"Worse than death"

[kaomera]

Let me start by saying that, as a DM, I do not like killing off PCs. I consider it one of my responsibilities to run a game where PCs can die, and to actually make it happen when circumstance, player action or inaction, and/or the dice dictate, but I do avoid it whenever I think that I can do so while still meeting that responsibility. This has come up in relation to a response I made in the thread lonebrendan started about his dead, petrified character('s finger).

Partly as a result of this I am a long-time fan of the idea that there are far more "entertaining" things that I can do to a player than to "simply" kill off their PC, and that killing PCs is even something of the "easy way out". I've never really wanted to put real fear into the players, that doesn't seem like fun. I don't want them to consider the threats in the imaginary world I've concocted to be "real" so much as get them to have their characters react to them as if they where real for them. And there are some threats that some players seem to feel are "worse than death" - like the idea that you'd rather lose a character and start over than be level-drained or lose a magic item, and that I just don't understand...

A lot of the "worse than death" stuff has come out of the game in newer editions. And this is at the same time that we've seen, IMO, a lessening of the problems that character death itself causes. And part of this is maybe a reaction to how some players respond to stuff outside their character sheet - players who, if the NPCs their character is attached to are threatened, make all new characters orphaned loners, rather than trying to defend them.

I'm not sure how well I'm getting my point across here, but I'm wondering if maybe I shouldn't be going for the kill a bit more. If it really is more fun for the players to have their characters killed off than to have them messed with, or even if that option is still really valid...

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Partly as a result of this I am a long-time fan of the idea that there are far more "entertaining" things that I can do to a player than to "simply" kill off their PC, and that killing PCs is even something of the "easy way out". I've never really wanted to put real fear into the players, that doesn't seem like fun. I don't want them to consider the threats in the imaginary world I've concocted to be "real" so much as get them to have their characters react to them as if they where real for them. And there are some threats that some players seem to feel are "worse than death" - like the idea that you'd rather lose a character and start over than be level-drained or lose a magic item, and that I just don't understand...

I'd rather start over. Here's why:

I'm not the world's greatest RP'er. I'm in a game for fun, and will occasionally have my character act in a nonsensical way of acting "smart" results in doing something not fun. (To a point: poking a dragon with a stick "just to see what happens" is not only stupid, it'll also annoy the other players at the table.) Basically it means I'd rather be railroaded than argue with four other players about four different avenues of progress, none of which have to do with the presented plot. There are varying ways of increasing or decreasing my amount of fun, which is particularly relevant since I only get to play six hours a week, and some of those games aren't even really my cup of tea to begin with.

One way of decreasing my fun is to depower my character for a long time. Level draining, taking away items (especially in 3.x) or temporarily taking away powers (I had this done to my character in Mutants & Mastermind) aren't a whole lot of fun. I wouldn't suicide my character, but making him retire seems like a valid option both in terms of RP and in terms of my own enjoyment. I only get to game about six hours a week, and it's not worth it if it's not fun. And sure, the GM might promise I'll get my stuff back, but I can't control when this is, nor can my PC know this.

Another is to restrict what my character can do. So if I'm tossed in prison, my only goal now is to escape. Which is made harder because I don't know how to break out of prison in real life, and even if I did my character probably wouldn't. And if I were playing a character like an intelligent rogue who might know how to do this, the GM isn't going to give me freebie hints when I keep rolling Streetwise checks. The loss of equipment doesn't help with this goal either; even if I escape, I probably won't get it back, so see the above paragraph.

Some games handle the situation differently from DnD. For instance in FATE, long-term debilitating effects are nearly non-existent. I think I read about a "bad luck" curse that assaults the victim with a single accident (one that is balanced mechanically too). This can occur far in the future, but it only happens once. Negative conditions can be simply removed with rest. Others, like Warhammer, do it even "worse" than DnD. Yes, you can lose limbs in that system, but even so you get a few fate/fortune points to put that off a bit.

