How do you handle character death?
No, not how willing are you to kill a pc. How does your character react to a fellow party member dying. A funeral? Taking their body to their family? Taking their loot and leaving the rest for the crows?
My character is going to die, I want to make sure his death isn't instantly forgotten.
Depends on group and method of death, honestly. Some groups bury the body (assuming one exists), some loot them. This is a scenario where more details are important and talking to your fellow players about what/how they want to handle the death is really valuable.
If it were me I would start searching for something strong to die heroically holding off for my friends to escape
Even if I have to start the fight!
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Loot his belongings and sell the body parts.
Any DM who "fudges" a death is a fucking faggot.
Risk of death is part of the game. I cannot believe RPGs like Savage Worlds have a "heroes never die" option where you can literally never die. Like what the fuck? If there is no risk of death, there is no tension. Look at how many movies rely on that risk to build tension. Literally almost 99% of them do, at some level or another. Or they risk failure at something that would lead to death. The rest of them are either boring-ass romantic comedies, or a rare movie that sits outside this formula.
So fudging it so no one can possibly die, is just fucking gay. My friend lost his first D&D character 15 minutes into the first campaign. Did he bitch and moan about it? No. He was pretty bummed for a while but he pulled himself together and made a new character.
I saw a thread on here a few months back where some dumb cuckold DM had a player get critted in the first 2 rounds of combat. Instead of sucking it up like a man, this player sat in the corner like a literal woman and pouted. When asked if he wanted to make a new character, he said he was "good."
Well, he wasn't good.
He was a massive fucking pussy.
It's a game. People die in the game sometimes. You know what? Get over it. It's part of the game and the game loses fucking meaning if the DM pulls the punches.
My DM in my current campaign didn't know much how to encounter build. I considered this an upside because it meant we didn't get the same cookie-cutter bullshit of party level = monster level every time. We fought a monster that one-shotted a character's cohort and took off half of another character's HP. The DM literally, right in front of us, said "oh no I'll halve the damage." What the actual fuck. That was when I checked out of that campaign mentally. It was ruined for me. There is not some mystical hand of god that steps in front of you every time something bad is about to happen and stops it happening. If there was, my brother would still be alive.
...
preemptive viking funeral
might want to down a few painkillers first
Burn the body. We don't want zombies. Towns with graveyards deserve to be assaulted by zombies.
My current character handles it by freaking out talking to the spirit cohabitant in their body.
>my brother would still be alive
jesus christ user no one said to take this thread personally
It makes me feel like I think of myself as a super special snowflake but it's starting to feel like less and less people care about stuff like this instead of instant gratification. Obviously there's always been those people, just seems more prominent now.
>load all his shit into a bag of holding.
>chop off one finger, and use magic to preserve it.
>bring it back to town and get him resurrected because he prepaid/out of his coins/out of shared communal funds as the adventurimg contract dictates
Loot, then carve out some tasty morsels, then hide body in some hole where nobody is likely to find it and make trouble.
I didn't take it personally. I'm just not a fucking pussy about it.
Any D&D campaign that uses resurrection spells is one for pussy manboys who cannot grow up and accept death. Note that I am not saying it needs to be lethal. Just that death happens and it fucking happens. Stop denying what is undeniable. Fucking control freaks. I prayed to jesus every day and it didn't mean shit. What do you fuckers think gives you the right to play god? Where do you get off?
I'm sorry for your loss.
death happena, but its d&d and therefore only a minor inconvenience.
if they wanted death to stick they'd capture the souls and deatroy them like a competent badguy. otherwise resurrection is fair game to anyone who can afford it and who did not die of old age
Depends on the game, here are the most recent.
>D&D
>Cremation while the cleric says a few words and the bard plays the bagpipes.
>Traveler
>Given to the void.
>Exalted
>Entombed in the ruins of a First Age city, which the character may or may not have one been the ruler of in a bygone age.
