What do do about lots of deaths/no shows?

[Majoru Oakheart]

Action, excitement, and if you die they bring you back to collect your pension? Sign me up! (Seriously, though, it would almost explain how they can get so many replacement recruits.)

Actually, it solves another problem I had due to this situation. PCs picking up the loot of fallen companions. Last time, by the end of the mod, each of them had almost double their GP value for their level because they'd loot a companion every time they died.

This time I solved it by simply saying "It's a cultural taboo to loot one of your fallen friends unless absolutely necessary". Basically, it was an out of game "You cannot loot party members except of items you need to finish the mod". I didn't really like this solution as it feels like a mechanical problem that I'm solving with a role playing solution.

Although, if they were all a member of an organization that brought them all back to life even if their player didn't want to continue playing them, I could have all of their old characters take their equipment with them into retirement.

 

[Gentlegamer]

Never allow a session to end while player characters are in a dungeon.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Never allow a session to end while player characters are in a dungeon.

I wish, unfortunately, due to time constraints, we normally push the session time in order to finish combats and normally end the second combats are done.

Besides, given that I am running a super dungeon, they've often camped out in the dungeon in whatever room they could find to regain spells and such. It would be impossible for them to finish the entire thing in one session

 

[Gentlegamer]

Rule that they must retreat to the surface before the session ends.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

Rule that they must retreat to the surface before the session ends.

The types of dungeons he's talking about are huge! They're designed to be "camped out" in. It'd be like saying "You can go explore Manhattan, but you have to walk back to the Jersey Tunnel at the end of the session."

I see what you're going for (and I personally like dungeons that you can do through a series of "commando raids"), but it's not feasible with this source material.

 

[sniffles]

Just wondering, but if the PCs are in an enormous dungeon, why can't another party be there too? Then the new PCs could be remaining members of another party - maybe they got separated from the other group, or maybe the rest of their group died. Then they'd have a darned good reason to want to join up with some other people.

My group ran into a similar problem when a player grew disenchanted with his character mid-campaign. Our party was set up to be drawn together by the PC's backstories, and we were on a quest of sorts. But the player was so unhappy that the GM let him make a new PC. The old PC became an NPC, and the player and GM worked out a good way for the new character to fit into the backstory that had brought the party together (if you want more details see my story hour).

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Just wondering, but if the PCs are in an enormous dungeon, why can't another party be there too? Then the new PCs could be remaining members of another party - maybe they got separated from the other group, or maybe the rest of their group died. Then they'd have a darned good reason to want to join up with some other people.

Yes, this is the excuse I've used a couple of times.

I was just referring to when you had to do it enough times that it strained disbelief. Exactly HOW many people know about this dungeon and has sent expeditions? How many of them got wiped out except for 1 person?

I was wondering partially if any DMs had a problem with this. Do characters just die that rarely in your games? Do all of your players have a burning desire to explore their current character so much that even if it means losing a level, they want to be raised? Do you start new characters off at such a low level or make it so cheap to be raised that players have no real choice?

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

[sblock]RttToEE was indeed a killer module, but we really enjoyed it. What made the difference for us, I think, was character creation: We decided at the beginning of the adventure that we would make up a whole party, rather than a collection of PCs, that they would all be of the same (randomly determined, PHB) race, and that we would make every effort to build and develop a well-rounded, teamwork-driven party.

We rolled dwarves. We had a rogue/fighter, a fighter/barbarian, a wizard/cleric/geomancer, and a psion/sangehirn. Now, granted, these are some tough-guy builds and we use a generous stat-generation system, but until we got about halfway through the crater-ridge mines, this module was almost a cake-walk. We had a good time just trouncing over anything/anybody in our way and adopted the group name "Twelve Seconds (of Bloodshed)," which was fairly descriptive of what combat was like for us. It was a fun romp.[/sblock]TPKs make life hard for everybody, but when individual party members die and are replaced, I tend to assume (or even roleplay, for the sake of review) that new members are caught up on what has come before and become invested in what's happening before too long. With a TPK, I might encourage PC's to carry a journal from then on. It makes life easier for those who find your corpse, knowing whether they can expect reimbursement and payment for bringing you back from the dead, and it shows them where the BBEG with the treasure is if they decide that they would rather complete your adventure for you.

 

[S'mon]

Do characters just die that rarely in your games?

In my current campaign we've had no deaths in 5 months/10 sessions, thanks to Fate Points. My last game was much more typical 3e high-level, high-death, high-entropy. As PCs died new ones turned up. My new one seems to work much better.

 

[RichGreen]

Hi,

I've had a similar problem in a different game. While running the superb Call of Cthulhu campaign, Horror on the Orient Express, I think 18 player characters died or ended up in the asylum. I'd pre-empted this by using the Randolph Pierce Foundation from The Unspeakable Oath magazine -- basically an organization of occult investigators who sent PCs on missions. I encouraged the PCs to send reports back to the Foundation who in turn would send along new investigators when deaths or indefinite insanity occurred. In the end, two of the original PC party survived so there was some real continuity, and this solution worked well. This could work in D&D with an adventurer's guild (or better still, some kind of organization dedicated to fighting evil) and the use of sending spells etc.

Cheers


Richard