Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

[runescience]

PC deaths are usually reflected by the campaign type, or how DUMB the PC's are, or a number of other factors.

 

As a GM or player: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

[John Desmarais]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

PC deaths are usually reflected by the campaign type, or how DUMB the PC's are, or a number of other factors.

 

As a GM or player: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

If you die, you die - but it hardly ever happens in my games.

[Diamond Spear]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

PC deaths are usually reflected by the campaign type, or how DUMB the PC's are, or a number of other factors.

 

As a GM or player: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

For more realistic/gritty games I dislike killing PCs due to random rolls in meaningless encounters. I have no problem killing PCs as a consequence of thier actions becasue either A) such action was ill advised (or outright stupid) and they'll be more careful next time or such action was heroic or plot apropriate and they will be rewarded for it anyway. I also let my players know up front what the score is.

 

For more cinimatic/heroic games PC death is very rare and almost always has player approval.

[MorpheousXO]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

I'd rather not kill the characters in a random way. If they are stupid and piss off the uber-dragon when they KNEW it was the uber-dragon, then they get what they deserve.

 

Only had one accidental PC death and it was my fault. Vampire: The Masquerade. Misjudged an opponents health levels and combat skills in a one on one fight. Fortunately the player was getting bored of the character anyway (which reminds me of another player who got bored with his characters quite often and did things to get his character killed so he could make a new one...). Anyways, would never be adverse to a PC making a sacrifice. He most certainly would be getting to make a new character at his old one's level of experience (unless he wanted a lower powered one for some reason).

 

I've learned from my own playing experience that the threat of death and almost dying is quite fun and exhilerating... and odd sometimes... when the party sorcerer is somehow the only one standing at the end of the fight (with 1 hp) and has to make a bunch of Heal rolls with only his Wis mod.

[Curufea]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

Mostly when the player wants to kill their PC. When they want a new PC, or want a particularly story relevant death.

[Killer Shrike]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

Depends on the grittiness of the campaign. In the last fantasy campaign I ran, Clutching Nine Arrows, of nine starting PC's, four survived to the end. The most that ever died in one single session was 3 but seemed to be 5 (one PC went missing and was thought to be dead when the player left the group to go out of the country for a while but I appropriated the character for my own purposes, and another PC seemed to be dead but wasn't quite and survived against all odds -- in both cases the players all believed the characters were in fact dead, making it a very bloody session with 3 remaining from the original 9). The two thought-to-be-dead characters returned to the group later, and the NPC one died heroically the same session. Of new PC's that later joined the group, only one died.

 

It really depends on how common resurrection is, in inverse proportion. If it is common, character death is largely meaningless and thus isnt a useful drama tool -- it doesnt enhance the story in any way, its just an annoyance. Thus I rarely bother with it. If death is more final, it has greater meaning, and thus has more potential to enrich the campaign when used appropriately.

[Old Man]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

I like to use two PCs per player, so that the player isn't out of the game when a PC takes a bad hit. And there is no resurrection, ever.

 

Wear a helmet.

[tkdguy]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

I don't remember any of the PCs dying in the games I played. Of course, the GM usually ran a Champions campaign.

 

The FH campaign I started running didn't last long, but there would have been no resurrection (or any other kind of magic). Still, I wasn't going to kill off the PCs that easily. The first session could have ended in a TPK, but I didn't want to scare off players new to the HERO system.

[Fitz]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

So far, in my present campaign arc, about five or six characters (out of a party of five) have died permanently. Most of them are the same player though, so I don't know how that skews the stats.

 

I keep being surprised by the resilience of PCs; time and again I've been sure I was heading towards a TPK and had nobody die at all. I have to resist the urge to keep ramping up the danger level out of sheer pique

[Guest steamteck]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

I very rarely have PC death. The only times I can remember it was voluntary heroic acts after I gave the "so you're running stark naked screaming at the machine gun nest" speech.

One I remember was a ninja who dropped his guard and struck simultaneously against a superior swordsman so he could kill him. Another was a a female samurai whom the villain tried to kidnap with a knife to her throat. There was super who rather than get medical attention bleed to death so he could get the bad guy. Stuff like that.

