He doesn’t require it but he rewards it with XP, so most people do it. My point is, if you spend time OOG writing these journals and stuff, you get more involved with your character and it’s more upsetting when he’s killed.
It’s good to see that most people agree with my philosophy, that PC death should be the result of flagrant stupidity on the part of the player or the character. When I’m GMing (or STing, whatever term you like), I feel it’s my responsibility to provide every oppportunity for the players to have a good time. Generally, they don’t have a good time when their character dies, although it can be fun to have them go out in a blaze of glory. Capping a character out of the blue is rough on everyone.
One thing we do is use action dice. Every player gets 3 six-sided action dice per session; the DM gets one per player, plus three (so if there are four players, the DM gets 7).
You can use them to:
-Add or subtract the result of a roll to any D20 roll (yours or anyone else’s);
-Automatically confirm a critical hit without rolling;
-Automatically turn someone’s roll of a 1 into a fumble of some sort; or
-Bend the rules in a cool way.
Players will often save their last action die of a session as a “get out of jail free” die: if something is about to kill them, they’ll either bend the rules in a cool way to avoid death, or they’ll add to their saving throw (or subtract from their opponent’s attack roll) to save their life.
It sounds like I kill PC’s more frequently than most DM’s here, but I don’t do it capriciously. I don’t tend towards “instant death” style traps or monsters and PC’s generally go out either through foolishness or bad luck. I also tend to create encounters that are harder than typical and give the PC’s the chance to sink, swim, or run away.
I will fudge dice to save a PC, especially I feel that I made the encounter too hard, but I won’t stoop to miracles or divine intervention. I like my game to have an edge. Oh, and ressurection magic is rare to non-existant, so dead tends to be dead.
On the other hand, as a player, I’ll just kill you if I feel like it.
Flutterby, your LARPing experiences with Vampire the Masquerade sounds just like mine. I got stuck sitting guarding a prisoner for my entire first LARP and then captured by four hunters (played by STs) in my second one. My third one I sat around waiting for one ST who was stuck in a two hour combat hold. I had no fourth one.
My last face-to-face gaming was done in a small group. We had a bunch of characters each and picked (or had one picked) for each game. There wasn’t much emotional attachment to them, more of a “well, I won’t get to play that guy again” should they get bumped off. Once the surviving players escaped, they radioed for help and the “dead” player picked another one of his characters as reinforcements. Death could happen at any time, so yes, the random bar fight could turn deadly if an otherwise pitiful enemy rolled spectacularly. If a player was about to do something really stupid I reminded him (“You just threw a grenade in there. You really want to go in?”), but if he went ahead it’s his own damnfool fault. We didn’t go for instant death traps unless there were several obvious warning signs (charred corpse lying in front of a door).
I once read a story about a girl who was so upset about the death of her character that she KILLED HERSELF! It was written by a highly respected author, Jack Chick. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?
gfloyd, I found Purgatory to be an excellent example of a game done well. It was amazing. I wan’t even part of the BIG plot, but I did have stuff going on. (Big Plot was basically the Inquisition is coming, we have the Lupines hanging around wanting some stuff and our Prince was killed going over the Channel to France to talk about what could be done. Lots of politicking and stuff. Sadly I moved about 3 months before the game ended and am no longer near enough to play the new version, which is set in Elizabethan England). The other game just sucked. I did go back a couple times, but it was mainly for the hanging out factor more than the game.
I never set out to kill a PC, and I was always more than lenient with interesting and well-played low-level characters (a Chaotic Neutral Fighter, if played strictly for the impulsive lunatic it is, would lose consciousness but would only die for reals if he was like, eaten or chopped in half by a trap designed for that purpose, etc.).
I had absolutely no reservation about horribly & permanently maiming PCs, however. I was especially nasty with traps, and always designed them with the goals of the trap setter in mind. If the NPC was concerned about thieves, for instance, traps might be a paper thin granite tile, indistinguishable from the rest of the floor, that covered a locking jaw trap. This once forced a 4th level assassin PC to choose amputation & survival over being eaten in place by critters.
The flip side of this is, my campaigns allowed for pretty much anything to be possible but proportionately difficult. For whatever reason the player wanted to keep her crippled assassin. She got creative when orchestrating her “hits” and by 6th level had enough cash set aside to commission a jeweled prosthetic foot with a few assassin/thief class-friendly extras (poison retractable claws, sticky sole, storage compartments for tools & special items, etc). 1 level later she had the thing permanently animated–it was a huge help for the PC and a really cool diversion from the typical list of artifacts & equipment.
