How often do characters die in your game?

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**Maelstrom808**

Crazy_Carnifex wrote:
I've found that the more effort I put into role playing a character and designing a background, the faster that character dies. The record holder has to have been one of my old human fighter (I forget the name). The guy loved wine, women, song... and the cash to get that. He also had a hair-trigger temper, but was overall a good guy who lived a life of crime due to circumstances out of his control. I also had an idea of how his character development could go.

He was introduced as being half of a smuggler team, who hired the PC's to help retrieve a stash of loot. halfway through a fight, I'm off doing fighter stuff, when my teammate double-crosses us, mugs the teams wizard, and steals all the loot. The Wizard then accuses my character of having robbed him. My character was already having a bad day (robbed by his only real friend), and didn't like the wizard anyways, so punches him (back) out. The cleric tries to lecture me, but my character mouths off at her before storming off. At this point, I'm thinking, "Hey, now I walk off. As the parties leaving, I'll come back, apologize, and offer to help them." Good idea, eh? Lays my character out perfectly, and gives me a reason to join the party (he has nothing left, and wants to apologize for his actions).

There's a problem though. The rogue decides to escalate the situation to include lethal force and starts shooting arrows at me. Naturally, I apply lethal force back. By this point, I've basically written the character off. The rest of the party beat me to death.

The end.

And they wonder why I laughed at the humiliating deaths of their character the next time I DM'ed.

Biggest contributing factors in PC death:

- Writing a nice fluffy background longer than 3 paragraphs
- Buying and painting a miniature specifically for that character
- Ribbing the DM about not killing one of your characters in awhile

**Alfndrate**

Surprisingly my current character has all of those things and he's harder to kill than the rogue he's replacing.

**loota boy**

Well, in the 4e DnD game i'm playing in, we've had two character deaths, but one of them was me intentionally having my character run over by a carriage because i was sick of him. However, almost ever encounter seems to result in most of the party bleeding out on the ground and unconscious until we somehow manage to win with the survivors and then heal the guys on the ground. The other character who died died last session just due to continuously bad rolls on his death saving throws, and my cleric rolling a natural 1 to heal him, so i tried to perform CPR through the gaping hole in his chest, directly onto his naked heart. The player is cool with it though, so we will make a new guy and introduce him next session. No res in the setting we are running.

Today, however i will be GMing my very first game of rogue trader. I plan on making combat quick and lethal, but i don't plan on wiping out everyone every session. Just want to make sure that they know humanity is very fragile in the grim darkness of the 41st millennial.

**imark789**

loota boy wrote:
Today, however i will be GMing my very first game of rogue trader. I plan on making combat quick and lethal, but i don't plan on wiping out everyone every session. Just want to make sure that they know humanity is very fragile in the grim darkness of the 41st millennial.

That's kind of the feel I want to give off to my players, but I'm never sure what's just too cruel. Let me know how your game/campaign goes!