my dead character on PbP. It is in EPIC, a Mutants and Mastermind game run by Calinon. We are now at our 6th season, and Kevin, my first character died in the 5th (finally, because he had many chance to die). He was a spoiled kid of a rich businessman who can duplicate powers of other, but is pretty weak without stealing other powers. A villain, named Mia, that he met a few times had a fixation on him. After many encounter, the relation between Mia and Kevin have been well devellop. Mia had fallen in love with Kevin, but she was a psycho and Sado, and decide she needed to kill Kevin to prove her love to him... the final scene of Kevin was pretty nice, and for once, he was doing great but sadly, he couldn't hold for one the last round before the rescue arrived. So he got killed and the teal arrived, seeing the sword still in the chest of Kevin.

Well, I'll stop here, but I could have detail it even more and talk more about it. Why? Because even if the death of Kevin was something I didn't want, the way it was made the story a good one. The master made Kevin's dead an interesting one.

Personally, I won't stop a death, but I may slow delay it. If something kill a character, I may simply hold the hit to kill the character a bit later, but in an interesting fashion. It is a game, and it must be interesting, so make some inetresting death too.

 

[apesamongus]

Apesamongus - some people like it that PCs can die easily from unexpected rolls ("it's exciting"), some don't ("it's depressing"). Reducing crit lethality is a suggested variant rule in the DMG, btw.

Different players like different things, the same player may even like different things at different times. It's all good.

Except for the people using loaded words like "coddling" or suggesting that others need to be "toughened up".

Doing paint this like I'm the one not accepting different playstyles. There's nothing wrong with enjoying lethal games, but the reason and justifications being given are bogus.

Having a character die does not make you more "heroic" than a player who doesn't enjoy that type of game (people really worry me sometimes when they don't clearly differentiate between character and player), nor does the absence of the chance of random and meaningless death render fiction devoid of excitement (unless the past couple of thousands of years of fiction has just been my imagination.)

 

[apesamongus]

If I threw my PC in front of a pack of wolves, and had no chance of death, the game loses some of its sense of drama or risk for me.

Why would you have your character throw himself in front of a pack of wolves? If I had a character do so to save a princess, or to save an innocent peasant family, or to protect his loot, each of those choices would say something about the character, and each would provide a different type of dramatic possibility. And none of those possibilities are diminished by the fact that I, as a player, know that I'm not going to loose the character.

Even in movies or TV shows, main characters die in trivial ways for dramatic effect (e.g. the death of the character Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series).

I have to give you a big "what you talkin' about, Willis" on this one. The entire 6th season of Buffy built to that moment. That was the catalyst for the climax of the season, and the moment itself was only made possible the the build-up and culmination of at least two different continuing story arcs. That death was the total and complete antithesis of a random, trivial, and meaningless death. That death was pre-planned, structured, and thematically significant. It is, in all ways, the absolute opposite of what we're discussing here.

 

[Zappo]

Yes, and it's because you've grown old and bitter and cynic

Could be. Maybe I didn't kill enough PCs in 2E and I'm trying to catch up.

Or, it could be that 3E monsters are a lot less predictable because of variable HD and class levels. One of the last dead PCs met his end at the hands of a troll which, umm, looked about the same as any other troll. Another got killed by a fiend who turned out to be a better wizard than he thought. Hell, I was last killed by a friggin' vampire drow cleric! You didn't get many vampire drow clerics in 2E!

As for the topic being discussed right now: actually, I save characters more often than not. I think that an accidental or anticlimactic death is the worst thing that can happen to a PC. PCs should die heroically against fearsome foes. That said, if someone is looking to get killed (eg, stand in the area of effect of your party wizard's empowered fireball, or charge into a pack of melee-heavy monsters alone), who am I to stop them?

 

[Kelleris]

Hm. Well, I have never killed a PC in anything other than a deliberate one-shot, but I still have a reputation in my group for being a tough DM. Why, you ask?

Because I rather enjoy beating the PCs to within an inch of their collective lives without killing them. The "bad stuff" comes from the other elements of the situation. My players know that the odds of ending the day at low hps and drained resources are very good in any case, so it's just a matter of when it happens, how, and from whom. The penalty for poor tactics is taking a beating in the plot.

To take an example from a PbP game I'm running right now, the PCs are in a tough fight against gobs and oodles of low-level warriors. I highly doubt that this will be the end of any of them. However, depending on their tactics and how well they handle the encounter, they could achieve any degree of success from... er, excuse me, better spoiler this for any of the players in my Dromus game:

[sblock] unmasking and capturing an NPC that's been antagonizing them from the get-go and clearing their name from the charge of dabbling in dark magic to being run out of town to another plane, bruised, beaten, and pursued by both the cult they wounded but didn't finish and the guards who saw them fighting in the streets and, well, dabbling in dark magic.[/sblock]

Especially in a mid- to high-level game, the threat of the latter result is much more interesting than just dying, and far more of a motivator to me. I've actually lost a player because he felt I was making his character's life too miserable, which I suppose is my equivalent of killing some poor schlub's guy off eleventeen times in one session. (Bad me! Bad!)

To my mind, this is a much better way to "toughen them up" than whacking people via an unlucky crit. It means the penalty for playing stupid is an intrinsic part of their interest in their character, and I don't force them to lose the character before they've lost interest in him or her.

 

[S'mon]

Except for the people using loaded words like "coddling" or suggesting that others need to be "toughened up".

Yes, I agree. Their play style is just as valid as yours, but sometimes they get a bit rude towards people who prefer a different style.

Personally I like the Gamist challenge of D&D, but sometimes I want the chance to roleplay a beautifully developed persona without the Orc Ftr-6 critting and doing 56 dmg to my poor wounded PC...

 

[S'mon]

BTW apesamongus, if you're not familiar with it you might like to check out The Forge and Narrativist games like Sorcerer & Sword, which are designed to facilitate narrative drama rather than challenging players with the threat of PC death.

See:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/

 

[Plane Sailing]

Similarly Heroquest might be worth checking out - it goes out of its way to make character death very difficult to achieve (even killing other people is very difficult too). In Heroquest it is all about the story.

Cheers

 

[Hjorimir]

If your first lvl PCs think they can take an Ogre, then by all means whack them. But where is the fun in having a party wizard killed cuz the goblin spearman maxed out his damage on the crit roll? Lvl 1 characters I usally cut some slack, because it can be a bad roll that kills them. My players dont have a "Superman" complex becuase of that, because once the get a little meat on thier bones, then know I flay it from them. I'll usally remind my players ONCE about a certain action, such as casting/shooting a gun triggering an AOO. After that, * shrugs * you knew what was coming. Yes every once in a while you have to remind the PCs whos boss, ("Oooo that smarts....roll a fort save for massive damage threshold.") but some times a helping hand is needed.

I think that by playing as the dice fall makes everything that much more rewarding in the end. I'm not saying my way is right and anything else is wrong, it is just how the group I'm a part of prefer to play the game. It hightens the respect for the opponents - even goblins with spears - and gets us into a better frame of mind when role-playing as it helps avoids any "they're just goblins" syndromes that would otherwise pop up.

 

[Kelleris]

Bah! You "PC-killing" DMs are sissies! Lettin' 'em off easy by just killing them... Haven't you ever heard of a fate worse than death?!