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When I'm running games, I try not to kill a character if I can avoid it. In most cases a death is pointless to the character, and the party actually benefits in the long run. If the average wealth of a character is 5 thousand gold, and he dies with around that much or less, the player has the party split the gear amongst themselves and the player makes a new character at level.

So I've made resurrections cheaper (since that's a big reason for people not bringing their characters back), and after the first adventure, I tell all my players that there must be a good story reason for your character to not come back.

In the pathfinder games I'm in, death is apparently more common, and in one game a lot more permanent. I'm level 2 in one game, I'm at 5 hp, our party has no heals left and we're in a big, major fight that we should have been given rest before. When I brought this up to the DM, he said, "You all knew that you could easily become smudges on the map." Thankfully, that game has been on hiatus.

In the second game I'm in, we've had 3 deaths, 2 of which were caused by my character, and 1 of which was caused by me the player. The first death was a Magus that died to a swarm we startled, and I threw alchemist's fire on to help kill the swarm (thinking the cleric would get there in time). The second death was my character's when I walked into a ship's hold and was sneak attacked, critted 3 times, and sneak attacked once more. I will say I let her die for the good of the party and brought in my current character (who while better for the party is having a hard time traveling with Pirates as part of the Chelish Inquisition). The third character was a sorcerer in our party. The player couldn't make it this past weekend, and the DM said, I will make sure that your character doesn't get sold into slavery, but I make no promises about his life. He died because I (NPCing him) didn't think we should send him back to the ship, he was very useful until his death when he drowned (we had 3 water breathing potions, and our cleric had 1 Water breathing spell prepared). After he cast it, he found out he could split the time up >_< It was too late to save the sorcerer.

Death is sadly too common in the games I'm in...

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Hardly ever. It only tends to happen when a player does something stupid (deciding to stay next to the Hammerhead and inside the blast radius of a Meltabomb, charging a Trygon with nothing but a knife, etc.).

Weirdly... all the same player.

Does he yell the appropriate battlcry? "YOLO"?

Weirdly enough I did that during a very boring Pathfinder Society game. The players I was with had the personalities of wet sponges. So we got to this room with strange glowing orb... Our rogue had no trap finding capabilities (he took the spy archetype or something like that), and so I looked at the party, slammed on the table and yelled YOLO as I told the DM I'm touching the orb.... I didn't die

 Crazy_Carnifex wrote:
D&D/Pathfinder: Depends on the campaign. If it's something unimportant, I'll fudge things a bit. If it's hilarious, dramatic, a result of party politics, due to sheer stupidity of PC's, or a result of something I just can't fudge (nat 1 vs. destruction), your dead, bro!

Paranoia: That is above your clearance level. please report to the nearest termination booth. Have a nice day!

Is that the game where you are a part of a secret agency and so are all the other players, and the entire game is spent trying to prove that other players are part of societies, etc... there's clones, and a city run by a computer in a post apocalyptic world that isn't post apocalyptic?

 imark789 wrote:
Quite frankly, I also don't want to introduce resurrection. A certain player of mine would bug me about it to no end.

The problem with character death is that it rarely serves any purpose, unless there is a good story reason for the death. That's what has always bugged me. The resurrection spell and it's ilk were put in to the game to sort out those "rare" instances when a player's luck runs sour, they do stupid things and learn their lesson, or you're running really hot with the dice (especially if you're like me and make it clear that the dice aren't fudged).

Also if it's the player that you're talking about in the other thread, if you kill him, have his soul ripped apart by daemons from the warp, thus making it impossible to bring him back. But with that said, I don't know if resurrection is in 40k RPGs.

 imark789 wrote:
I was talking about him, but even aside from that I kind of want to leave death permanent. I'm not totally sure how the whole resurrection deal works, but I feel as if it would make death something to take a lot less seriously.

There's an awesome discussion about this on the Paizo Pathfinder forums. Most of the argument is from one of the designers and revolves around the weird cost associated with the resurrection spells. Resurrection doesn't have to make death any less serious, especially if you play with other planes of existence, you could have the party travel to the realm that his spirit has gone to and bring him back that way.

Many of the people I've talked to refer to the cheapening of a character's death by rezzing them, this is mostly dependent on the player and the DM mostly. You can come back from death with a few incantations and be no worse off for wear. The problem starts to occur with how the player treats his character's death. If the character stays dead, then the player and the DM have to spend time playing introducing the new character and explain why the character is joining the party, their motivations for staying with the party, and why the new character should even care about what the rest of the party is doing.

This is something I'm experiencing from the player side now. With my Inquisitor in the pathfinder game I'm in, I made him a heretic inquisitor of the Chelish Inquisition. The Chelish don't like pirates, so now I have reason to be in the sea based campaign we're playing, and being on the run from them as well gives me reason to join up temporarily. Now that that immediate mission has been completed, I'm having a hard time trying to figure out why my character would stay with these pirates. He's lawful/Neutral, he is only a heretic in the eyes of the Chelish Inquisition because he doesn't worship Asmodeus (1 of the main religions in Cheliax). So I've spent 4 sessions now trying to think of the reason why I'm with these pirates, and it's not gotten any easier. So I'm detracting from the party since my character's motivations don't even align with the overall motivations of the party (becoming pirate kings). I could have just made a pirate and been done with it, but I liked the character concept.

Now if my dead character he replaced had been rezzed, we wouldn't be having this issue, but the party wouldn't have some of the skills they were lacking (some casting and melee support). Yes the party made out better in the end because they got the gear my old character was wearing (we were woefully undergeared). But if my Inquisitor dies, I'm going to push for rezzing him because it would cheapen the death if I brought in a new character with no penalties.

Sadly that seems to be an issue with the games I play in because our long time DM felt that rez magic should be rare, so whenever we died we couldn't find a way to rez the character...

Idk my post is kind of off topic, but it does pertain to the idea of characters dying. If a character is nothing more than stats on a sheet and ends up as a smudge on the map, then you're not going to care too much about what happens to them. If you actually try to develop the character, then you'll want to hold on to him for some time.

Though rezzing does depend on the game system.

 imark789 wrote:
I'm not asking if I should kill anyone out of malice or have a contest to see how many players I can kill. But I still write up how difficult their enemies are, and I'm wondering if I coddle them. I'm wondering if I need to write up more difficult enemies, or should not fudge dice rolls to save them from death.

We're not saying that, we're saying kill him because he might not learn his lesson any other way .

Though to be fair, when characters die in my games and they're not being rezzed, I collect the character sheets for use down the road. My current DM collects them and hangs them on his wall like a trophy.. He got upset when I stole my dead rogue's sheet so we could use it for a new player's character.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
If any of my group did cry out "YOLO" (unironically) before doing something stupid I think I might kill their character out of spite.

I had assumed that I was going to die, and YOLO would have been quite appropriate since we didn't have enough prestige and fame points to rezz me...

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