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How do you handle character death? How often do you send enemies that have a good chance to kill a character? How do you pick which character to attack with the enemy you control? Do you ever fudge the dice to save a character, or no? Do you play with a maniacally evil GM, and how do you like it? Do deaths always result from a bad decision combined with luck or is it occasionally purely luck?

I'm playing Rogue Trader, so responses appropriate to that game and the 40k universe would be nice, but I appreciate any input. Just specify which game/universe you're talking about.

D&D/Pathfinder here. We have characters that occasionally die. Not often, but it happens. In the last two deaths we had, one character was allowed to play his psuedodragon familiar from that point on, and in the most recent one, my character was resurrected due to shady deals I had going with the fey, but I was made an unnatural lycanthrope in the process and lost a level.

I've had a few games where the character who died was just gone. It pretty much depends upon the scenario.

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...

My Dwarf Runepriest in 4e drowned from trying to drink a health potion under water.

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.

 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

These answers come from a D&D, Pathfinder, HackMaster, BattleTech, and Star Wars player and/or GM. The HackMaster slogan of "Let the Dice Fall Where They May" rings true with my group.

How do you handle character death?

If the character dies, he dies. That's what the Raise Dead spell was created for. In Pathfinder, you get 2 negative levels upon being raised from the dead. Restoration will get one level back immediately, but you have to wait a week to get the other back. Tough crap. The mission must go in. Get back in there, champ and we'll get the other Restoration cast in 7 days. Better not die again, though! In HackMaster, you lost a point of Constitution with Raise Dead (and risked picking up extra Quirks and Flaws).

How often do you send enemies that have a good chance to kill a character?

Not every encounter should be a player killer. No. But each encounter should tax their resources. In each dungeon crawl, there should be at least 1 encounter where a player could die.

How do you pick which character to attack with the enemy you control?

For unintelligent creatures, go after the closest target or whatever special rules/tactics their entry says. For intelligent bad guys, do just like the player's do. Pick the biggest threat. Is the fighter in your face? Put grease on the floor in front of him. Do you have undead minions? Then hit their cleric with something. Is there a mage in the back that can cast fireball? Tell the archers to shoot arrows at him.

Do you ever fudge the dice to save a character, or no?

No. LtDFWTM

Do you play with a maniacally evil GM, and how do you like it?

No, nor would I ever play with someone who took joy from killing a PC. That's easy. Ridiculously easy. Bragging about that is like bragging that you found naked pictures of Pam Anderson online. As a GM, your role is to make the game interesting and keep the players challenged.

Do deaths always result from a bad decision combined with luck or is it occasionally purely luck?

Usually bad luck. Sometimes it's a combination, though.

I don't go out of my way to kill PCs. Mostly they die because they forget about powers they have or charge into fights completely heedless of their actions.

My favorite was a game of exalted, one of the PCs was dueling this real powerful dragon blood martial artist outside the burning gates of the city they were defending. He was our tank, so he was holding the gates while everyone else dealt with the surprise attack through the sewers. Big epic fight, the PC kills the three other dragon bloods with the big honcho, and then the dude proceeds to just curb stomp the PC. NPC just keeps punching and kicking him, until he dies. He just let it happen, didn't say a word about using the magically perfect parry that he could use, that he'd forgotten to use the last time we'd played, and pretty much every time before that. So I didn't remind him that time.

I also had a good one in another exalted game where the PCs had just stolen an airship and were being followed by a squadron of warships. The airship had ten bombs, there were six ships, I figured it would be an easy enough thing. One of the PCs proceeds to grab the bombs, put them in a sack, and leap off the airship onto the flagship of the squadron, three hundred and fifty feet below. He survived the fall, barely. He did not survive the bombs and the ship's magazine going.

I haven't ever killed a character (not to say I won't). I feel like it doesn't really help the story/game.

I much prefer to punish them pretty hard and make it interesting for the player. My favorite was permanently blinding a character and forcing them to figure out alternative ways of functioning.

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!

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

Ah Crazy_Carnifex, an interweb person after my own heart. Proper answer for those with the correct clearence is:

Not. Nearly. Enough.

 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?

Yup, that's the magic of Paranoia

My take on character death is it depends on the game system and setting.

In my long running Call of Cthulhu campaign investigator death or insanity (where the player looses the character), maybe 1-2 per major storyline, but as well as investing in their characters the players were also invested in the organisation they worked of (the Institute of Parapsycological Research) and were encouraged to have somebody else waiting in the wings to play when it occured

but Call of Cthulhu is a game about an essentially fuitless struggle against the inevitable extinction of all humanity (when the stars are right), all they can do is delay the day.

For more traditional fantasy games permenant player death would be extremely rare (there's usually some magic get out clause even if it may leave the PC weaker/lower level or some other sort of issue)

and when I've played or run SF fits somewhere inbetween, cloning/memory dumps etc allow the dead to return to some extent.

In terms of GM/DMing I'd never set out to kill a character,

it would only come about from a combination of player stupidity and unlucky dice rolls

 kronk wrote:
That's what the Raise Dead spell was created for.

AFAIK, theres really nothing like that in the 40k universe. I'm sure somewhere, somehow, there's a way to make it happen, but I'm under the impression it's extremely rare.

No, nor would I ever play with someone who took joy from killing a PC. That's easy. Ridiculously easy. Bragging about that is like bragging that you found naked pictures of Pam Anderson online. As a GM, your role is to make the game interesting and keep the players challenged.

