How to deal with death in RPG?

[GMMichael]

Generally I find that most players these days have strong norms about respecting group decision making. . .I'll respect the group decision making as a player, but as GM I'm fine with intra-PC conflict.

Intra-PC? I'd love to see a PC roll d20... GM: "are you attacking someone?" PC: "yeah. Myself. So I don't end up attacking another PC..."

Half of the party expects the GM to cheat and half doesn`t. I`m in favor of let actions and dices decide.

But the other half says a good GM doens`t let a player die, unless, he wants to. Because they put so much time and effort in creating and desenvolving their characters.

As soon as a playfefe rolls hit points, or determines a Hardiness level that sets a wound-threshold difficulty, or what-have-you, that PC is agreeing to be mortal. It is only fair for the GM to imply or explicitly state how much mortal combat she expects to go around.

If I had put lots of time and effort into creating my character, I'd probably be extra-careful about walking into dungeons known to be inhabited by evil things. Unless, of course, my party was laden with magical items that would aid us in our quest

 

[Blue]

I feel like a lot of people are approaching this from the DM side. That's backwards - the players are the ones whom will most feel the death of a character, you need to approach this from your feelings as a player.

In a game with the base assumptions of D&D - you are putting your life and limb on the line to do heroic things - as a player I find it off-putting if death is not on the table. Yes, there can and are other risks, but they are taking one constant - and sometimes the only risk depending on the scene - off the table. Why should I both to play intelligently if I know I have plot armor? Where's the thrill of victory if my character can't lose?

As a side note, I don't equate character success to *my* success. I have had a great time losing, had fantastic deaths that I can tell the story about for years. But overcoming challenges, be it a puzzle, a social encounter, or a combat, is fun. Having no fear of death so we spend 45 minutes rolling lots of dice to a preordained end result is not.

Now, just because I feel this way as a player doesn't mean others do - each table will have to find the right for all them. But the DM is at best one among many, and really has the least at stake for character death. The DM encouraging a discussion pre-game / session zero is the best way.

 

[S'mon]

In a game with the base assumptions of D&D - you are putting your life and limb on the line to do heroic things - as a player I find it off-putting if death is not on the table.

Yeah me too. Although I'm not keen on 'compulsory trivial death' - like the OSR game where I wasn't allowed hirelings & was told I had to put my 3hp Cleric on the front line vs the zombies, who inevitably killed me. I like a chance to survive, especially if I play smart.

Recently been running 2 5e campaigns at 1st level, one (PoTA) with standard hp and one (Thule) with full CON + max hit die as hp. The former had random trivial death, the latter did not, and felt much better and more exciting IMO. If I was doing it over I'd use the CON score house rule in PoTA too and tweak early encounters as necessary.

 

[Blue]

I tend to prepare a lot of environment and a lot of plot. But the plot is designed in such a way that the players are able to alter it.

So if the players ignore what I planned for them, and negate a situation by being clever (or blunt), that's fantastic. I've never been in a situation where the players did something I didn't expect, and I didn't like it. The trick is to not 'intend' for the players to do anything. They can do whatever they want. If they say "screw the riddle, lets kill that thing", then more power to them.

I gave XP, but I needed to comment about how much I agree. As a DM, we have the whole world as our playground except for a few individuals - the PCs. Let the players take them in the directions they want, and explore the consequences (good and otherwise) of what it means in the world. Don't be so attached to an outcome or plot direction that you overrule your players and railroad them down the path you envisioned.

While I try to live this as a DM, one of the best examples comes when I was a player. Campaign started with all the PCs getting press-ganged into working for a pirate who has the only skyship in a several country radius (playing FR, this was before Eberron was a thing - AD&D 2ed). DM had a whole campaign planned of us as pirates were we up for. Anyway, first session the Captain was impressing on all of us why he was captain and the rules of the ship, and I forget the actual sequence but one PC ended up in a duel with the captain. The captain was a high level NPC with magic items, it was a forgone conclusion he'd knock out the PC and show he was boss. Except that the DM had introduced a crit chart from somewhere and let us know about it before the stat of play.

Second round of combat the PC scored a crit, rolls happened, and he ended up cutting off the captain's leg. And then finished him off.

