Player character mortality - Yay or Nay ?

[deaddmwalking]

I think that for the most part, PCs and monsters should use the same rules. I want to kill lichens, so liches must be able to be killed - especially if I am one myself. I want PCs to choose to play as an ogre and I want them to be able to kill ogres. Therefore ogres must be killable. If the PCs want to kill a lich, liches should be something that can be killed. If the PC plays a lich, it should still be something that can be killed.

[infected slut princess]

At this point, I think that "real" PC death{1} should be off the table unless that character's player explicitly decides it should happen at that time.

...

{1}: In this case, I mean a death that has the player sit off to the side and not play, not just, "everybody stops, retreats with the body, and gets the character rezzed"

This seems really arbitrary. I mean, if you get hit by a petrification attack, you might have to "sit off to the side and not play" for like 30 minutes. That's just as bad as death in the "not playing the game" category.

Sometimes bad things will happen to a character and they won't be able to do anything for X amount of time. You want the X value to be minimal, but sometimes it's hard to get around that and you have to improvise. You might let the player take over an NPC temporarily or maybe even join "Team DM" and control a monster or two.

[Kaelik]

I think that for the most part, PCs and monsters should use the same rules. I want to kill lichens, so liches must be able to be killed - especially if I am one myself. I want PCs to choose to play as an ogre and I want them to be able to kill ogres. Therefore ogres must be killable. If the PCs want to kill a lich, liches should be something that can be killed. If the PC plays a lich, it should still be something that can be killed.

You can kill a lich, just destroy his phylactery, but to do that to a PC, you would have to have know they were a lich and kill the entire team.

[PhoneLobster]

I think that for the most part, PCs and monsters should use the same rules.

Problem with risk equality argument.

Then the monsters should have the same rules for the potential difficulty of PC opponents they face as the PCs have for the difficulty of monsters they face.

50% death rates suck.

[shadzar]

What people do when a player character is killed ? No, seriously. What your group did when this happenned at your table ?

Was the dead character player invited to get da fuck off while the rest continue playing ?

Did the group stopped playing while the guy created another character rapidly ?

Did the GM let the guy assume some NPC until next session when the player could make a new character ?

Did the GM simply manipulated the dice roll for the guy not dying ?

What are your REAL experiences with this ?

1. loot the corpse
2. looted the corpse. brought the character back to life buck naked, as his possessions were not "willed" and used as expenses to bring them back.

3. they should be quiet to let the others present continue playing jsut as though they were in a split party, unlike the WotC game video where James Wyatt tries to get info from the other group while he was not with them. this gives the player time to either make a new character, or prepare for his backup character to be brought in at a proper point by the DM.

4. hell no! the game goes on, no new character will teleport in in the middle of a fight or some shit.

5. if there was an NPC that could be taken over for a short time, then they could have. most times they jsut wait until their backup character or new character could be brought in. no need to wait until a next session to cut another characters teeth on.

6. depends on the situation. if the DM dice are having a good night, then it violates randomness to much for enjoyment of all, so fudging in some cases happens. so to for bad player rolls. dice should not be used as an excuse to be a dick. if all is fair and randomness prevails.. the character died.

7. see above. also note this was NOT a game where it took 6 months to scour books for all kinds of piddly ass feats and other nonsense to make even a higher level character. a character could be made relatively quick and easy in about 10 minutes. usually the character is ready if a backup isnt present before the end of the next fight and can join after it. if not in combat area, then met at some tavern or mercantile sooner if it is ready at that time.

---

now i have a question(s)...

do people really only make a single character these days? do people not make several anymore with the one they want most being the one they try to play first, and the others they use for cases like this? maybe another wasnt approved because of X, but a little change and its ready to drop in at the next tavern. people really only have a single character to play in games these days and dont make others for "just in case"?

i ALWAYS have a character on me (on an index card), so in the event of a game i am ready to jump in with a few added details.

Character-on-a-Card(TM), never leave home without it! for everything else there is waiting and not playing.