It's not that I take any joy from killing PC's. Quite the opposite. I'm well aware that I'm here to make the game fun and challenging for the PCs. Generally, I feel as if I am too easy on my players, and too sympathetic towards them and character death (In the past, I have often fudged dice rolls to keep them alive, especially when they were just starting out). The concern I have is that sometimes they are just reckless, and pick fights when no other alternative is blatantly obvious. In addition, it is the 40k universe after all, I want it to seem dangerous and unpredictable. I want to run a game where there are no guarantees- I want to create the feel that when they don't know much about an encounter/opponent, they can't rest assured it will be an easy (or even winnable) fight. Some fights will be ultra easy, and some will be ultra hard requiring them to run for their dear lives.

When I said maniacally evil GM, I just meant one who kills characters off more often. When playing a game with a harsh universe, like Call of Cthulu or 40k or something.

Keep in mind although we've been playing since October of last year, this is a first for all of us. My first time GMing, their first time playing an RPG. I'm a 40k vet and pretty well versed in the lore, but they are all relative noobs to the 40k universe aside from my constant education of them as well as them flipping through my 40k rulebook.

 imark789 wrote:

 kronk wrote:
That's what the Raise Dead spell was created for.

AFAIK, theres really nothing like that in the 40k universe. I'm sure somewhere, somehow, there's a way to make it happen, but I'm under the impression it's extremely rare.

Check out Anval Thawn. Sometimes you come back to life simply because, well, you're in the business of coming back to life.

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

 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.

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.

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

In 40k, that makes perfect sense. Stick to your guns, then.

I feel that as DM it is my job to make sure the players have fun then any contest to have them killed, but how i approach it depends on game system. In DnD I will not try to hard to kill them and fudge rolls if needs be, but if they die through stupidity then I will make sure they are punished for being brought back.

For dark heresy however, with its fate system I don't hold back, mainly because the setting demands the party to be in almost constant danger, and I will refuse to fudge rolls and will be merciless to their mistakes, because the enemies of the Imperium won't be merciful, so neither will I.

Overall though most party deaths for me are more through stupidity than through malice, and because everyone's IQ seems to drop when they become a player (myself included) so bad decisions and deaths usually aren't too far apart.

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.

 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.

DM/ST/GM since 89' regarding AD&D, Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms, My own fantasy Setting, Marvel Superheroes, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Vampire the Masquerade, World of Darkness, WOD Dark Ages, Werewolf the Wild West, Dark Heresy, Warhammer 2nd ed and Star Wars RPG (D20) ..might be forgetting a couple.

How do you handle character death?
Its a rarity, the last few games have been historical games for my fantasy setting to help form back story, with a main character who can't die. So its more about the story, but tbh even when characters who could die, that's always been my mantra.

How often do you send enemies that have a good chance to kill a character?
Depends on the threat, death isn't always the worst thing that can happen to a character. In Werewolf it was much more common, but I had groups that would work together well, so even a hard and nasty player death system like the WoD it was a rare occurrence.

How do you pick which character to attack with the enemy you control?
I have an ability to visualise the fight in my head very clearly, don't use miniatures, so my npcs tend to react as I suspect they would, often this means nearest target, but some specialist groups would target biggest threat etc.

Do you ever fudge the dice to save a character, or no?
Sometimes to often, I won't kill a character if its a ridiculous situation, had a situation when a player died with 30mins of a game starting due to bad luck failing three rolls in a row, they then had to get a replacement character together while we carried on, which was a boring experience for them, and frustrating for the group. As its supposed to be about fun for all of us, I pretty much vowed not to let that happen again.

Do you play with a maniacally evil GM, and how do you like it?
That's another part of my reasoning for the question above. I was introduced to the WoD via Vampire the Masquerade in the early nineties by a ST who to be fair was running a big group (seven to ten of us) but took too much pleasure in killing characters, I didn't know at the time, but after he left I took over ST duties and I realised he was throwing against enemies we had little chance against, or he knew at least two or three of us would die each time. He would then insist on taking the character and writing DECEASED across it with a permanent marker. Oddly, my Brujah never died, but I supposed I was a four year RPG vet by then and knew what I was doing.

Do deaths always result from a bad decision combined with luck or is it occasionally purely luck?
Nearly always bad luck, bad decisions are a rarity and the only time I have punished those if they where really bad decisions combined with a disruptive player, or an attempt to harm other player characters.

Well, here is the link to the PC graveyard on our site That's on a campaign that's stretched 2-3 years.

Generally, we go by the decree that "it's a harsh and cruel world". PCs die, they have to accept that. In games like Pathfinder though, it's pretty hard to stay dead once you hit a certain level.

The Dark heresy campaign my group on skypes being doing. It's uncommon for at least one member of the team every few missions to not suffer some sort of debilitating injury. The acolyte groups had a lot of turnover. 5 dead in the last year nearly. it would be much higher if it wasn't for fate points though.

Personally I like lulling my group into a false sense of security before pushing them off the deep end. If they survive they get rewards for doing so on top of whatever the mission rewards were. Currently got quite a stable bunch of hard bitten, jaded and paranoid acolytes now. I'd only allow resurrection in this dark heresy campaign under very specific circumstances. Such as the brain being intact and the body not being too long dead to be cyberneticly resurrected or some such. If the brains gone then tough cookies.

of course though this is Dark Heresy. It's made to be a meat grinder. As long as you and your group have fun just do what you enjoy.

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

 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...

I found myself having my characters live on pretty long. mostly because I am careful with my characters, I ensure they have some deus ex machina or something to ensure their survival. Mostly because last time i didn't install one of those into my characters, the following happened..
Spent four days writing character, backstory, and everything first game.... Dies first mission, gets sucked out of an airlock. (DeathWatch onboard of a space hulk.....)

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.