To Kill or Not to Kill

[Steverooo]

It was hard to be afraid of running out of food, being lost, or being shot at after those expierences. It was espeically funny when the DM explained to us that we were out of food and water, and didn't know where to go, and I just looked at him blandly and said "we managed it last time."

And I've had a ton more expierences like this. And in the games where that happened, my successes didn't feel like mine anymore. So I managed to trap a rabbit, but it doesn't matter. So I'm an awesome driver, but when anyone can do the driving moves requried to manage the situation I feel like there's no point to being awesome at it. There's no satisfaction of a perfectly executed escape from the room with the animated statue guardians when the owner comes in and escorts us out of the trap.

"No consequences" and "No unneccessary deaths" are two different things... In the wandering in the desert example, I would have used the fatigue rules, and applied them until the PCs reached the point where they should have died of thirst, or starved to death... Then, if I wanted the campaign to continue, I would have had a wandering tribe of dervishes come along and find the dying PCs, pick them up, cart them off to their camp, relieve them of the weight of their gear, and then tell the players that they wake up, many days later, weak, thinner, without X, Y, and Z, and in too poor a shape to do much about it...

Death? No. Consequences? Yes! See the difference?

So your PC managed to trap a jackrabbit, in the desert? Cool! He is no longer fatigued! When the Dervishes come by, he is the only PC still up and about, and manages to save MOST of the other PCs' gear (and, of course, all of his own)! Thanks to him, the consequences of the party's wandering into the desert are lessened.

So you can drive really well? Great, if you ever find a working vehicle to operate! You will succeed at tasks where others fail. If you intentionally plow your car into a brick wall doing 98 mph, you will still take the appropriate damage, and possibly die (if it's enough to kill you). If you take 50+ HP, I'll also call for a save vs. Massive Damage, and "kill" you on a failure...

On the other hand, if you're trying to take a tight corner at 98 mph in order to cause the security droids to crash into the wall, and you roll a "1" and fail, crash into the wall, and take enough damage to "kill" you (for doing something that wasn't stupid, in my opinion), then you'd be more likely to wake up in a hospital bed, with a major medical bill to pay off, and discover that the traffic 'droid reported your crash to the Hospital Computer, which dispatched the Medibots to pull your flaming carcass out of the burning wreck, and they managed to patch you back together!

Consequences? You lost your vehicle. You lost your gear. You owe the hospital a lot of money. You lost a lot of game time... Now if you wanted, you could roll up a new PC, and join the group. If you were attached to THIS character, however, you could continue to play him/her/it.

Many people seem to find creating new PCs fun... and that's fine with me. More power to them!

Me, I like to see character development! I long for level 10+ PCs, and loathe starting at level one. "Okay, this is your NEW PC's very first-ever adventure!" BORRRRING!!!

I like real-world versimilitude in a game, and the truth is, the Human race survives because we HELP each other. So when a PC is supposed to die, I don't find it unreasonable to have someone help them... Like the wandering dervishes, or the medibots (built for the job). This is not the "Your actions don't matter" free-ride that you're talking about, in your previous post...

In D&D, at level one, you die at -10 HP, and have from 1 (Wizard with a 5 or lower CON) to 18 (Barbarian with an 18 CON and a race with +2 CON Bonus) HP. A sword critical can kill the uninjured Wiz pretty easily. It is unlikely to hurt the Barbarian.

As levels go up, though, the damage/round increases, more than the HPs. Would it be so bad to allow PCs to die at -10 or negative HPs, whichever is higher?

For gamers who think a good chance of dieing is neccessary, yes, it would be bad. For many others, going unconscious at 0 HPs would be bad enough, and the extra time required to regain consciousness would be penalty enough... Not to mention the possibility of bleeding to death, without help, still exists. The PCs (and NPCs) would just have longer to stabilize.

I think this would work better. D&D seems more geared for people who like quick, clean deaths, so maybe it's the wrong game for me.

 

[Yokiboy]

This is the heart of the matter for me. It's not the idea of characters being brought back to life (a staple of myth and fiction), it's that it's so easy to be brought back in 3E compared to earlier editions that the fear of death is meaningless because death has been reduced to a temporary inconvienience rather than a real possibility of loosing the character.

Hello Bendris,

Why can't you just make it harder to come back from the dead? I have IMC. We all agreed that we didn't like the RAW, and adopted some quick and easy rules to make it harder to get raised from the dead. Check out Malhavoc Press' Book of Hallowed Might for some great ideas on how to make it harder and more epic to raise a character.

Plus I don't think it is that easy to get raised to begin with. My party is usually adventuring on the outskirts of civilization, and don't have a temple of their religion nearby that they can get to within the timelines for a Raise Dead. For True Ressurection we demand specific power components, that are a quest in themselves to get a hold of.