The PC immediately let on that the recent people press-ganged (our PCs) were a powerful adventuring guild (you needed a charter in FR back then) and none of the pirates should mess with us, and he was the new captain.

The whole planned campaign just took a flip. DM loved it and jut ran with it. We were a bunch of 1st level PCs who couldn't show weakness in front of the pirates, deal with all the bounty hunters and stuff coming after the pirate captain (now us), had an airship and a bunch of magic items well above our level that others desired and sent people trying to steal.

Ended up being a very unique campaign while it lasted, and it never would have got there if the DM wasn't willing to literally discard every plan he had made and just go with what the players did.

 

[Blue]

As gamemasters, we are rightly frustrated when a player trivially circumvents an aspect of our game that we put a lot of effort into...

No, why would you? Heck I put effort into more plots than I know the PCs can deal with and see which ones they do. I routinely let effort not see the table. Forcing players to focus on what I spend effort on instead of what they want to do leads to railroading, and as a player I really dislike it so I try not to do it as a DM.

Like an author, a DM must not be afraid to kill their darlings.

So yes, I kill PCs. But /I/ decide when it's a good idea, not my dice. Just like all the other important stuff in my campaign. Random dungeon generators are fun but they make for terrible campaign guides.

I would never want to get into an adversarial mode with my players, where they are granted plot armor so they can't die except when I intend to take it away.

I plan deadly encounters regularly, but then at the table I'm not just my player's biggest cheerleader, but also their biggest enabler in a "say yes" way. They regularly end up feeling like they survived though the skin of their teeth and clever play, but the only PCs deaths I've had in 4.5 years of running this campaign was one player-initiated martyrdom and one retirement. It's actually remarkably hard to kill off characters - there's a big buffer between down and dead even before getting to magic.

 

[Blue]

Wait seriously? You've never had players go "Screw this we're gonna hit it instead!"???

Really?

<----this is my incredulous face.

What he said was that he wasn't bothered by players doing something different, not that they never did anything different.

 

[Blue]

You haven't had a disappointing session as gamemaster in 16 years?

:: patronizing smile:: Okay.

This isn't what he said. He was referring to your comment "That sometimes the players deal the gamemaster an unwelcome surprise. "

What the players do isn't unwelcome - it's the very lifeblood of an RPG. regardless if it's the path the DM envisioned.

I can have a disappointing session for a lot of reasons. Because I was expecting options A or B and the players came up with option C isn't one of them.

 

[S'mon]

This isn't what he said. He was referring to your comment "That sometimes the players deal the gamemaster an unwelcome surprise. "

What the players do isn't unwelcome - it's the very lifeblood of an RPG. regardless if it's the path the DM envisioned.

I can have a disappointing session for a lot of reasons. Because I was expecting options A or B and the players came up with option C isn't one of them.

Thanks Blue!

 

[Lanefan]

Generally I find that most players these days have strong norms about respecting group decision making. So I feel I'm a bit of an outlier maybe (for D&D). I'll respect the group decision making as a player, but as GM I'm fine with intra-PC conflict.

As both DM and player I'm fine with internal party conflict; and as player if the rest of the group comes to a decision I (in character) disagree with I'll decide* whether or not to go along with the plan on the fly as things play out.

* - assuming I'm playing a halfway chaotic and-or intelligent character willing and able to think for itself rather than be told what to do.

 

[Lanefan]

When I referee a campaign, the death of a PC only ever comes at the explicit direction of the player; occasional one-shots might have a different paradigm. This has been my position since the 1980s; even in 1e, death was nothing more than a 5500gp inconvenience – so what’s the point?

A 5,500 g.p. inconvenience*, plus the permanent loss of a Con point, plus the risk of failing your resurrection survival roll and ending up perma-dead...plus not getting a share of any xp earned while you're dead...yeah, dying in 1e did have its consequences.

* - assuming a relatively whole corpse; otherwise resurrection became a 12,000 g.p. inconvenience if you could even find someone who could cast it.

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The one factor not yet mentioned regarding character death is this: in the rules system in use, how easily and-or quickly can you generate a replacement?

A system where char-gen takes an hour or two would be far less amenable to frequent PC death, I think, than a system where char-gen takes under 15 minutes.