Why dont you kill PCs?

[Vague Jayhawk]

I am currently running a d20 future game.

I am a good storytelling type GM. I like to provide a setting and let the characters tell thier own stories.

I do not like twinks or rules lawyers.

I tend to fudge the dice for those who are into roleplaying. I do not for power gamers.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

The only time I fudge to spare the PCs is if I discover I've badly misjudged a fight so that they didn't stand a fair chance, otherwise they just live or die by the fate of the dice. Fortunately, with D&D it's very easy to balance fights so it happens rarely.

I had this happen one time, through a combination of drunken adventure planning, player non-attendance, and poor player strategy, an encounter that was supposed to tork off the characters and get them out of a rut and back into action ended up nearly being a TPK. I fudged like mad, and let the players know that I was doing it so that they would get the point of the encounter...

Later
silver

 

[EricNoah]

To be honest, I avoid killing PCs because a) it grinds the game to a halt, b) it's not fun -- either as DM or as player, and c) it throws the rest of the session into a game of "let's find something for this player to do." That said -- a PC died in my last session; fortunately it was right at the end of the session, and fortunately they had one suitable magical solution to the situation handy.

 

[jollyninja]

In my games, death is a far more permanent situation then most. It's an Iron heroes game using the setting info from FR. I have told the players that I am going for a low magic style of play and none of them have seriously complained about not playing clerics or wizards. When death is meaningless, my games tend to tpk because the players know that if a couple of them survive, they will recover the bodies and get everyone rezed so a few rounds of not really paying attention to the tactics of their enemy (cutting off potential avenues of retreat for their foes for example) have made things go poorly. my players have walked into some seriously obvious traps just to feel out the opponents before i switched to IH. now they search everything, sometimes with multiple pc's and pay a great deal more attention to tactics. I enjoy the game more and have only killed one pc (of 7) running red hand of doom with a large group that has no magic (exception being a cleric of tyr they saved in another adventure to keep em alive when things go way, way south) and is 2 levels under the reccomended.

edit: yes, i kill pc's when they make mistakes that warrant it and are fighting foes capable of exploiting the mistake.

 

[Treebore]

Diaglo and BlueBlackRed summed it up nicely. I only cut them slack when I screw up, which isn't often.

 

[3d6]

I normally try to design adventures and campaign that can absorb PC death, so I don't try to avoid killing PCs. I probably end up killing about 1 PC every 3 sessions or so, barring special circumstances. Some players tend to have thier PCs die more often than others, of course. In a Star Wars playtest campaign I was running, I had a player that was new to our group. He died about every session for one reason or another. Didn't belive in retreating to the back to be healed or taking cover or what have you. He never seemed to really grasp that d20 Modern was a more lethal game than D&D or WotC's d20 Star Wars. Once he managed to have 2 characters die in a single session. In another campaign, I had a player who ran a gnome evoker from level 3 to 16 without a single death, and only a few times at negative hit points, and I think we only had 2 or 3 character deaths in the entire campaign.

 

[Agent Oracle]

I had a problem with killing PC's. I would draw up an encounter that would be challenging for them, and, somehow, they would either bumble into it, or else they would fall to a disadvantage early on, and one would wind up dying. And i never knew it was coming. The rogue / fighter would get picked off by a stray CR 1/2 cultist's arrow, or the Cleric would fail a save against a paralysis trap and then wind up dead. I was allways profusely apologetic to the players.

But then, I played with my master DM. Two TPK's in three sessions. and it was all perfectly fair. We had started at 5th level, with the correct amount of equipment. every encounter was to-the-dot CR for us. When we died, it was a work of art. I might sound like i'm romantacizing it, but i'm not, the guy was a master tactician... Ultimately, I realized that the fun of the game wasn't allways in surviving, it was worth it to learn how to build a strong, survivla-oriented caster class.

 

[JediSoth]

The only time I pull my punches when it comes to killing PCs is when I've mis-calculated an encounter's difficulty. If they do something foolish, I have no problem with killing them. Also, if a fluke die-roll would kill someone and it would hinder the flow of the game, I'll usually fudge it, but I stopped doing that in WLD, because we don't have any group continuity in that campaign anyway.

That being said, I don't recall the last time I had a character die in a regular campaign.

JediSoth

 

[sydbar]

I don't try to kill pc's, but i try not to cheat to keep them alive either, but i do try to save them without cheating. Last saturday the half-orc monk was killed fighting in room 18 of the temple of erythnul in 3 faces of evil, having alerted them, the chief was the last one standing, but the party was hurting, then they decided to start him on fire, so instead of attacking(and killing) the party members he put himself out twice, but the half-orc monk(who has a tendency to go down in battle) was hit and killed, the funny thing was that since they were all doing the 5 foot step shuffle the wizard ended up next to the chief, who was down to 5hp, was hit and killed by the wizard. I used putting out the fire to give the players a chance to survive, but i did it without having to cheat. I've had 2 deaths so far in the campaign, but both have refused the free raise that they were offered.