To Kill or Not to Kill

[Philip]

Quite frankly, this seems like nonsense to me no matter how often it's repeated.

I've played off and on since 1e. And I've never liked having characters die. (Come to think of it, I've only had two characters die in that time). My characters nearly ALWAYS assess the risk of approaching a given encounter since, there is never any guarantee of being able to come back. In 3.x, if you die and your party loses the fight/runs away, odds are good that you'll end up in an orc's cookpot or as a zombie. No Raise Dead for you.

I never liked my characters too die as well, but I always like taking risks with might possibly kill the character. When confronted with a EL of party level +5 my adrenaline really starts pumping. Personally, I hate the no chance/no warning insta-kill effects, which are incidentally one of the few times my characters (and often most of the party) did die.

For my characters, a guess a 25% statistical chance of dying is the maximum risk they will normally take. Such encounters are often the most memorable as well.

 

[Philip]

Mine can act QUITE reckless on occasion, such as two 2nd level characters taking on an Umber Hulk (described as 10 feet tall, enormous bulk, wicked mandibles and razor sharp claws ripping through rock) for the bragging rights. They left the party (in the middle of currently pursuing another goal!) to do this, and ended up as the Umber Hulk's meal. So players can be quite reckless, and I play a game style where that recklessness can have consequences. Your mileage may vary.

Some of my players sometimes have the same recklessness. Going up the wrong path after having been explicitely warned away because a tribe of Fomorians lairs there. They meet a wandering Fomorian giant, and the fools decide to fight instead of run away (they were 4th lvl). I was prepared to kill them all, but then the Giant fails his save versus the grease spell, the fighter scores a critical, the Giant fumbles, and behold, the party slays the giant! They exhausted all there resources, but they did!

My players sometimes thing my dice are jinxed, because they tend to roll badly whenever they think it is the end for them, and roll very well when they think they are going to get an easy fight. I always think my freaky rolls are the biggest contributor to there not being any PC deaths in my campaign.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

Although I agree with you 100% (ok, maybe 99%), I cannot connect your argument with what I've said. Foremost, I expect everyone to have fun, which means that with different groups of people you run different games, or even run different flavored sessions with the same group. I haven't met any player who didn't care about their characters enough to the point of taunting death. If they did, which is hard for me to imagine, then I would probably ask them to play in another campaign.

had to page up and snip, but it was mostly the part about "If those actions invite death, and it doesn't come calling, you campaign becomes less believable." I've rarely had characters do things which I would consider "inviting death" moreso than being an adventurer in the first place. I tend to give players good idea of which encounters they will be "winning" and which they will be surviving, and I've been mostly blessed with folks who follow those hints. bear in mind that while I quoted you, there had been several comments of the 'fear of death stops players from running their characters into suicidal danger' tack, and I was responding to the idea in general. Your example may not be the best one, but it was the last one fitting the profile.

In fact, I sent an instant message to my snuggle bunny, who I will be running a one player game for soon and checked to see if the fact I wouldn't be killing off his character was going to cause him to run around like an idiot into suicidal danger... Luckily there will be much more to the plot than survival, so he was fine with acting intelligently in character even without my finger on the smite button.

kahuna burger

 

[danzig138]

Hits happen

What is the stance on charectar death in your game and why? And please no one trash anyone elses views.

Bad title on my part, I know. Character death: it happens. These days, I am very rarely on the player side of the Wall o' Fear and Ignorance, so this is from my DMing POV. It happens. I don't have much of an opinion on character death. Some characters die, and it might suck for the player, but they know the risks. I make any story adjustments necessary and move on with things. If the rest of the party can get the dead guy back, good for them. Otherwise, we wait for an appropriate scene to introduce a new character.

 

[danzig138]

>Dark Dungeons panel snipped

Haw!

 

[Malk]

though this will no doubt induce an entirely different firestorm of discussion...but crits dont happen to players in my game unless i want them too. I dont roll in front of the players, and they never know if what i roll and what i say are the same. Within my own group some dms play that way and others wouldnt dream of it, but they know that i do and have no problem with it. Fudging as a player is entirely different.

 

[ForceUser]

I don't go out of my way to kill player characters, but actions have consequences and sometimes the DM rolls an unlucky crit. I don't like it when PCs die, but I don't often shy away from such an event either. If your character dies in my campaign and you can't secure revivification, you can start a new character one level lower than your previous one. I don't see the point of penalizing players for getting their characters killed with unduly harsh "new character" rules; we're all in it for the fun anyway, and losing your cool PC forever is punishment enough. That said, without the possibility of a grim finale, a campaign loses that sense of drama that makes for compelling roleplay. I want the heroes to triumph in the end, but that end is by no means preordained.

 

[JesterPoet]

The fact that there even is a discussion about character deaths proves they are not. The characters we get attached to transcend that piece of paper, transcend editions and revisions. They get played at the table, in CRPG's, at LARP's, you can even find their images and/or names on these very message boards, where people use them as aliases. If you cannot get attached to a character, I would say you are missing a part of what can make RPG's fun.

Besides, when it comes down to it, your friends and family are just a bunch of carbohydrates as well, no?

Hmmmm..... nope. No, I don't buy it. It's still just a piece of paper with numbers on it. They can still be played in Joe's game if they're killed in Bob's, because they aren't real.


There's a difference between being attached to your character, and being that attached to your character. It's the difference between "Marcie" and average Jane who just sucks misfortune up and deals with it.

EDIT:
Oh, and my family, carbohydrates or not, are also more than a piece of paper, as are yours. I don't think I have to go into the many things your family can do (interaction with you being a key one of them) that your Rog3/Brd2/Eye1 will never be able to do, no matter how attached to him you are.

 

[milotha]

I had a DM once who absolutely refused to kill my character. I was the center of several subplots, and no matter what dumbass or near-suicidal thing I did I just couldn't die. It drove me nuts. I'd much rather reap the consequences of my actions.

Yeah, I was in a game once where the PCs were all destined to save the world. If any of us died, the whole world was doomed. The GM loved his plot so much that he didn't want to deviate from it. As you can imagine, after a while we began testing the limits of the system, and the GM was forced to backtrack to prevent us from dying. The campaign really lost all credibility for me as a player.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Oh, one more thing - as a player, I like my characters, but never get so attached that I can't afford to lose them. I always have one backup character prepped and ready, because personally I am not a big fan of resurrections. If the PC is going to paradise for following his beliefs, why the heck would he want to come back???

The first time my character died, I made jokes about how he was sitting in this lime green waiting room with Absolutely Nothing To Do until he was raised; after all, it hadn't been seven days yet. Perhaps that had something to do with dying at the start of the session.

Later on, I started playing him as a bit blase, which got reinforced every time he came back. After all, after you've been dead, what else is there to fear? However, he got less blase the longer he'd been without dying, as he learned (again and again) that while death isn't all bad, getting there smarts.

Brad