How do you feel about GMs sparing player characters from death due to bad rolls?
>character is riding on a train with group
>badly injured from a recent fight
>skill roll due to a sudden stop
>failed roll
>cross fingers for low damage rolls despite odds
>before damage rolls GM has a NPC that is traveling with the group hold on to character
>negates the failed roll
Is this bad practice or no?
If it's a casual game and group sure. I personally think it's no fun to stop playing so someone else can roll a new character or have them leave all together, but that doesn't mean you can't put the fear of death into them
I fudge death rolls on the first adventure or two. No one wants to roll up a new character after just starting one, but after that, you're fair game. Maybe maim them instead, if you don't want to kill them outright. Lose a finger to the wolf rather than your throat.
Depands on the group and game. If it is some Gygax-style dungeoncrawling then yes, death is to be expected and one some more storydriven campaigns it might give interesting possibilities for the storytelling and be less of a setback to the player. On the other hand, if the death would be mostly meaningless and a huge setback for everyone then yes, consider saving the character. Just don't do it too often.
IMO saving a character's life (though possibly giving it some kind of a penalty) is pretty ok as long as the players don't start abusing or relaying on it. If a player is acting reckless, taking risks or just being plain foolish then ofcourse he or she should suffer the concequences.
Depands on the kind of players you are dealing with and wether or not it would risk driving them away.
I agree with you user
Depends on the group and the style of game. People who claim there's only one way to do it are always wrong, no matter which 'side' they're on.
Personally as a GM I like to avoid character death, because I think it's quite lazy and uncreative as far as consequences for failure go. It can be appropriate in certain contexts, but most of the time there are much more interesting things you can do while leaving a PC alive. Of course, this is assuming you have players whose PC's care about things other than themselves and are invested in the story and the world. I'm lucky enough to have groups like this, but I know not everyone is.
It turns the game into a farce where you can't lose and as such any rolling is pointless. If you can't lose it isn't a game, you're just playing pretend.
I tend to GM W40K games and for the first, say, three to six games player death cannot happen. After that it's fair game.
>"People who claim there's only one way to do it are always wrong, but if you don't do it the way I like you're doing it wrong."
>sparing player characters from death due to bad rolls?
I'd rather bake that into the normal rules.
You get some bad rolls and hit 0hp, then another PC rushes to give you medical attention. You probably won't die, but I will roll on this here table, and you better hope I roll high.
A damaged eye here, a few fingers and teeth there, a twisted spine, and suddenly your mercy doesn't look so consequence-free. And we haven't even gotten to the table you roll on if you use a regeneration spell.
The game gets a little more interesting when you have some more midway points between OK and dead.
nice strawman there
what he said is that there is no ONE TRUE WAY™ and what he thinks is good. Nowhere did he say that you are bad because you are not doing it that way
As has been previously said, there is no One True Way, but there is a General Trend that is good to follow: The more time it will take to create a replacement character, the less chance a character should have to die.
I prefer to not kill off characters if possible, at least without the player's permission. I'll generally offer them the option between rolling up a new character or sitting out of the session for a bit and taking a permenant wound (I prefer games where healing is hard). It will depend on how bad the killing hit was, if it was just a few points of damage it'll be a nasty scar with no penalties, but a big hit or a critical might cause the loss of a hand or blindness in one eye, possible requiring a slight rebuild during downtime.
He thinks the people doing it the way he likes are "players whose PC's care about things other than themselves and are invested in the story and the world", and those who don't are obviously bad.
What are the modifiers?
For me, the tone of the game (and how much of a hassle it would be to make a new character and get them into the game) sets an expectation for approximately how likely it should be for characters to die.
If it's a grim, gritty dungeon crawl type game? The dice say you're dead so you're dead. Make a new guy.
If it's happy fun times fantasy land? There's probably resurrection magic there, if not (or the players don't have any and I can't think of a deus ex machina to get some to them soon enough) then they'll usually only die to themselves being stupid or just not handling a fight well. If they do have resurrection magic and it was a stupid death, I may waive or lessen the downside for that particular resurrection.
Most games are somewhere inbetween, though, so my preference is somewhere inbetween. Typically my rule of thumb is to keep players from dying in ways that could reasonably be described as "bullshit" but nothing more.
Or group expects everyone to abide by "Don't play with fire" no matter what side of the screen you're on.