[Ancient History]

I think that for the most part, PCs and monsters should use the same rules.

Problem with risk equality argument.

Then the monsters should have the same rules for the potential difficulty of PC opponents they face as the PCs have for the difficulty of monsters they face.

50% death rates suck.

Bullshit. Same rules does not mean the challenge is the same for all. You and Historical Footnote Romney share the same physics engine, but obviously Mittens has a comparative advantage in terms of wealth. That is okay. People hunt dragons because they're deadly. But what's good for the dragon should be good for the player characters - if an NPC drops a Hackmaster +12, then the PCs should be able to pick it up and stab-stab-stab the fucking shit out of people with it. That's the beginning and the end of fair play and a unified ruleset. NPC-only items and classes are annoying and suggest that the gamemaster is incompetent.

[RadiantPhoenix]

At this point, I think that "real" PC death{1} should be off the table unless that character's player explicitly decides it should happen at that time.

...

{1}: In this case, I mean a death that has the player sit off to the side and not play, not just, "everybody stops, retreats with the body, and gets the character rezzed"

This seems really arbitrary. I mean, if you get hit by a petrification attack, you might have to "sit off to the side and not play" for like 30 minutes. That's just as bad as death in the "not playing the game" category.

Sometimes bad things will happen to a character and they won't be able to do anything for X amount of time. You want the X value to be minimal, but sometimes it's hard to get around that and you have to improvise. You might let the player take over an NPC temporarily or maybe even join "Team DM" and control a monster or two.

I have proposed a solution for this, cribbed from another game:
Explicitly give the PCs abilities they can use when they are otherwise unable to take actions.

[Dogbert]

I've always wondered: when people say 'PCs should only involuntarily die if they're doing stupid things' what exactly do they mean by that?

"Doing stupid things" = not reading the GM's mind.

That line is a favorite among crap GMs who either fail to inform their players of their game's genre conventions or for whom every single challenge has to be a bottleneck with one and only one solution.

That takes me back to my days suffering a Star Wars game in a table full of SW fanboys... the experience alienated me from all things SW for years.

[Dean]

^Exactly. Death as a punishment for stupidity is from the language of ShitDMing. In english it roughly means "I'm a huge cock who runs a game that acts as my power fantasy". The death as punishment argument has been beaten enough to be dismissed.

The idea that games need loss or death in order to be games is also wrong. Minecraft is a game, children's imaginary games are games. There are many games that are made to have win and loss conditions but it is not a requirement and it does not categorically makes games better. Minecraft would definitely be worse if you could lose all your mans and would have to restart your world.

I personally desire a massively unlikely death option with many warnings in a game like D&D. I think that would benefit the game the most. But a game with no death option would be preferable to the current paradigm of everyone lying about their games having a death option when it doesn't.

[PhoneLobster]

Bullshit.

Everything you just said remains entirely consistent with an argument for the introduction of similar risk rates for NPCs and PCs of the same levels.

You need to actually present an equality argument that somehow differentiates between risk rates, where you clearly don't want equality and other areas where you do demand equality.

Your current argument does not.

It's not surprising really because actually "hackmaster +12 means the same thing for PCs/NPCs" and "Death Means the same thing for PCs/NPCs" is actually a LONGER stretch than "Death based defeat risks are the same for PCs/NPCs" and "risks of defeat states are the same for PCs/NPCs". You are going to need a REALLY subtle differentiation to drive a wedge between those two equality goals with your current direction of argument.

You aren't managing it. Not even close.

[PoliteNewb]

What people do when a player character is killed ? No, seriously. What your group did when this happenned at your table ?

Typically, they hang around, eat snacks, and watch the rest of the play session...because they are still a part of the group, even if there guy is dead, and have some sort of emotional investment in the outcome of the adventure. Only very rarely do they re-enter play during the same session with a new character (and usually, it's simply taking over an NPC who was already present, if that was viable).