I don't think I can answer the original question as I don't generally kill characters either. My plots revolve around the characters, and would come to screaching halts if I had them off'ed. They're still very scared of dying, as they love their characters and they have on several occassions come within an inch of a TPK. It works fine for us anyhow.

I am about to start a Conan the RPG campaign, and intend to have it be a lot grittier, with more final deaths. Doing this though will shift the focus of the campaign from character driven plots to something I'm at a loss to find a word for... :\

Anyhow, I'm going to give it a try about a week for now. I might be described as "episodic campaigning" perhaps? What I'm thinking here is that each adventure will be its own chapter in the ongoing saga of the Hyborian age, rather than a furthering of the plotlines revolving around the characters. Does that make any sense at all?

TTFN,

Yokiboy

 

[Yokiboy]

If you like death but want a reasonable amount of control over coming back then you could the WFRP method of fate points - you had a 100% chance of survival as long as you had spare fate points, but once they were gone you had 0%. Since the number of points is recorded clearly it is upto the character how reckless they act at any given point.

Mongoose Publishing have made great use of Fate Points in Conan the RPG. Where you can use a Fate Point to be "left for dead" on the field of battle. You still have to recover, but you're stable.

TTFN,

Yokiboy

 

[Inez Hull]

(EDITED OUT) ...I say character deaths ahoy and nix raise dead in all forms while you're at it. Give me some gritty iron hard PC's who celebrate each survived fight and enter paroxysms of delight at a new level, rather than whiny twink maxed out munchkins who glow like christmas trees when detect magicked. Give me a campaign where the GM's bloodlust is regularly sated and survival is a victory in itself. Can all that "the game is the winner" twonk and give me a shot at putting some respect in the GM's eyes as we weather a horribly unbalanced encounter whilst limping home from our last @ss whipping. CR you wonder? Hah, Chicken Rating I scoff! I don't care if the characters are first level, who ever heard of orcs in groups of three, sod the players and send a whole tribe at 'em. If the PC's never flee, they haven't been through enough TPK's.

EDIT: Um, Inez, Madam, we frown on that sort of tongue-thrashing 'round here. I edited out some of the more accusatory statements. What you prefer is fine, but calling names is not courteous.

 

[JesterPoet]

I don't think that it's so cut and dry as you think.

Tim the Fighter rushes in to attack the Frost Giant that is currently killing the Cleric. He has not been hit at all and he has both a fairly good AC and a good attack/damage ratio. The Frost Giant will be tough but he's fought and beaten them before. Unfortunately, the frost giant gets lucky and crits Tim with its oversized Great Axe doing 76 points of damage! Now, Tim has to make a Fort save (DC 15, easy as cake for Tim) or die from the shock. He rolls and rolls a 1, a failure and he dies. A case of bad luck ending a character.

And I had this happen (more or less), two sessions ago.

Apparently you didn't read my earlier post. Just a week ago I lost a character to one set of attacks from a troll. Yeah, the troll got lucky hitting me with all attacks, just as the Giant did by critting on Tim. However, if Tim's (and my) tactics had been better perhaps we would have survived. Unless you have no choice in the actions you take, anything that happens to your character involves more than just luck. Just because Tim the fighter had beaten Frost Giants before, he still should have known the risk of charging into combat. He made a choice that got him into the situation that got him killed. If he had any chance of not making a save versus massive damage, then he knew that there was a chance he'd die. As such, he had many other options, but chose not to use them.

I'll grant that bad luck contributed to Tim the Fighter's death, but it wasn't the only factor. Tim made a choice. That choice proved to be fatal.

 

[Malk]

Yup, the thing is we play in games that are heavily story driven and heavily charectar driven. I never want a charectar of mine or someoen elses to die from a random critical hit unless it would make the game more dramatic and meaningfull.

I dont understand the "test the limits" train of thought. I mean if you didnt know that the dm was running a game like that i can see where you would be miffed. But wouldnt actualy talking to the dm and saying "hey...could you make the game a bit more realistic buddy?" be slightly more productive to everyone having a good time than say....setting a ship on fire and destroying the plot along with your charectars.

As a players, if you are not having a good time the DM is obligated in my opinion to make changes to fix that. As players your responsibilty to make sure that the DM is having fun is just as strong. I would deffinately recommend that DMs say up front what their game is going to be like. This is true in the Low/High magic debate as well as any other style issue.

 

[ThoughtBubble]

Steveroo, I see the difference. However, as I said earlier it's a damn fine line. Is weakining the encounters while we're in the wilderness because we're all fatigued a good idea? How about if our guns get stolen, should the next fight be that full group of bandits?

And once the DM's I've played with stop dropping death as a consiquence, other things soon follow. We ran into a caravan (since wandering in the wilderness sucked. Note that this was completely by accident, and had nothing to do with our skills) who then ran into bandits, who had two cars. We got one for helping. Oh, we got some guns too.

