Help me! I'm afraid to kill my players!

[Patlin]

Absolutely avoid killing your players. Their characters are another story...

However you do it, there should be a difference in outcomes between good playing and bad playing. The difference doesn't have to be life-or-death, but this is certainly one of the primary ways it comes out in most games. Generally, I recomend avoiding fudging die rolls -- it tends to create an environment where playing well and playing poorly are indistinguishable.

There are some circumstances in which the rules present undesirable results. Are you experiencing too many combat fatalities, even with the players excercising reasonable strategies? Rather than fudging, a house rule can shift the penalty to unconciousness instead of death. Expand the range in which a character is knocked out of the fight without being killed. For example, you could change the rules to allow a character to hold on to life to -50% of hp (so if you have 50 hp you die upon hitting -25 hp.) Advantages: Penalty of unconciousness is significantly more temporary and less costly than death, and you can get players back into the game faster once the immediate situation is resolved. Disadvantage: characters will still die, and characters rendered unconcious without other PCs in close proximity will see little benefit unless they are captured. May encourage greater heroics and less of a realistic fear of injury.

You might also fudge a little bit when extreme die rolls are throwing your game out of whack. Has the monster hit with 5 criticals in a row? You could probably tone that down a bit without throwing your game out of whack.

If you really need a deus-ex-machina, however, I'd suggest sending in an obvious outside element rather than "cheating" in favor of your players. Being rescued by an unusually timely arival of a friendly NPC is less rewarding than winning the fight on your own (especially if the NPC wants a cut of the loot), but beats the heck out of dying. Your players *know* when they've been helped out by an NPC, so doing this doesn't make a true victory less satisfying, when they win and the cavalry *didn't* ride to the party's rescue.

Finally, if your party does something really stupid let the chips fall where they may, even if the characters die. If your party of 4 first level characters refuses parley with an ancient red dragon, instead charging heroically into glorious battle, then run the fight without mercy. Truly poor decisions, as opposed to simply poor luck, ought to provoke disaster.

 

[Kormydigar]

So, how do you deal, cope with, or decide when it is "appropriate" for a player to die?[/QUOTE]


One thing I do is keep up with all the Pc's HP. I don't as rule fudge die rolls just to keep a character alive. If combat results in death then thats the breaks. As a player I prefer GM to be like this. I want my character to survive the adventure but not if the only reason is that the die rolls were fudged. It cheapens my feeling of accomplishment. I will alter encounters sometimes. If I have a nasty combat planned for example, and 1 or 2 players cannot make the game for some reason I will change the encounter to be a challenge to the characters who ARE present, but then the combat is run as normal. If your players have a feeling that they are in some way " protected" then they may become more reckless, especially new players. This can result in either you having to fudge more and more or letting the dice fall and having a TPK. Neither is very desirable.

 

[the Jester]

First of all, only kill your players if you have an adequate supply of new ones waiting and either somewhere to dump the bodies where it will be decades before they're found or a lot of other potential suspects to throw the scent off, if you know what I mean.

As to killing characters, I run a very lethal game. Pawsplay's advice- kill 'em like flies for a while- is actually quite good, and if you simply let the dice fall where they may you'll find yourself implementing it.

 

[rogueattorney]

"DM's don't kill characters. Monsters and traps kill characters."

Repeat to yourself 20 times before every session.

I never "decide" that it's now O.K. for a character to die. Making that decision is just as capricious as fudging die rolls, or, on the other end of the spectrum, using the "hand of God" to arbitrarily strike the character down.

DM's should set things up such that they are a good challenge for the players and characters. The chance for success should match the stage of the campaign, the goal sought to be achieved, and the experience level of the players and characters involved. Then let the dice fall where they may.

R.A.

 

[Pbartender]

Help me! I'm afraid to kill my players!

None of your players like you.
They think that you are ugly... and stupid.
They only play in your game to humor you.
They are continually plotting ways to disrupt your game.
They cheat on their dice rolls.
And they constantly fudge their character sheet when you aren't looking.