This is for my gaming group, which was composed of all my high school/college buddies, where we all knew and liked each other and hung around together whether or not we were playing D&D. This may be different for other types of groups.

Now, I mostly game online. When people die in a PbP, they either fuck off (happened a few times) or they lurk until they make up a new character and a good point occurs for their re-entry. Several of my players are involved in multiple PbPs simultaneously, so they have something going on somewhere all the time.

[Ancient History]

Bullshit.

Everything you just said remains entirely consistent with an argument for the introduction of similar risk rates for NPCs and PCs of the same levels.

By "risk rates" you mean "At CR == Character Level, then there is a 50% chance of PCs dying." This is not even the same conversation as PCs and NPCs using the same rules.

Here's what I call equality. There is a weapon called a sword. It deals 1d6 + Str damage. No matter who swings it. No matter what swings it. Balrog, human, disembodied tentacle penis, anything, if it swings the sword, it deals 1d6 + Str damage. That's using the same ruleset. If you have a world where the PC swords only do 1d4 + Str and they can't even pick up the Orc swords that do 1d6 + Str, that's bullshit and bad game design.

You're saying equality but what you mean is lethality, and lethality depends entirely on the type of game you're playing. In a gritty game, then yes the orcs have an equal chance of killing you as you do of them. The dragon has a much better chance of killing you than you do killing it. In other games, the PCs might be more than a match for an army of orcs. That doesn't mean the game is broken, or that the PCs and the orcs aren't playing by the same ruleset - there's nothing stopping the gamemaster from bringing in a party of Orc NPCs that can rout an army of humans, either.

And I'll admit, lethality can be a hard balance to strike for gamemasters - D&D was infamous for its glass ninjas. You add in linear warriors/quadratic wizards and it gets almost impossible to manage, and the bizarre CR ratings in D&D3.+ don't always help. This makes the gamemaster's job harder because they want to present a challenge that the PCs can overcome (or, less likely, run away from) while still retaining some degree of difficulty. Nobody wants to go back to the days of Gygaxian save-or-instadeath.

But neither does anybody want the bullshit in D&D4 where the Celestial Goblin you summon with magic doesn't have the same stats as the Celestial Goblin you fight in the Seven Heavenly Warrens, or the same stats as the Celestial Goblin summoned by the Exalted Hob-Magi. The whole reason you have stats is to give some sort of structure to the game, the whole reason you have dice is to add in an element of random chance. If you have multiple different Celestial Goblin stats, then you're unnecessarily bloating and confusing the rules with special cases (and probably shortchanging somebody somewhere), and if you don't let the dice fall where they may then you're just playing magical teaparty and who the fuck gives a shit what it says on your character sheet?

[Dean]

we all knew and liked each other and hung around together whether or not we were playing D&D.

You still must be aware that it is a good game design goal to minimize the amount of time your game forces people to stop playing your game.

[fectin]

we all knew and liked each other and hung around together whether or not we were playing D&D.

You still must be aware that it is a good game design goal to minimize the amount of time your game forces people to stop playing your game.

You said minimize, but I think you meant optimize.
Unless you mean to suggest that the single most important aspect of game design is ensuring that everyone is acting at all times?

[PoliteNewb]

we all knew and liked each other and hung around together whether or not we were playing D&D.

You still must be aware that it is a good game design goal to minimize the amount of time your game forces people to stop playing your game.

Actually no, I don't agree with that...at least not that it is objectively good design. That would mean that a game without character death ever is objectively better than a game that allows character death, and I don't believe that is true.

Instead, it is a slider, where you have to weigh what you get out of characters dying (more verisimilitude, feeling of higher stakes, being HARDCORE, etc) against what you lose by sitting out of part of a session (and how frequently that occurs)...and that sets your "minimum" for time you have to stop playing the game.

Me personally? The amount of times I had to "stop playing D&D" because I died are incredibly minor when simply compared to the number of times I had to stop playing because of real life, lack of sleep, or lack of players. Not to mention, some of the down time from character death (having to make a new character) can coincide with other downtime.