And part of this is maybe a reaction to how some players respond to stuff outside their character sheet - players who, if the NPCs their character is attached to are threatened, make all new characters orphaned loners, rather than trying to defend them.

Generations (probably overly dramatic) of DMs have instilled this mindset in players. And it's not like these DMs are even bad. It's realistic when you're deciding what evil characters will do. If you're a powerful hero and villains are having a hard time dealing with you directly, villains will kidnap your significant other, threaten to burn down your child's school, harass your older sibling until they lose their job, read your younger sibling's mail, get your ex-significant other that you had a good relationship with into trouble with the law, etc.

Personally I find playing foreigners to work quite well. The PC is from so far away that NPCs can't realistically find his family, and my PC might lie about his family members (claiming his parents are dead when they're alive, or saying he has lots of siblings when he only has one, or even naming the village bully as his old best friend, etc). But in a well-played campaign, he'll make friends anyway, and they'll be vulnerable to the villains, so the problem is still there.

I'm not sure how well I'm getting my point across here, but I'm wondering if maybe I shouldn't be going for the kill a bit more. If it really is more fun for the players to have their characters killed off than to have them messed with, or even if that option is still really valid...

Killing is a "thin line". In most systems, it's hard to justify killing PCs unless there's been a TPK. You don't normally beat on an unconscious opponent without good reason (like you think the cleric is about to heal them). The DM feels like a bad guy if they have a villain do this anyway. Although it's easy to explain if it's an arena-trained brohg or a dumb hungry troll or some monster that would do this.

 

[eriktheguy]

I haven't had to kill of or debilitate any characters in my campaign. They seem to be okay with just having the fear of death put into them occasionally. Occasionally I kill of a PC when the player wants to make a new one. Other than that I only use a coup des grace when an intelligent monster realizes that the players are using healing, or when one has a particular hatred for a single PC. It still hasn't come up.

The only other causes of death I can think of are a particularly vicious trap, or a character getting singled out (assassination, ambush, etc).

 

[S'mon]

As a player, I don't like the feeling the DM is twisting game-reality to keep my PC alive. But nor do I like seeing the endless revolving door of PCs. Ideally the threat of PC permanent death should be real but rare, avoidable with reasonably skilled play and a little luck.

 

[fba827]

Let me start by saying that, as a DM, I do not like killing off PCs. I consider it one of my responsibilities to run a game where PCs can die, and to actually make it happen when circumstance, player action or inaction, and/or the dice dictate, but I do avoid it whenever I think that I can do so while still meeting that responsibility. This has come up in relation to a response I made in the thread lonebrendan started about his dead, petrified character('s finger).

Partly as a result of this I am a long-time fan of the idea that there are far more "entertaining" things that I can do to a player than to "simply" kill off their PC, and that killing PCs is even something of the "easy way out". I've never really wanted to put real fear into the players, that doesn't seem like fun. I don't want them to consider the threats in the imaginary world I've concocted to be "real" so much as get them to have their characters react to them as if they where real for them. And there are some threats that some players seem to feel are "worse than death" - like the idea that you'd rather lose a character and start over than be level-drained or lose a magic item, and that I just don't understand...

A lot of the "worse than death" stuff has come out of the game in newer editions. And this is at the same time that we've seen, IMO, a lessening of the problems that character death itself causes. And part of this is maybe a reaction to how some players respond to stuff outside their character sheet - players who, if the NPCs their character is attached to are threatened, make all new characters orphaned loners, rather than trying to defend them.

I'm not sure how well I'm getting my point across here, but I'm wondering if maybe I shouldn't be going for the kill a bit more. If it really is more fun for the players to have their characters killed off than to have them messed with, or even if that option is still really valid...

Here's the thing.. it all comes down to player preference and table preference...

I know several players who would rather have their PCs killed rather than lose a magic item. Why? They view magic items as part of the PC's customization and built the PC around it. It would be the same (or similar) as telling them tat they no longer get a class feature that they like to use. Take that away and they feel like they were just gimped out of their biggest strength.