 

Early in my groups gaming career death was cheap though. Back college in late 70s and early 8o's we would have several characters rolled up ahead "just in case" and their were often multiple deaths nightly. As our characters became more detailed and "real" fatality decreased until now hardly ever. Some characters are now over two real time decades old of pretty much continuous play..

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

I don't kill a PC unless the player comes to me and says "I want to kill off this character". If a PC becomes an NPC (due to the player moving away) then they are fair game.

 

The last Fantasy Hero game I ran lasted 7 years. If you spend that much time investing in a character, I see no point in character death.

 

To much of the "If you are stupid you die" approach comes from D&D and the adversarial mode of GMing - and that is one of the reasons I stopped playing D&D and started playing (and GMing) Hero, to get away from that.

 

 

In all my years as a GM, I am proud to say, I have never killed a PC.

 

By tone I like swashbuckling action adventure, and if a character does die, there is always a way to bring them back; might be a bit of a convoluted plot though.

[sinanju]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

PC deaths are usually reflected by the campaign type, or how DUMB the PC's are, or a number of other factors.

 

As a GM or player: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

Not surprisingly, it depends on the game. And it can change over time even within a campaign. When I first started gaming (with Steamteck back in Virginia in 1977) we had a horrifying death rate. One player routinely started EVERY GAME SESSION with at least half a dozen pre-generated characters on index cards. As each character died, he handed Steamteck the next one. Admittedly, he was a special case--his characters in particular tended to die like flies. But we all went through characters like kleenex.

 

But eventually we began to invest more time and care in creating characters (and Steamteck invested more time and care in the game world). We began to realize that it was possible for characters to retire rather than die in harness. Characters died less frequently and tended to live a lot longer. By the time I left Virginia for Oregon characters seldom died, and usually only if it was a deliberate choice by the player.

 

Here in Oregon, I played for years with a bunch of rules-lawyering power gamers; the group consensus was that "he who lives by the dice shall die by the dice." We pushed the rules as far as we possibly could--but in the end, if the dice went against you, or your character did something stupid, you died. C'est la vie.

 

The group I gamed with after that, mostly here at home, was different. Characters seldom died, and--as in Steamteck's game--generally only when character stupidity or player choice caused it.

 

Both approaches are valid. It just depends on what you want from your gaming experience.

[Alibear]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

I really can't remeber when the last player actually lost a character in game..

 

There has been loads of really close calls but no fatalities.

[Markdoc]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

It happens rarely in my games, but there's no resurrection, so when it happens, that's it.

 

We did have a near one several sessions ago, which illustrates how it can happen, though: the PCs are hunting a shapeshifting monster that has ensorcelled half the men in the town, seduced half the women and eaten a fair number of children. They finally corner it in a basement, but it manages to surprise them anyway and get behind one player with a sword pointed at his back. It then demands it be allowed to escape or it'll run him through (he has armour, but the tip of the blade is resting on an unarmoured bit).

 

The player shouts "Kill her anyway" and tries to jump away - even though warned by me that it has him covered - and takes a sword in the neck. I roll the dice out in the open for everyone to see, to make it plain that this one is serious. As it happened, the player goes down squirting blood everywhere but with the help of the healers he survives. But it could easily have been a heroic death.

 

So ... I try to avoid PC death, but not to the point where death loses its sting.

 

cheers, Mark

[Alibear]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

The closet I had was when the 125ish point total PC's go hunting a man-eating lion in waist high grass. In it's feeding ground. At NIGHT!!

 

One lad just about had his arm ripped off and another, the healer, ended up at -9 body before he was stabilised.

[Guest steamteck]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

It happens rarely in my games, but there's no resurrection, so when it happens, that's it.

 

We did have a near one several sessions ago, which illustrates how it can happen, though: the PCs are hunting a shapeshifting monster that has ensorcelled half the men in the town, seduced half the women and eaten a fair number of children. They finally corner it in a basement, but it manages to surprise them anyway and get behind one player with a sword pointed at his back. It then demands it be allowed to escape or it'll run him through (he has armour, but the tip of the blade is resting on an unarmoured bit).

 

The player shouts "Kill her anyway" and tries to jump away - even though warned by me that it has him covered - and takes a sword in the neck. I roll the dice out in the open for everyone to see, to make it plain that this one is serious. As it happened, the player goes down squirting blood everywhere but with the help of the healers he survives. But it could easily have been a heroic death.