The fact that characters sometimes die does not significantly impact the amount of hours I devote to playing D&D, so for me it is a relatively negligible concern. If death was more frequent, or character creation more onerous, or the time between sessions much shorter, I might feel differently.

Another way to look at it is to ask how you define "playing the game"; for many people, sitting and watching a game of D&D (or Axis & Allies, or chess, for that matter) is just as entertaining as playing, so it's not like that time is wasted. For some, sitting at the table with their buddies during a game is part of "playing D&D". For others, apparently, only time spent actively controlling a PC is actually "playing".

[ubernoob]

we all knew and liked each other and hung around together whether or not we were playing D&D.

You still must be aware that it is a good game design goal to minimize the amount of time your game forces people to stop playing your game.

You said minimize, but I think you meant optimize.
Unless you mean to suggest that the single most important aspect of game design is ensuring that everyone is acting at all times?

You still must be aware that it is a good game design goal to minimize the amount of time your game forces people to stop playing your game.

Emphasis mine. Things that disrupt immersion are bad. Being dead and unable to act for a large portion of the time you have slotted to "pretend to be an elf" disrupts immersion.

[K]

I think that for the most part, PCs and monsters should use the same rules. I want to kill lichens, so liches must be able to be killed - especially if I am one myself. I want PCs to choose to play as an ogre and I want them to be able to kill ogres. Therefore ogres must be killable. If the PCs want to kill a lich, liches should be something that can be killed. If the PC plays a lich, it should still be something that can be killed.

That's circular reasoning.

Second, liches are very specifically things that cannot be killed without DM fiat. A player choosing to play one is making a clear request that this "death bullshit" that you've been doing is something that he wants no part of.

[tussock]

What people do when a player character is killed ? No, seriously. What your group did when this happenned at your table ?

Wow. People out there really haven't ever killed characters. It's almost surreal.

1: There is a game in session, it will continue. They're not all dead. Yet.
2: People do often have some ideas for other characters they want to play, and one character dying is an opportunity for that. Dice right there, and stuff.
3: There is always an opportunity to take on playing something else immediately if a new character is not desirable. Monsters, NPCs, hirelings, the pack mule, whatever. I quite enjoy when players switch teams when they lose a character: it's cathartic.

4: If you want to sulk, go sulk. See #1. People have all sorts of reactions, but it's fine and well to be sad for a bit when sad things happen to you.

5: I did once have someone stalk me for a couple weeks, in the bushes and shit, with ideas of "talking to me" about what was real and what wasn't, in the game, or something, but then he got back on his meds and all was well, last I heard.


REALLY. It can be a kick in the nuts to lose a character, sure, but it also sucks to retire them, have games just die off, have DMs want to switch to something new, or all the other reasons you eventually have to stop playing your current favourite. Dog knows I've lost more characters to eternal-postponement limbo than I've lost to proper monsters and traps.

[Fuchs]

REALLY. It can be a kick in the nuts to lose a character, sure, but it also sucks to retire them, have games just die off, have DMs want to switch to something new, or all the other reasons you eventually have to stop playing your current favourite. Dog knows I've lost more characters to eternal-postponement limbo than I've lost to proper monsters and traps.

That's a reason against character death.

[deaddmwalking]

Fortunately, I don't have players (nor am I a player) who wants death taken off the table. I play more than a DM, so I don't think this is totally a power-tripping fantasy on my part.

I absolutely agree that 3.x run RAW is too lethal. The difference between walking around with 1 hit point but being fully effective and being dead at -10 hit points is often literally impossible to avoid with the kind of damage being thrown about. 'Solutions' like death at negative Con hardly address the issue, either.

Our group takes care of it in two ways. You have two pools of hit points - Vitality (which comes back in the course of hours and represents things like a blow being negated by armor - a bruise, not a cut) and Wound Points (which actually can kill you). When you run out of Vitality, you take penalties to actions, so usually getting out of the fight at that point is a good idea. If you continue fighting without Vitality, every time you're hit you risk falling unconscious. When you run out of Wound Points you make a save or die effect, but you can use a Fate Point to automatically succeed. Every time you're hit with 0 WP, this happens again.