However, I view it differently. I am as much a fan of PC evolution as I am of a PC at any given level. Thus, watching a PC lose his favored magic weapon results in the idea of adaption as to how the PC will evolve and adapt over the next level: does he try and find a replacement weapon of equal caliber? Does he refuse to use any other of that same type of weapon until he finds the original, and until then will try and use a new weapon type, and so on. So I find that sort of adaptive change, and seeing where the PC started from and where he ended, as much fun as playing at any particular moment.

Is either of these more right than the other? Na
Can they coexist at the same table? Sure, all it requires is the DM to recognize that everyone's definition of fun within the game is different.


So it's an individual thing and it's also dependent upon the type of tone/vibe you want at your game table.

 

[The Monster]

I'm a pretty soft GM, as my whole home group - it's been ages since we had a PC death (other than one-shot horror games). I find that killing PCs in a long campaign is hardly fun for anyone. I haven't played in a campaign where permanent/semi-permanent disabilities (amputations, level drains, etc.) figured in a very long time.

I can easily see the frame of mind where losing a level or some such can be very discouraging; it's effectively wiping out a fair amount of game and real time, as if it had never happened. In some campaigns,that's an understood risk, and if it happens regularly (i.e., I'm not the only one down a level), then maybe. But I doubt most players really like this sort of thing at all.

Severedhead's comments indicate an area where I think some kinds of GMs distort the situation - they use whatever means they see fit to threaten and harm the PC - so magic items get stolen/destroyed, background details lovingly created are turned into hostages, and so on. On one hand, yes, an evil plotter would do exactly these things; furthermore, these kinds of things are stock tropes in heroic fiction, to motivate and challenge the heroes. So they should be fair game, right?

Not so much. The problem is that players respond exactly as described in this thread: orphaned loners with no connection to the local adventure setting, taking extreme measures to protect property, and double-tapping all the villains to make sure they don't come back in the sequel. So instead of brave heroes, we get paranoid sociopathic bloodthirsty killers who really are in it only to kill critters and take stuff. Not good - not fun to play (for msot people most of the time, I'm pretty sure), and not fun for me (at least) to GM. It spoils the whole genre of heroic fantasy when the hero has no motivation but greed and power.

Items and background are and should be plot hooks, and GMs can and should use them. The problem is to use them just for that: to hook players into the plot, not to punish them. In the classic adventures stories, bad guys are always taking the prince/ss hostage and threatening to kill them; but they pretty much never do, no matter how smart or 'appropriate to evil' it would be to stab the victim as soon as the hero shows up at the Gates of Darkness. Heroes are always getting thrown in prison or slavery - but among the first things that happen are that they get or make an opportunity to escape, or make an effective appeal to justice - if it takes long, the time of imprisonment is handwaved in narrative. Of course, if there's a prison/arena subplot, that gets rolling and the hero does not *need* his special sword to succeed, and in addition, the escape attempt doesn't rely on the hero coming up with an elaborate escape plan (unless the story is abou a "smart hero!"), but taking advantage of things around him.

The point is, all these hooks and challenges and such are tools to move the story along, not to simply gimp the heros - and they should work that way in games as well. Contra to 'my character wouldn't know' that the magic items are coming back, or the disease will be cured, or the like, the player should be able to trust the GM enough to keep going (like heroes of all kinds always do) and that the situations to be faced will be suitable to the PC's new status (and, furthermore, that the underlying assumption all around is that things will turn out all right, barring truly unusual events). Of course, this requires that the GM be sensitive to the player's design, so that background hooks are not grossly violated nor simply used as excuses to punish. Well-developed background should be used to *reward* players, with both mechanical and fluff benefits, at least as often as they are used to provide hostages. After all, character background info is entirely at the grace of the player, who is bringing something to the game besides a buch of stats - that kind of offer to enhance the game ought to be regarded positively.