IE: Don't rush the dragon if you don't want to go print a new sheet while we keep playing, and don't put a player up against a dragon if their character needs to survive for whatever reason
it's at the bottom
Although the game I got it from is ACKs, basically B/X with houserules.
One could use it for 5e, although you'd generally have better results considering that most characters have good con, and casting spells is a lot easier.
To get the most horrific results you basically need to either completely fuck up the care (i.e. leave someone to die for a full day without treatment) or else roll very poorly.
you meant
?
This.
Getting killed from a train lurching in any but the most Gygaxian lethal games is lame.
But getting taken out by a low level mook right before you get to the bbeg could be fairplay and done well dramatically, depending on the group.
>I'd rather bake that into the normal rules.
This. If you don't like characters dying, establish some rules to mitigate it, don't just fiat it on the fly. 'Cause if you fudge the rolls to save one guy's character, everyone else will expect you to do it for them. It's important to remain impartial if you want to have characters ever die.
Having an NPC around ready to help you is not the same as teleporting an NPC to save your asses. I have had a babysitter before with the pcs but he didnt help if wasnt able to. Its true that usually I (the npc, who was a mentor-lik figure for the party) had enough foresight to be around where the crap hit the fan.
Thats also why he died first helping them and that was the way of leaving them without wheelies and feeling that surviving wasnt free.
Also the avenging took the characters in interesting directions and fleshed the characters.
If the player wasn't being retarded and it was pure rng, then I don't mind an occasional save, or a "I thought you died" reintroduction of the character a few sessions later. It's why I adore fate/edge systems, since it's a good way to counter how fickle the dice can be, and makes players more willing to invest in their characters and their motivations. We're pretty casual, though, and are in most systems as a fun escapism and power fantasy, so your millage may vary.
I do it like this. Most of the time players are competent enough to survive, but sometimes pure chance can fuck up even the very best plans. For example, low levels of DnD. Your stats, skills, and shit mean less than a single d20 roll, so if my players die in the very first adventure I just fudge the rolls to get them to -6 HP or something. It still looks dangerous, and some smart moves might be needed to prevent disaster, but it's not an outright "lol, you die because I rolled 6 with 2d6" situation.
And I don't even like DnD, so in better systems this is almost never a problem.
Only roll dice when you want the outcome to be random. Sounds simple, right?
Do not roll and then change the result. That undercuts the validity of every other roll you make.
Ask the player how much health they have left, then roll damage according to that. Unless you want to randomly kill them, there are such games...
I rarely go out of my way to kill characters so I usually do not negate death if it happens.
Didn't Gygax go out of his way to say how much he disliked killing PCs?
if a player is rolling like shit but I like how they're playing their character I might make them a mcguffin so the party tries to protect them
The Gygax killer DM meme comes from Temple of Elemental Evil. There's no way in hell Mordenkainen would have survived to high levels if Gary's group was designing every dungeon and campaign like that.
YOu also have to understand Veeky Forums has 476 definitions of what gygax play styles are and 450 of them use it in mockery or outright hate.
I'm falling behind, last I checked there were only 473 definitions.
>spine is broken at the waist
>can't reproduce
This isn't true if female.
It means there's no real risk involved, and the GM is a pussy.
You mean Tomb of Horrors, right?
Depends entirely on the situation.
If they do something obviously dumb and die for it, then that's it. If they're a new player who is trying their hardest but getting screwed by RNG or ignorance, I'll gladly cut them slack.
It depends on the situation. A character dying from landing on a fluffy couch can really undercut the tone of the experience, Van Helsing. In the train example, it could just as well feel like a cheap trick to kill the character if they did die.
Rule of thumb: PCs can die from falling off a train. PCs can die from crashing a train. No one (important) dies from a train stopping.
>the tone of the experience
That depends on what the tone is exactly. If the PCs are gifted with special plot armor and treated as if they were main characters in a work of heroic fiction, then yes, an embarrassing or ignominious death can undercut it. If the game is meant in part to challenge the players' skills at helping their PCs prepare for and navigate dangerous scenarios, then an unsatisfying death, injury, or other failure may actually prod a player to give it his all and avoid the next one.
And of course there is the question of whether or not a particular game or adventure allows players to experience failure without death. If dying is the only way to not succeed, and the players aren't allowed to die most of the time, it can make things rather predictable and dull. But if you have other ways to fail or have setbacks, like a PC being so injured by the train crash that he won't be able to contribute 100% to the challenges ahead, that can make those seemingly-random events impactful without ending the game or undercutting its premises.