Me, my girlfriend, and a group of our mutual friends have been running an awesome D&D campaign weekly since March. Three of the guys are very experienced players. I’m less experienced, but holding my own well. My girlfriend has no D&D experience and has been, for lack of a nicer term, dead weight on the party.
She very much enjoys combat, however, combat only comprises about 20-25% of the entire campaign. She’s very bored while we do the roleplaying and planning stuff, to the point that she falls asleep. While the rest of our characters have individual goals we’re pursuing, she pretty much just goes with whatever the party’s doing.
She’s bored and frustrated, and part of her frustration is that she doesn’t really understand the rules. I’ve tried to get her to read the PHB, but she says it’s dry and boring. It’s also been taking some fun out for everyone else because we have to show her how to add up her attack rating and damage every time her round comes up, plus remind her to roll Sneak Attack damage. She feels like no one in the group listens to her, but when we ask her opinion, she gives the standard answer, “Let me think about it a little bit.” She also doesn’t really understand how to roleplay. She’s not putting herself in the plot situations.
She doesn’t want to admit to the rest of the group that she’s bored and quit because she feels she doesn’t get to see our friends enough.
We’ve tried to give her several plot hooks to engage her even more, even setting up some personal side-quests for her. She hasn’t bitten any of them yet. The DM and I are going to make one last attempt to engage her. I am writing her a custom prestige class based on what she’s interested in (combat, strength, and leadership) and we are adjusting the plot slightly to give her a leadership task, earning her the prestige class if she completes it successfully. All that revolves around her taking the plot hook, though.
Here’s my question: If she doesn’t take the hook, I suggested to the DM that he just kill character her off in combat. She goes into negative HP pretty much every fight, and he’s avoided killing her off every time (at one point she should have been dead, but he let her live, unbeknownst to her). Is this a nasty thing to do to my girlfriend? If the DM kills her off and gives her the option to reroll, chances are she’ll decline. This’ll save her from having to admit she’s bored, and will save the rest of the group from asking her to bow out, which they’re getting closer and closer to doing. We can always store her spirit in the outer planes for resurrection later if she reads the books and gets more engaged.
Sorry this was kinda long. Thoughts?