There's a lingering mindset, a sad legacy of earlier times, of player-versus-GM sentiment. One of the aspects of this mindset is precisely this sense that anything the GM can use should be used, to make the player's life harder; and the player must respond by carefully denying the GM any chance to pull a 'gotcha.' Frankly, it's one reason I quit D&D decades ago (I only came back a couple years ago) and played other stuff, where that 'gotcha' was much less prevalent. Both players and GMs need to work to overcome this attitude, in my opinion: the goal is to provide a fun time for everyone, and the toolbox for doing that is better if it includes background info and lingering effects.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I would have to say that a lot of things are worse than death also. DMs messing with my character, and possessions and backstory drives me nuts. A little is fine, in a more undirected way (an invasion of my kingdom, or a widespread disease) but not the villain knocking on my character's parent's door every few levels.

Overall, I do not want to get that immersed in the backstory for the game. Overall I do not want my character's backstory to end up reading like a real-life crime novel.

 

[roach570]

First off, hello all, New to this site, but long time player. I have been out of the game for nearly 2 years (graduated college and working in a machine shop leave little game time). I was going through the forums, and I happened across this thread. At first I thought it was going to be funny stories about DMs killing off players in humorous ways, but I read it more and I have to say that I think players shouldn't think that the DM won't kill them or let them die.. which is why I decided to throw in my 2 cents.

Sometimes the DM does not even need to try to kill off a player, sometimes they don't need the help. They can accomplish it all on their own.

One player "Joe" decided that beating on the door of a mage's cottage in the dead of night was the best way to get information.. then proceeding to kick the door down to beat the information out of him. He was met swiftly by a fireball which, having only a few life left from not healing after battles, caused him to die. So the cleric of the group decided to resurrect Joe.. without putting out the fire.

Joe( in another game with a different character) found a small cavern inside a cave the party was exploring. in the center of the cave, there was a longsword stuck through a wooden table. He proceeded to rush forth and grab the sword, greedy for the "cool sword." He lost the challenge against the being trapped in the sword. his team, from the safety of outside the cavern, unleashed two spells: Rain of Steel , and Wall of Stone (shaped to seal the only door into the cavern. Joe was trapped in the cavern as it filled with molten metal.

Joe still to this day blames the DM for his deaths...

 

[mneme]

The Monster: very nicely stated (grump: You must spread some xp around before giving it to the monster again)! Yes, it's important to play with the plot hooks players give, but overdo it and you're punishing them for leaving themselves vulnerable, and then nobody has any fun.

 

[S'mon]

Personally I'm far more likely to kill a PC, who after all is adventuring down deadly dungeons, than I am to have their non-adventuring friends & family threatened. That said, most players do create PCs whose family are distant or dead. And high level PCs who marry and start their own families typically have them installed in well-defended fortresses, I don't normally have these kidnapped or murdered by 25th level assassins unless there's a very good reason in game. And if I did do so I wouldn't handwave auto success to screw with the player; many or most such attempts fail, even 'offstage', IMCs. A baron PC who takes the same precautions a real life medieval baron would have had to, plus accounting for common magic, should be fine.

Example: In my 1e deity campaign with god-PC Thrin the Brave, following the Thrinian defeat of the Druagite dragon-riding Darksword Knights, the Darksword leader Lord Vorgrim survived and embarked on a vengeance campaign against Thrinia, using teleportation to launch lone-wolf assassination/massacres vs the Thrinians. I rolled these out; Vorgrim was a Fighter-20 and he killed a good number of low level Thrinian Clerics and a few leader types. Until one time he attacked a Clerical dormitory at night, a young Thrinian 1st level Cleric woke up and cast "Command" on him - and Vorgrim rolled a natural '1' on his saving throw. That was the end of arch-baddy Vorgrim, and Thrin's player Craig was very happy! All without Thrin himself ever being directly involved.