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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mesh Hong" data-source="post: 5165322" data-attributes="member: 73463">Its funny you should mention this because the first sign of this has just happened in my game. My PCs were level 24 and at the top of Vecna’s secret tower in Pandemonium with the intention of getting a vial of liquid from his scrying font, In my game Vecna has been killed but when they got to the font they found a young teenager necrotically tethered to it out of who emerged 3 remnants of Vecna (undeath, necromancy and secrets). Now the battle is for a different thread, but during the fight the Paladin (angel of death) surprised everyone by using divine transposition to switch places with the tethered teenager meaning that the Paladin was bound to the font and the teenager was free. Everyone was shocked because no-one knew how to get him free and it was becoming apparent that when the final Remnant of Vecna was destroyed the font might do something nasty, as the two destroyed remnants were sucked back into the font on death and were attacking the tethered person. This is when the Paladin announced that he was going to kill himself. Surprised looks all round. But then we realised his plan was to use his on death power to explode and appear at the end of the encounter.  Now I like to be fair, and I realised that we were in a precedent setting situation so I ruled that he could coup de grace himself but he couldn’t just die. He was initially a little incredulous that he couldn’t just kill himself but I explained that Epic level characters are hard to kill. They have developed so far from normal people that they are closer to gods than commoners and as such can take an amazing amount of punishment before their mind or body succumbs. I also pointed out that I would never allow an NPC or monster to just kill a PC without a dice roll while they were sleeping, and if he could just kill himself so could anyone else. Everyone agreed that this was the way to go, (some more readily than others), and the Paladin did himself a lot of damage but not enough to kill himself. But in this case the font took care of that later in the round. An interesting upshot from this encounter however was that the remaining group finished off the remnants of Vecna, then collected the vial of liquid they were after just managing to Recall out before the whole area exploded in a major release of magical energy. Then the paladin rematerialised in the shattered and destroyed remains of the tower, somewhere in Pandemonium, with no way of getting himself home and at the mercy of the maddening winds that howl through that plane…….. In conclusionFriendly fire is a possibility at all tiers of play, it is going to happen on purpose or by accident at some point and the PCs will naturally sort it out one way or another. Self harm and tactical suicide are probably only going to be encountered in mid to late epic tier play, and a DM is going to have to sort it out one way or another. Personally I am perfectly happy for my PCs to do anything the players want, the important thing for me is that there are tangible repercussions for their actions and that everyone understands the natural balance of “anything the PCs use can also be used against them”. I do feel it is worth pointing out that monsters gain “on death” powers a lot sooner than PCs. It is not that surprising to see monsters explode in a burst of necrotic energy when defeated, the Epic destiny powers are really not that much different.</blockquote>

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