Except under unusual circumstances, you won’t get time to prepare for character deaths — crappy rolls, bad luck and other spur-of-the-moment factors will make sure of that.
Personally, I haven’t had many PC deaths on my watch, but thinking back I’m pretty sure I’ve managed to handle each of them with a complete lack of skill and without any sense of drama — in other words, as gracelessly as possible. It’s not that I try to be a dick about it, it’s just that PC deaths tend to take me by surprise, and all of my GMing skills go out the window.
Assuming you’re running a serious campaign (not Paranoia, for example), and that PC death has meaningful consequences in your game (not just poof, you’re back), how do you go about describing a PC’s death to your group?
Do you focus on the PC’s player? Do you let that player describe her character’s demise? Do you try to move on as quickly as possible?
This will likely be the last question post before TT goes into reruns, and I’ll be shutting off the comments before November 1st. If you want to weigh in, don’t wait too long!
I’d have to agree that having a character death kind of throws a GM into shock mode. Almost a “what just happened!!!!” for him or her as much as for the player. Very few times have I recovered and made the death dramatic. I love the idea of letting the player describe it, but I’m big into player narrative elements. So having a player describe the valiant battle, thrust, and parry that finally led to their demise seems like a good thing to give to them. Although I find it could be especially hard to add lots of meaning when character death comes from a fodder like enemy, such as a Kobold. Certainly easy to make it comedic, but harder to make it dramatic and meaningful.
In one D&D supplement (can’t remember which), there was a prestige class ability that allowed a character to have one extra round after they ran out of hit points, during which they could not be healed or buffed, but where they could perform one last heroic action. I’ve considered letting all my players do this for the infrequent cases where they do die. Sort of like a bonus, consolation round where they know they’re about to bite the dust and can try and do something really and truly memorable… a sort of Boromir moment.
I’ve had 2, maybe 3 character deaths in the 4 or 5 years I’ve DMed. In only one of those did I manage to even remotely keep my composure. The situation was this: In that D&D game, I had a house rule that it was possible to multiply the efficacy of a wand by using multiple charges at once (up to 3), but it required a Concentration check to do it and there was a risk of an arcane “resonance cascade” (I got the term from Half Life and thought it sounded cool) by which all 50 (or however many were left) charges were expended at once in an uncontrollable magic blast. The party wizard was attempting to use 3 charges from her wand of fireballs against a pirate fleet. Unfortunately, the player’s luck was against him that night and he fumbled 3 rolls in a row. The best I could come up with was simply a really cool, semi-gruesome death as the flesh boiled off of the character’s bones, leaving nothing but a blackened skeleton and dealing nearly 2500 points of damage to most of the pirate fleet.
Yeah, because of that night, I no longer have that house rule about wands… It’s proof that sometimes we just don’t think things through at all.
I tend to run games where PC death never happens at random, or at least, never by surprise. Games where PC death is either a mutual decision between the GM and the player, or games where a PC is only likely to die in truly dreadful circumstances, thus giving warning.
Mostly because I truly, passionately hate random PC death. As both player and GM.
I play with a GM that wants a PC to die each and every session and his not happy unless one does.
We are in one campaign now to where we have had to fight 6 or more CR3 or 4 Spike Traps, 6 Shadows, a Wight, an Undead Huge Constrictor Snake, and numerous other undead in one part of the game. This had to be done with out the ability to sleep, due to a time limit being put on us, for our cleric and duskblade, let alone being a average of 3rd level party. Imagine this – 3 of the 4 party members died… And the GM was shocked to see that.
Makes me really not want to play a game with this person as the GM anymore.
This question begs another: to what extent do you, as a GM, protect the PCs from death?
It’s really different from game to game. In D&D, for example, there’s usually an expectation that characters will die fairly regularly (not because of DM sadism, which is a different issue, but simply because it’s the nature of the beast). In a game designed like a modern mystery adventure television series, there’s more of an expectation that, absent player boredom, players joining or leaving, or “epic scripted deaths,” the same set of characters that started the campaign will end it.
(As a side note, many of these “television” or “cinematic” types of games have some type of mechanical over ride, such as drama dice or hero points, to prevent random PC death).
I’ve enjoyed both types of campaign (and everything inbetween), both as a player and a GM. It’s all about social contract situations.
In my current D&D campaign, I’ve found that understanding that characters might drop at a moment’s notice (as well as knowing that my players understand that) has allowed me to keep a clear head when it happens and to “narrate” accordingly. Yes, sometimes PCs do “go down like punks,” but it’s part and parcel of that type of campaign. D&D groups are more about balancing parties than individual characters.
In games where I follow the “television model,” I used to protect (“fudge”) characters from death. I’d discovered pretty early on that this leads to sloppy play and I’d spend too much time rationalizing why the PCs didn’t “go down like punks” when they should have.
I have a player in these types of games that has a real problem losing characters. To accommodate that need as well as dissuading sloppy play, I have a house rule. If the dice result in death, I put the character’s fate in his player’s hands. The affected player gets to narrate (with my input) the character’s exit, which might or might not include death. If that character does not die, he is prohibited from returning to the current campaign as a PC (although he may be allowed back in a subsequent campaign).
In other campaigns, I’ve used a “narrative ending” rule, where if the PCs mess up so badly that they die or otherwise wreck the flow of the campaign, I’ll step in and “reedit” the adventure, docking the players the XP for the adventure.
I realize that both of the above examples will ruffle some gamers’ feathers. To them I say “don’t play this way.” I only use them when I get a buy in from everyone around the table.
One question to ask is whose perspective gets narrated? I’m currently running a forum-based campaign and recently a the mystic theurge failed his Reflex against an explosion, got knocked into negative hit points, and went bouncing down the street like a punted ragdoll. The character was being NPCed at the time due to player absence, so it was an easy decision to describe the scene from the perspective of the other players watching him go flying.
Looking back, however, if the player had been controlling his character, it wouldn’t have been as easy to decide. How do other DMs pick the narrative perspective for PC death?
“The last thing you see is the foul orc laughing as it moves to retrieve its hurled spear”?
OR
“There’s nothing you can do, however, and Fingbad the Dubious is lain low by the orc’s spear”?
Reading your comments got me to thinking about this problem in a broader sense. Assuming random or unexpected PC deaths remain a possibility in your campaign (and I agree that those kinds of deaths pose a problem for a lot of players — understandably so!), I’d love to see a collection of techniques for, and ideas about, describing those deaths, making them more satisfying for players — and deciding whether or not to allow them at all.
That sounds like great fodder for a series of blog posts or a jumbo-sized forum thread to me. Not quite fair to say that as I’m about to duck out of the building, but I thought it was worth mentioning. 😉
I’ve never got too wrapped up about how to describe death. I’ve certainly described heads flying or something else when massive damage outright kills someone, but most deaths aren’t described in much detail beyond just noting the rules mechanic that led to death.
I do think that there always has to be an element of randomness and unexpectedness to PC death (assuming death is at all possible in the system). Otherwise, PC’s either only die when their player decides to let them, or when the GM determines death by fiat.
But just because randomness and unexpectedness is present doesn’t mean it has to result in unwanted and meaningless deaths. Death is quite random and unexpected in Dogs in the Vinyard, however, the player has a lot of control as to whether death is on the table for any particular conflict.
Frank