In our games, we don't have people saying 'he's at -2, it's okay to spend 5 more rounds in combat before he bleeds out' which was a problem in 3.x.

But there are a lot of things that 'interrupt' play. I want to be able to petrify opponents. Opponents have access to the same tools. Therefore, I expect some opponents to be able to petrify me.

I think you can minimize character death without getting rid of it. Getting rid of it completely is contrary to the experience we desire. If you knew you were truly immortal, there'd be no reason NOT to wade into the middle of an army of orcs - we want a game where a high level character is potent but can be overwhelmed by superior numbers - where heroes bring their own army to avoid losing via the numbers game.

[Fuchs]

If a player cannot play a character as fearing death despite knowing character death is not on the table then that's not a player I want at my table.

[Kaelik]

If you knew you were truly immortal, there'd be no reason NOT to wade into the middle of an army of orcs - we want a game where a high level character is potent but can be overwhelmed by superior numbers - where heroes bring their own army to avoid losing via the numbers game.

I think you are strangely a slave to specific genre conventions that I don't want in my games. I never play D&D characters who give any fucks about invading Kobold Warrens full of level 1 Kobolds or who bring armies to deal with that. A single powerful individual being beaten by an army of weaker fuckers is not something that people want death to actually be an option for.

[deaddmwalking]

If a player cannot play a character as fearing death despite knowing character death is not on the table then that's not a player I want at my table.

I think double-think is hard. It's easier to pretend that something exists when it exists. If your rules don't support the playstyle you like, you may want to consider changing the rules. I imagine that given no chance of death 'excessive risks' would start to creep into the game. Which is fine if that's what you want... But if you want (or more importantly, if the players want) a system that feels like death is a real possibility for failure, that will tend to encourage somewhat more cautious play.

I consider it a sliding scale - make death too easy (which 3.x RAW does) and it's bad. Make death impossible, and it's bad. Make death a real (remote) possibility with multiple chances to negate it and I don't have a problem.

[Omegonthesane]

If you knew you were truly immortal, there'd be no reason NOT to wade into the middle of an army of orcs - we want a game where a high level character is potent but can be overwhelmed by superior numbers - where heroes bring their own army to avoid losing via the numbers game.

I think you are strangely a slave to specific genre conventions that I don't want in my games. I never play D&D characters who give any fucks about invading Kobold Warrens full of level 1 Kobolds or who bring armies to deal with that. A single powerful individual being beaten by an army of weaker fuckers is not something that people want death to actually be an option for.

Depends on genre, depends on game. For SIFRP I'd be very disappointed if the rules didn't support swamping a stronger foe with superior numbers. For D&D, or WoD, less so - if a mob of level (Me)-2 isn't a threat then something's gone wrong, but once you ding level 9 or so, there isn't meant to be an amount of level 0 Kobolds who can wear you down over an arbitrarily long period.

[Fuchs]

If a player cannot play a character as fearing death despite knowing character death is not on the table then that's not a player I want at my table.

I think double-think is hard. It's easier to pretend that something exists when it exists. If your rules don't support the playstyle you like, you may want to consider changing the rules. I imagine that given no chance of death 'excessive risks' would start to creep into the game. Which is fine if that's what you want... But if you want (or more importantly, if the players want) a system that feels like death is a real possibility for failure, that will tend to encourage somewhat more cautious play.

I consider it a sliding scale - make death too easy (which 3.x RAW does) and it's bad. Make death impossible, and it's bad. Make death a real (remote) possibility with multiple chances to negate it and I don't have a problem.

That sort of double-think is actually a minimum requirement for me to play with someone. I've played with a guy who could not do it in the past, and I won't Play with him again.

Also, I have seen what I do when cautious play is "encouraged", and it's not a playstyle I like.