 

So ... I try to avoid PC death, but not to the point where death loses its sting.

 

cheers, Mark

 

 

That's almost exactly like my female samurai hostage incident except she got her heroic death. ( But her daughter lived on and became another PC for my wife down the road.)

[tancred]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

I keep being surprised by the resilience of PCs; time and again I've been sure I was heading towards a TPK and had nobody die at all. I have to resist the urge to keep ramping up the danger level out of sheer pique

 

Amen, brother!

I've only ever killed one PC.

That one was in a Traveller game, 27 years ago. The players were investigating the Ringworld. The PC flew over a field of sunflowers, in daylight. (Somebody HAD to die.) And the player was getting bored with the character anyway. He wound up happier, with a new character.

[Nolgroth]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

In my latest and greatest, I don't recall any mortality on the character side. One lost an arm that had to be surgically reattached. He's just now recovering from the worst of that. Another was mildly burned. A few cuts and scrapes.

 

Then again, as a HERO GM, I am still getting my "system legs." I didn't want to start off with a TPK and adjust downward. I'd rather start small and work upwards in lethality.

 

In previous campaigns, it was uncommon, but character death happened. Because it was uncommon, when a character died, we all felt that the situation had been especially tough. If characters died once a week, character death would have become as meaningless as if they never died or could easily be resurrected. There is a happy spot in there. It just varies for each group.

[Cancer]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

It's been a while since we've had a PC death. I think it's only happened when GM and/or player are new to a system so one or both don't have a handle on lethality of certain combinations.

 

In general, it's a traumatic event. In general we have no resurrections or return from the dead (unless that is a significant feature of the game-world, as in Deadlands), though a dead character has, rarely, been used as an NPC information source via a seance or some such game-world-relevant thing.

[S. John Ross]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

As a GM or player: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

Varies a lot by genre and subgenre for me, but in most of my standard fantasy runs, there's probably a PC death every 5-15 sessions. I can't nail it down to a tighter range than that, since so much depends on how the players approach things.

 

In fantasy campaigns, I see a TPK maybe once every 1-6 years on average. I see more TPKs than that in other genres, but I run a lot of games (like Fly From Evil, for example) where there's no such thing as a healing spell and there _is_ such thing as a Tommy Gun, so there's that.

 

That's as a GM. As a player, it all rolls down into "I want my choices to have meaning in the context that they're made, and if that means I get killed, then that's what it should mean." The most cheated I've ever felt as a player was when my character risked everything in a very foolhardy move, and ... as far as I'm concerned anyway ... earned himself a fairly fiery and inglorious (though not ineffective) death. And the GM "let" him live. The character never felt legit to me after that, and I got the GM's permission to have him wander offscreen and be replaced with a different PC, a few sessions later.

 

As both a player and a GM, I enjoy games best when there is no conflation between the success of the players and the success of the characters. A kick-ass session can be one where the quest is failed or gets set back, or even gets lost entirely. Similarly, a very drab session can be one where everything goes "perfectly." I think I became liberated as a gamer some years ago, when certain RPGs and campaigns taught me the value (the power, even) of keeping myself in character, but still cleanly separating the character's successes as an adventurer from my own successes as a roleplayer, tactician, puzzle-solver or shameless ham.

[Blue Jogger]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

I came close one time.

 

We had a house rule, you could wield as much damage as you wanted to take. The fighters foolishly took 6D6 RKA weapons (great sword, STR minimums, inhuman STR, plus Fatal Blow x2).

 

After a few combats of, "Splat, that monster's toast", they had a combat with what they thought were orcs, but was really a mental illusion design to attack each other.

 

The fighters both took each other's 6D6 blow, against 10 resistant defense. Luckily, I did not use hit location, because head shot would have been nearly an instant kill.

 

They complained bitterly over that one.

[CrosshairCollie]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

My general mortality rate is 'almost never'. It pretty much has to be a voluntary "I die to complete this plot point" sort of thing, or complete and total stupidity.

 

The high PC lethality rate is actually my biggest issue with D&D/d20. It's nearly impossible (barring houseruling or DM fiat) to deal the PCs a defeat without killing them, or blatantly doing so. It can be patched with houserules, of course, but that shouldn't really be necessary.

