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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mr. Kaze" data-source="post: 1564227" data-attributes="member: 8848">Having killed possibly more than my fair share of characters, I have to say that it's very important to the enjoyment of the enjoyment of the game that players don't love their characters more than the game.The following are true stories... - A rogue was scouting out ahead, doubling back through an unseen room.  She encountered a couple of spectres and was quickly drained to death.  She came back as a wight and the party killed the wight.  She was raised from that.  The next session, she was doing the same sort of thing and killed by a Bodak's gaze.  The party killed the resulting undead while it was still in a bag. The party didn't raise her that time and she quit.  - One session, a rogue was scouting out ahead and got ripped appart by dire apes while the fighters were milling about a full 40' back.  Next session, a wizard was shredded by a fiendish dire lion's pounce while the fighters were a good 20' back.  The rogue and the wizard were played by folks from the previous story.  The fighters quit the next session because "heroes aren't supposed to die." - A party was effectively TPK'd because they camped out immediately adjacent to a Drow city after walking through and waving at the guards, who were the same sort of guards they'd been slaughtering with reckless abandon for the past week -- only with enough sense to not attack a party of armed-to-the-teeth adventurers who'd been slaughtering guards like them with reckless abandon all week.  (Unfortunately, the replacement heroes didn't have enough mooks to get XP from to make continuing the adventure feasible, which resulted in a TPK despite my valient efforts.  Nobody quit, but we're on a different campaign now.) - In this campaign, a character got killed by a Slay Living while he was sneak attacking a cleric.  No problems there.  The replacement character got killed by a Slay Living glyph targeting humans less than half an hour after showing up.  We're not docking him XP for that one.  There've been a few other casualties, but that's the worst of them.  The really sad thing about that, though, is that the glyph was set to target a different member of the party who'd been on the campaign for the past couple of in-game months...So my rules for killing characters are as follows: - If you want to target a character for extermination, have a campaign reason for it.  Only two current party members have been causing the cult grief for a long time, so they're at the top of the target list -- and at least one of them certainly knows it due to constant harrying and a couple of failed attempts on his life.  That's good tension. - If you want characters to finish off NPCs they knock down, start rolling congeal chances for the NPCs.  I expect that most of the players who don't finish downed NPCs don't do it because the DM ignores the NPC after the 0-line is crossed. (If you want to teach this behavior, remember the poison tooth scene in Dune...) - If you want an NPC to kill downed PCs, do it with their boss while the underlings pursue the rest of the party.  Offing downed enemies is the luxury of rank -- peons put their own lives on the line.  Of course, the counterpoint to this is "don't arbitrarily kill a PC with a mere lucky mook."  (Of course, there are probably fewer mere mooks as the campaign goes on, but that's a risk to your PCs...) - And if you kill the weakest member of the party because they're too much in harms' way, feel free to bend the death/resurrection rules to ensure that they don't fall too terribly far behind the party.  Just because you kill the character doesn't mean that the player should so weak that they're not having any fun anymore.  It'll make it easier for your players to get over losing a character and get on with the game.::Kaze (hopes that helps -- if it was an Orc party leader, he would've offed the downed cleric, too.  After all, no telling when he'd recover, heal himself and flame strike the noble orcs from behind...)</blockquote>

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