Death of a PC

Isn't it funny - you wait over a year for a PC fatality, and then two come within a week.

The first occurred on Saturday, in the "Heresy of Angels" one-shot. The player of the Sorcerer, sick and tired of being totally ineffectual, elected to use his Doombolt at Push level - boosting the power but guaranteeing that a Psychic Phenomena would result. He rolled on the appropriate table, scored more than the 76 that moved him to the higher-scale Warp Mishap table, and then rolled the 1-in-a-hundred chance that he would be slain outright. That was probably the single most entertaining moment in that entire game.

The second occurred on Tuesday, in my regular "Eberron Code" campaign, in which the party were faced by a single Giant Skeleton - a CR 7 encounter against three EL 9 PCs, which should have been a fairly easy challenge.

Unfortunately, the fight did not go well. The party defender was hit twice in quick succession, losing most of his hit points. He backed away to avoid dying, causing the skeleton to instead split its next round of attacks between the Wizard and the Psion, both of whom had low AC and fairly low hit points. The Wizard took a mighty but survivable blow. The Psion, injured from the previous session, was slain outright - reduced from 18 to -11 hit points at a stroke.

Two very different deaths in two different situations and two very different games. But, in both cases, there are lessons to be learned...

1. PC Death is Fun

I think this is something that gets forgotten about quite easily, but actually character death is no less a part of the fun than what the characters do while they're alive. This was immediately obvious in the case of the Sorcerer, where it was a one-shot, it was a freak set of dice results, and it was actually quite funny. But it was also true in the case of the Psion - although unfortunate, the death of that character changed the content of the session significantly, taking it in directions that it otherwise would not have gone.

2. PC Death is a Pain

Ironically, this is also entirely true at the same time as the above. In both cases, the loss of the character left a player with a sense of "now what do I do?" Plot threads and storylines needed to be rejigged. And, of course, there was/is a need to work in a replacement PC. It genuinely is a pain.

3. PC Death is Necessary

Of course, with it being such a pain, there's a huge temptation to fudge the dice rolls - to rule that the attack does a few points fewer damage, or that the Warp doesn't slay the Sorcerer, or whatever.

But that would have been a huge mistake. As noted, the death of the Sorcerer was the highlight of that game. And while the death of the Psion was unfortunate, had I instead dropped that character to a near-death state, the most likely outcome would actually have been a Total Party Kill - had Jag not been dead, the other PCs would likely have gone to her aid, giving the Giant more attacks, where each PC had too few hit points to survive even one more attack.

But there are two wider principles at stake:

Unfortunate as they were, both of those character deaths were undeniably fair. All the dice were rolled out in the open, it was clear that I wasn't undul targetting any one PC, and it was clear that I hadn't fudged anything. And the skeleton, in particular, was a 'balanced' encounter for the PCs.

So, had I fudged the rolls so that Turiel survived or so that Jag survived, that would very clearly have set a precedent of unfairness. And so, the next time a PC 'dies', I have to do the same. The net effect is that I could never kill off a PC, ever. Not to mention - if I cheat on this, what else might I cheat on?

And if it's a foregone conclusion that a PC can never die, it's no longer a game. There's no risk, there's no possibility that the PCs might, in the final analysis, lose. At worst, they'll only ever suffer a setback, but in the end the world will be saved. It's like playing a video game in God Mode - sure, it's fun for a while, but it quickly pales as any 'achievements' become nothing of the sort.

4. Thank Goodness I Play with Adults!

There are horror stories out there of players who lose a character and throw a tantrum. Heck, I've even heard horror stories about players who throw a tantrum if their PCs suffer damage! Thankfully, I don't play with any such players. When the PCs died, including the character who had been painstakingly built up from 1st level over more than a year of play, the player simply accepted it and we moved on.

Huzzah for playing with adults! Huzzah!

5. Always Have a Back-up Plan

If PCs can die, you should plan assuming that they will die. And that means you should have a plan for that eventuality. Perhaps there's a spare character you can fade in. Perhaps there's a henchman that you can promote (Planchett in "The Three Musketeers", Lewis in "Morse", etc). Perhaps the PCs encounter a new guy with suspiciously similar abilities ("I see your party has no Mage..."). Or, of course, they PCs could just go into the local town and hire a suitable mercenary type to join them - presumably one with exceptional references.

But you probably shouldn't sent your PCs off on a thousand-mile expedition with a fully-detailed crew of allies, and with no real ability to meet or contact anyone who isn't about to try to kill them...

(You would not believe just how fortuitious the timing of this most recent death actually is. I may tell you in a couple of weeks.)

6. PC Death Should be Appropriately Rare

One PC death in a year of campaign play is a pretty good rate. In general, it's good if the party can spend much of their time teetering right on the edge of disaster, but generally without slipping over. The risk should be real, always, but there's a gap between that and the reality.

Now, who's next...?