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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Kobayashi Maru: Should the fate of the character always be in the player's hands? POLL
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<blockquote data-quote="Ibrandul" data-source="post: 8261522" data-attributes="member: 6871736"><p>"Other":</p><p></p><p>PCs should never die in an event over which the player had no control whatsoever.</p><p></p><p>But no player ever has absolute control over any game event capable of killing anyone, whether themselves or another character.</p><p></p><p>(The quasi-exception would be killing someone who does not resist, e.g. a willing ritual sacrifice, or PC suicide; in most situations it's a bit silly to make someone roll to have their own PC attack themselves. But even then, another PC or NPC could intervene to stop the event.)</p><p></p><p>So it's a matter of threshold.</p><p></p><p>And that is always a judgment call a DM must make in a given group, and with a given game.</p><p></p><p>For example, I'm DMing a long-running weekly game for three adults and two kids (ages nine and eleven). Two of those PCs (guess which ones?) simply are never going to die under any circumstances other than deliberate heroic self-sacrifice. The other three are mostly fair game, but as they were all novice players prior to this campaign, I'm still going pretty easy on them, not by fudging rolls—I never, ever fudge rolls—but by occasionally tweaking the game world mid-combat (roll perception; you see the outline of a secret escape hatch in the corner you've backed yourselves into!), and by offering direct advice when they're about to do something foolish that might get them killed.</p><p></p><p>But I would happily whack PCs with no mercy and no forewarning in a meat-grinder-mode Tomb of Annihilation campaign, sticking to the module precisely as written, if that was what the players had signed up for. Or in a different system where no-fault player/PC divorce laws were baked into the system itself, such as DCC.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ibrandul, post: 8261522, member: 6871736"] "Other": PCs should never die in an event over which the player had no control whatsoever. But no player ever has absolute control over any game event capable of killing anyone, whether themselves or another character. (The quasi-exception would be killing someone who does not resist, e.g. a willing ritual sacrifice, or PC suicide; in most situations it's a bit silly to make someone roll to have their own PC attack themselves. But even then, another PC or NPC could intervene to stop the event.) So it's a matter of threshold. And that is always a judgment call a DM must make in a given group, and with a given game. For example, I'm DMing a long-running weekly game for three adults and two kids (ages nine and eleven). Two of those PCs (guess which ones?) simply are never going to die under any circumstances other than deliberate heroic self-sacrifice. The other three are mostly fair game, but as they were all novice players prior to this campaign, I'm still going pretty easy on them, not by fudging rolls—I never, ever fudge rolls—but by occasionally tweaking the game world mid-combat (roll perception; you see the outline of a secret escape hatch in the corner you've backed yourselves into!), and by offering direct advice when they're about to do something foolish that might get them killed. But I would happily whack PCs with no mercy and no forewarning in a meat-grinder-mode Tomb of Annihilation campaign, sticking to the module precisely as written, if that was what the players had signed up for. Or in a different system where no-fault player/PC divorce laws were baked into the system itself, such as DCC. [/QUOTE]
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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Kobayashi Maru: Should the fate of the character always be in the player's hands? POLL
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