And really, you could only pull the survives the explosion barely but car is trashed thing once unless the narritive spirit is going with us. After that, I (and by extention in a non narrative/story game) my character wouldn't fear death, just losing stuff. And then I'd get petulant. In a more narrative/story/rp game though, it becomes the source of a running joke. See the difference?

And in the bandit counter example, (just FYI we wandering in the desert was session 2-5 after weaking up with amnseia in a building. We hadn't had the time or capability to prepare for the journey we hadn't known about.) had we been captured by bandits and been uable to do much, I probablly would have quit the game there (we hadn't had a meaningful choice to that point).

In the above mentioned campaign, no one actually felt like we were going to die (it was turning out to be a very exploration/simulationist campaign) since we were too important to the meta-plot. During the first difficult batttle we faced over half the party died. Then the GM changed his mind, and dropped them to nearly dead. From there, the story goes into a series of 'they did what?' and 'and that worked?' and then the party escaped. I was out of the game at the time and had many a disucssion with the GM as to our ridiculous behavior.

Another result of not wanting to kill people in a simulationist game are those NPC's four levels higher who are always there to resucue us.

I'm not saying that no unnecessarry death can't be fun. I'm saying in all the simulationist games I've been in where that rule was applied, the choices we made felt meaningless, our victories hollow, and we were generally babied. And when I ran a game where I followed the 'no killing unless something incredibly stupid is done over and over' I recall a player (who lobbied for that particular rule) saying "Why should I care? It's not like you're going to kill me."

Key points:
Both styles work, depending on the game.
The people who I've played with (admittedly a little immature) who wanted to play sim style games and were heavily against dieing under any circumstances were also the ones who wanted to act with impunity.
Players tend to gravitate towards what works.
In story/narrative/rp heavy games dieing sucks, and I'd rather be furthering the plot.

 

[Bendris Noulg]

Hello Bendris,

'Ello.

Why can't you just make it harder to come back from the dead? I have IMC. We all agreed that we didn't like the RAW, and adopted some quick and easy rules to make it harder to get raised from the dead. Check out Malhavoc Press' Book of Hallowed Might for some great ideas on how to make it harder and more epic to raise a character.

Got it. Long before it was out, though, I had already made a few changes over all.

First thing to understand is one of environment. The game focuses on role-play (read: storyline development, character interaction, and problem solving). Smackin' mooks around occurs semi-regularly, but actual combat encounters where the PCs are exposed to a true threat of death occur (on average) every 3-4 sessions. Or, to ratio it out, my games about 50% RP, 45% Skills/Problems, and 5% extreme bloody violence.

So, while I've made changes that make combat a bit grimmer (less magic, less healing, W&V-derived system, etc.), those changes don't really threaten PC death on a "daily" basis.

Within this environment, the spells themselves have received several changes, most of them related to frequency. To begin, there is no "standard" Cleric spell list, as there aren't any actual Clerics, although several Prestige Classes exist for the pious to obtain (some Paladin-like, others Cleric-like), with each Prestiege Class having its own Spell List.

Reincarnation: I've never liked this spell. Over all, it's always just produced wonky results. As such, I've been removing it from the lists since 1E. For d20, rather than removing it, I took a clue from Relics & Rituals by making it a Druidic True Ritual in which the Druids ask for someone to be reincarnated, as the term is defined in the real world (i.e., by the end of the night, someone, somewhere, has become pregnant with the reincarnated soul. This, of course, takes the spell from being a death cure to a plot device, but is that really a bad thing?

Raise Dead: The most common death cure available, and for most of the divine Prestige Classes, the ultimate healing spell available. Again, a True Ritual, the only real reduction in potency with this spell would be in the chance of failure (the Ritual Casting check). Another change is that of "level loss". I don't subtract any levels from a raised character, but rather remove just the Experience Points. The effect is that it takes longer to level up (as the lost Experience Points must be regained), but the character doesn't loose any abilities.

Resurrection: Thus far, only five Prestige Classes have had this spell added to their spell list, and that as a 9th Level spell (as it's their uber-healer spell). More likely will get it, just haven't developed those specific Prestige Classes yet. However, most of the Prestiege Classes that have gotten it aren't exactly intended as combat-machines in the same manner that Clerics are (i.e., their balanced as religious icons within their community, not as adventuring crusaiders). Resurrection comes at a price, being that you loose Experience as described for raise dead, and it's also a True Ritual (with its chance of failure), and the character retured "bonded" to the divine caster that cast ressurection; Think if it along the lines of, "I, the god of [what ever], will send you back. But a part of your life belongs to me. You will serve [Divine Caster] in my name until the debt of life is paid." Again, there is no actual level loss, but until the PC has regained the lost Experience Points, he is effectively quested to serve the NPC that cast the spell. Agreeing to this is a condition of the spell; don't agree, don't come back.

