Unexpected Deaths

[R_J_K75]

It's rare, but I've had players lose two PCs simultaneously!

Talk about a bad day at the office.

 

[GMMichael]

My PCs travel with a huge wagon. Look in the back, and you'll find this. Just in case.

The worse has happened. You've just gotten ten minutes into a session and a PC has died. . .

I'd call that grounds for a toast. But maybe that's just me...

How do you handle that in your games?

Do you let them survive but they gain some sort of flaw, curse or other drawback?

Or do you let the dice fall where they are and just assure them that the dungeon crawl won't take that long and they should just sit back and wait?

Gaining a flaw is standard operating procedure for me. But the player can opt for a new character if she'd like. Rolling up a new character is a decent way to keep a player busy while the rest of the party goes on to glorious victory.

Since "sit and wait" is pretty lame, a player could take on an extra player job (like mapper and treasurer), play an NPC (including enemies), or just play on her phone for a while. That last one is pretty popular these days.

The parties Fighter/Berserker decides he's cutting this interlopers head off. He gets surprise on the stranger, rolls a natural 20 in his called shot and lops the guys head clean off.

Murder-hoboing at its best. And a very good argument for a bounty/warrant system in the rules.

 

[R_J_K75]

Murder-hoboing at its best. And a very good argument for a bounty/warrant system in the rules.

It happened so quick that it was so funny, but they guy ended up quitting for the night. Cant say I blame him. If I was DMing I most likely would not have let this happen without some repercussions to the offending player. Then again it was a different game back then.

 

[aramis erak]

The worse has happened. You've just gotten ten minutes into a session and a PC has died. Maybe the dice were against them from the get go. Maybe the consequences of their actions finally caught up to them. And to top it off, they've crossed a point of no return and can't just hop back to town for a quick raise dead. How do you handle that in your games?

Generally, if there is an NPC suitable for becoming a PC, they get to take over that one for the session, and maybe as a long term. Or they can generate a new PC before next session, or even during, and get in at a suitable point this session.

 

[Catulle]

Last Tuesday, the first round of combat saw our Rogue get flat-out aced by a Finger of Death (so far so good, our Oracle was packing Breath of Life, we can do this...). Then our Sorcerer whacked said Oracle's (possessed) mother with AoE. Some... awkwardness... ensued as we all saw the rapid realignment of the triage calculus working it's way through our healer's thought processes. Mother was saved; shame about our murderscout.

Fortunately our DM was kind enough to get that wayward party member back on their feet... as a Dread Zombie. Who then occupied themselves for the rest of the session by gleefully playing for the other team.

Situation as yet unresolved.

 

[CleverNickName]

It won't work for everyone's table, but this is what happened at ours once.

It was early in a long-term, two-year campaign...I think it might have been our third or fourth gaming session? We were just getting started. The party of five, 2nd level characters were investigating some strange goings-on in a mysterious forest, and ran afoul of an ogre. What should have been an "Easy" encounter turned into a massacre: the party's cleric was knocked unconscious by a lucky dice roll, and then a combination of bad death saves and careless friendly fire finished her off. (But by golly, the wizard got to kill that ogre I tell you what.)

After the battle, I called a break. Everyone got up to get some snacks, stretch their legs, etc., and I chatted with the player. I asked her if she would like to keep playing her cleric, or if she would like to roll up something else. She said she wanted to keep playing her cleric, if possible, because she had spent so much time on her backstory and portrait and stuff (she even had a family tree). So we brainstormed for a few minutes, and I bounced a few ideas off of her. She picked her favorite idea and I ran with it.

So when we got back from break, we had the funeral scene. The party set camp, and as they were digging a grave, an old crone entered the clearing. She saw the body of the cleric on the ground and exclaimed. Such a pity, she said, for that particular cleric was destined for greatness and would have gone on to save many lives from a terrible fate. But now, alas, those lives would now be lost. She offered to raise their fallen friend, in exchange for a favor...but wouldn't give any further details about what that favor might be or when she might call it in. They agreed, and the crone raised the cleric from the dead. Then the crone (actually a powerful hag) vanished. From that day forward, every character in the party except the cleric noticed that their own shadows had been replaced with the shadow of the crone.

I never ended up calling in that favor; the campaign ended after about a year when I moved away. And honestly, I didn't really have anything planned for it. I just wanted a way to bring the cleric back in a way that would be memorable, and wouldn't be abused in the future. (And yes, I wanted to toy with them a little, make them paranoid, and remind them every now and then of the debt that would someday come due.)