 

HERO, on the other hand, already has a very simple way to deal a knockout instead of a kill; Normal Damage weapons and spells. Heck, on those rare occassions I actually get to play, I always default to a N-damage weapon because it's just THAT MUCH easier to KO than kill.

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

The high PC lethality rate is actually my biggest issue with D&D/d20. It's nearly impossible (barring houseruling or DM fiat) to deal the PCs a defeat without killing them, or blatantly doing so. It can be patched with houserules, of course, but that shouldn't really be necessary.

 

HERO, on the other hand, already has a very simple way to deal a knockout instead of a kill; Normal Damage weapons and spells. Heck, on those rare occassions I actually get to play, I always default to a N-damage weapon because it's just THAT MUCH easier to KO than kill.

 

One of my major reasons from switching from D&D to Hero.

[runescience]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

"seduced half the women and eaten a fair number of children??" did the monster at least cook them first?

[Markdoc]

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate?

 

"seduced half the women and eaten a fair number of children??" did the monster at least cook them first?

 

Nope - likes 'em all warm and wiggly

 

Short recap. The creature in question was a lamia (in my game, just one of many names for a seductive vampiric creature: they come in a variety of types/forms). Most of them have shapeshifting/illusory powers and this one was no exception. The problem is - for a vampiric creature - that the people you snack on, die after a while. Meaning you have to find a new host, deal with people finding the bodies, etc etc.

 

This particular creature had found what it thought was a solution. It landed in a small, isolated town and instead of taking a single host, it took many (as many as it could reasonably hold enchanted at one time). That way, it was able to feed regularly, but without killing any one host. When it feeds, the victim sees wondrous dreams (mind control/mental illusions) and simpy wakes up tired, after what they think is a bout of intense dreaming. Since the creature is a shapeshifter, it has no gender as such - it fed on (and seduced) both men and women and (ahem!) satisfied other appetites with them as well. That way it not only got a host of willing victims, but victims who were prepared to arrange a secretive "tryst" where the Lamia could feed at leisure (and moreover victims who would actively obstruct any attempt to investigate exactly what they had been up to). The small kids, on the other hand were just an annoyance - so it fed on them until they died, and then dropped the bodies down an abandoned mineshaft.

 

The players worked out pretty rapidly that something was amiss - a side effect of the Lamia's kiss and the dreams is the awakening of intense creativity (a small transform which swaps some BOD for creative skills). So they found this isolated mining town possessed a swarm of creative types who had formerly been miners, nightsoil collectors, etc, but they didn't know exactly what was going on.

 

They actually encountered the Lamia, but via mixture of very minor illusions and some mind control, she was able to talk the players out of attacking her - and almost convince the players that maybe she wasn't an evil monster after all. At that point they didn't know about the kids, nobody (as far as the PCs knew) had died, all her apparent "victims" were voluble in her defence, they enjoyed their new creativity. She even seduced and fed on one of the PCs, who was pleased to get a new skill apparently for free (the BOD loss was totally invisible, so he didn't know that part )

 

Eventually, at a dead end, they went to see a witch, and one of the players made a terrible bargain with her in exchange for charms that protected them from enchantment magic (and broke the enchantment on the PC who was still enchanted). They went back looking for the lamia and in their hunt for her found the remains of the kids - at which point, they went straight to combat mode, when they found it. Unfortunately they only killed one of its charmed "lovers" instead (the Lamia switched their forms via an illusion and got out of there). The lamia hid in the town, intending to come out at night, charm one of the PCs and get him to lead the rest into a trap, but it didn't know one of the players has a magical talent that lets him find people. So the players tracked it down and the scene I mentioned first ensued. The character who got stabbed was willing to take the risk of being killed because of the murdered babies.

 

I've skimmed over a lot but the basic idea behind that scenario is that it started off slightly whimsical, with lots of red herrings that turned out to be nothing, but with more and more clues that something was seriously wrong - but the PCs couldn't get anyone in authority to take drastic action, because none of the clues by themselves meant very much. Then the last session (the scenario ran for 4 sessions) ended with the discovery of the bodies, a search of the town and the discovery of many missing children - and a few other unsavoury details - and the reallisation that when they had last faced the creature, that they had let it go. At that point the mood had changed from "whimsical adventure" to "horror" and the players were ready to do whatever it took to send this creature to hell.

 

cheers, Mark