True Resurrection: To date, only one Prestige Class has this spell on its spell list, being the setting's "penultimate healer". It is 9th Level for this Class, and is a True Ritual as the others, and functions as resurrection is described with one primary difference: The character looses all Experience Points and is bonded until such a time as having regained all of this Experience in the service of the religion/deity/priest that provided the healing.

By these changes, I don't remove the spells from play (except reincarnation), but I make access more problematic, with a long term cost to the "upper two" having impact on story line and providing plot hooks that can take the game in new directions.

Plus I don't think it is that easy to get raised to begin with. My party is usually adventuring on the outskirts of civilization, and don't have a temple of their religion nearby that they can get to within the timelines for a Raise Dead.

Again, though, this becomes less problematic once a PC has teleport, and irrelevant once a PC can cast the actual spells themselves, which is primarily when the "cheese factor" can kick in for this aspect of the game.

For True Ressurection we demand specific power components, that are a quest in themselves to get a hold of.

Now, this is actually the opposite of what I've done; This effectively requires a quest of friends and allies prior to the casting, where I have a quest for the actual beneficiary after the casting. Amounts to the same thing, although your method has the target PC out of play for that little bit longer time.

I don't think I can answer the original question as I don't generally kill characters either. My plots revolve around the characters, and would come to screaching halts if I had them off'ed. They're still very scared of dying, as they love their characters and they have on several occassions come within an inch of a TPK. It works fine for us anyhow.

I, too, enjoy a group with a similar style. Then again, there is the case of required ratio; Having (on average) less than one fatality per year on average, and with only about half of them "permenant deaths", the restrictions made are more about maintaining world consistancy than anything else (for instance, while the players know that PCs might not come back from a fatality, they also know that a slain villain will most often stay slain... In fact, I've yet to have a "return of [NPC they had killed earlier]" session or adventure because that's part of the cheese factor I seek to eliminate.).

I am about to start a Conan the RPG campaign, and intend to have it be a lot grittier, with more final deaths. Doing this though will shift the focus of the campaign from character driven plots to something I'm at a loss to find a word for... :\

Anyhow, I'm going to give it a try about a week for now. I might be described as "episodic campaigning" perhaps? What I'm thinking here is that each adventure will be its own chapter in the ongoing saga of the Hyborian age, rather than a furthering of the plotlines revolving around the characters. Does that make any sense at all?

I've not gotten Conan yet (it's on my short list of near-future purchases), but I have seen some of the preview material, so I'm not sure how different it is. I don't think the environment (as I know it, anyway) will prevent character-focused story lines, but it may likely change the way these story lines are presented.

As for the episodic-campaigning, yeah, that makes sense. I've considered similar for Midnight, but I'm too wrapped up in other projects to give it a whirl.

 

[Bendris Noulg]

As a players, if you are not having a good time the DM is obligated in my opinion to make changes to fix that. As players your responsibilty to make sure that the DM is having fun is just as strong. I would deffinately recommend that DMs say up front what their game is going to be like. This is true in the Low/High magic debate as well as any other style issue.

Couldn't possibly agree with this statement any more than I do, which is to say I see 1 exception: When a new player is joining an established group. While there certainly should be a commitment on the part of the group to express the relative style and methods of the group in game-play, I don't see any obligation to change a game in progress to accomodate the new player (i.e., the group is playing a game the new player wants to join or the player shouldn't join).

Otherwise, yeah, the rest is dead on (although, personally, I have no qualms about having a gaming "dry spell", as player or GM, if a similarly-minded group isn't available, a situation I've been fortunate enough to avoid for near about 7 years now). When starting a new campaign, however, I do present the group with "I want to run a [style of choice] campaign; what are you folks looking for?" I then try to create a world that is very much a combination of everyone's desires (and is, in fact, the basis of most every change I've made to the rules).

 

[Bendris Noulg]

Another result of not wanting to kill people in a simulationist game are those NPC's four levels higher who are always there to resucue us.

Argh, I hate that. Don't get me wrong, at lower levels (1-3), I might introduce a "iconic mentor" that fits this description, and he might help if the players get into a jam (more likely if new players that might need a little direction). However, if by 5th Level or so the players aren't able to "pull themselves out", than there is either a problem with the players (not seeing enough possible choices to fulfill an objective) or a balace issue (I made the encounters too powerful or complex), both of which would require some degree of fixing (because characters that are 5th Level or higher that are constantly being saved by NPCs can only result in upset players, and if they were saved once or twice before then, while some resentment might have formed earlier, it only reinforces the idea that the PCs have finally "come into their own", as the saying goes).