The ranger is feeding rat poison to your dog.
The rogue is reading your mail.
The dwarf secretly charges magazine subscriptions to your credits cards.
The cleric is dating your sister behind your back, and he's going to publicly humiliate her by maliciously dumping her via broadcast television.
And every single one of them makes prank phone calls to your mother.

There, does that help?

 

[Mystery Man]

So, how do you deal, cope with, or decide when it is "appropriate" for a player to die?

Just play the game and make sure everyone has a good time. The measure of a DM is not how many character he kills off but that you provide an interesting and fun campaign for the player and yourself to enjoy. If they die they just get out the dice and a pencil and role up a new one, no biggie.


That being said if you really want to kill them have some big green stompy come in and wipe them out in the first two rounds, then have them wake up from their shared nightmare and tie it into the storyline.
The benefits:
1. You've now got it out of your system
2. You've had the pleasure of watching their faces around the table turn to a nice shade of ashen gray.
3. You now have another tangent for your campaign to go off on.
4. They now have a deeper understanding of what it means to get the bejeebus scared out of them.

Fun, fun, fun!

 

[Ogre Mage]

Fudging die rolls as the DM has its place, but it should be used sparingly if at all. Don't ever let the PCs think it is a crutch they can rely upon.

Don't forget Darwin's Theory, also known as Too Stupid To Live. Last session we had a character battling a large earth elemental. A powerful blow from the elemental reduced him to 4 HP. There was room for him to retreat, but instead he kept fighting. Note that this character was not a berserker so there was no RP reason to keep doing so. The next round, the PC was hit again and killed. Natural Selection at work.

 

[Sinjucala]

Herpes Cineplex, aren’t you doing your players a disservice? As a GM I am no more out to get them than you may be but it is as much or more their responsibility to make sure they don’t bite the big one as it is yours. It sounds like you do well in giving them some foreshadowing or hints that they are over their head. But if they don’t take them then let them savor the taste of death. It might make them a bit wiser for the next set. Or not. Tough to tell. If character creation is a part of the issue over them dying, then make sure everyone has at least one other out there in the wings so they plausibly step in should their primary die.

Sir Whiskers has given some good advice. Both his first and second paragraphs sum up well a great attitude to take and to emphasize to your players.

MrBrown sums up my most enthusiastic point well. Provide the PCs with risk. If they don’t know they can die, or they are sure you won’t let them die, then some of the fun leaves the game for both sides. We cheer the hero, the underdog; the one who has to go through hell to get where they are going. The guy who waltzes in and does it easily doesn’t endear our admiration or worship. They were not challenged, it was just business as usual. Make sure your players feel challenged and respectful of that fact they can die. And if they do, make it an experience they can savor vice feel sour about.

 

[fba827]

(I only skimmed the responses, so sorry if I"m repeating something already suggested).

Why not suggest to the players that they have a back-up charater ready in case their character dies or becomes incapacitated during the game. This way (if your hesitation is that the player will have nothing to do) you can work around one possible fear/problem.

Of course, this has its own problems if the player becomes overly anxious to use the backup character and starts taking risks unnecessarily with his main character.

Maybe make up back-up characters for them (but don't tell them) thus if someone does die / become incapacitated, they can choose from a backup character you have made so that they have something to do for the rest of the game session....

i dunno, really depends on the players themselves to see how either of those suggestions would go.

 

[der_kluge]

This past fall I started running a high level game. I started them at 9th specifically so they would have access to raise dead. Since that time, I've managed to kill two characters. The first drowned when he got dominated by an aboleth, and the second died two sessions ago from a beholder's finger of death ray.

Because my game is high power, high magic, high combat, I have house-ruled raise dead such that being raised only results in the loss of 1 point of con. So, dying isn't a horrible thing. I also told my players before we started that, since we were dealing with high levels, and none of us have any real experience in this arena, that if we have a TPK, I'll have no qualms about rewinding and redoing whatever it was that caused the TPK to make it more reasonable. So, while I'll deus ex machina a TPK, I'm gonna let the dice fall where they may for individual player deaths. Not sure what I'm going to do if the party cleric bites it.