>Shadowrun
>Laid out for review on the groups attack boat with all his stuff piled around him, then blown sky high in a modern rendition of a viking funeral by 500kg of plastic explosives.
Chummer, do you happen to live in LA?
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I'm sorry for your loss, user.
I agree with you. I've actually been in a group where the DM got into a shouting match with a player, because the DM wanted to know how much health the player's character had before announcing damage.
Depends
> on the game
Does the game have a mechanism whereby death in not permanent? Is the setting one in which life is cheap (Paranoia, WH40K, ) or the character meeting his fate, in one form or another, is part of the experience (CoC)?
> on the circumstances
Did they die a heroes death? In the service of something bigger than themselves? In the name of a cause? Or did they die because they picked a fight they shouldn't have? We're in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Was this a character who had been recently created or were they a long-played fixture of the campaign? Are there NPC's who will care? Or will there be a party to celebrate the character's departure?
> on the character
Was the character a pain in the ass? Well-liked? We're they an integral part of the party or just a pip on the die when the gm rolled randomly to decide who got attacked? Did the character provide a voice in the party's direction?
> but...
Ultimately, players are assholes. Any roleplaying they do to eat to a PCs death will probably be part of their jockeying for position in the inevitable jockeying for position when they quibbling starts over divvying up the dead PC's stuff.
The best comprise I seen was the party getting wiped by a Vampire Lord but he turned them into thralls if you rolled high enough because he wanted a strong coven to protect him from future assasination attempts.
Que new party taking on 3/4 the old party in vampire form later in the campaign.
Loot their body, burn it, scatter ash on the wind. Because we did traditional mourning the one fucking time, and because we were in a corrupted land, that fucker stood up and almost killed entire party before mage managed to burn him down. From now on, we mourn only when body is taken care of.
The first time, I cried. He was a good man, the best warrior I ever met. Our last meeting had ended in a duel to see who was better, and I managed to win.
I promised him a rematch, and waited for him to return. They brought back his body, and told me he fell in battle fighting an orc shaman king and his entire retinue ALONE. I cursed his foolhardy, hotheaded nature. He was supposed to return and win the rematch, so we could each become mightier to match the other.
I paid for his funeral, and began the task of trying to find a next of kin to inform. Never found any.
We weren't... friends, but he was respected as the pinnacle of the warrior ideal my character admired. He didn't lose a rival, he lost an example to follow.
My replacement character had to deal with the father of my previous character, who had come to town seeking his son (who'd pretty much sent him a "bye forever lol" letter).
The son had turned on the party, got sentenced to death and then turned into a tree by nature Goddess because he thought she'd ignored him.
Replacement character (now the diplomat of town) managed to talk down angry dad, and offered him accomodation in the town to be closer to his dead tree-son.
>dead tree-son.
still better than a neet son
Is it incest if you the dad eats his son's apples/nuts/fruit/whatever?
This guy gets it. Modern players are such gargantuan pussies.
You honor your brother by never forgetting him. He will live forever in your memories of him.
Thank you user. We have tributes for him every year. Not a day goes by without thoughts of him.
Thank you guys. It does mean a lot.
Wait, was the player mad the DM was trying to fudge his death, or the DM was trying to adjust damage to auto-kill the player, or spare him, or what?
As a player with cynical pragmatism. Make sure the death wasn't in vain and can benefit the rest of the party (unless we're talking TPK on in-party betrayal) and that I can resume participation with another character.
As a character, well, it depends on the character. Anything from going through all five stages of Kubler-Ross to psychopathic disregard.
Resurrection spells have been a thing for a good long while, and fudging's been around for at least as long as that.
Death never had the absolute hold on RPG design that you grumbling jackholes seem to think.
A few games having options for death not mattering or being a risk--as much as it's not my bag, it is simply cutting to the chase and dispensing with some of the theatricality. Death is and has always been the least interesting fail state and that's especially true in a campaign where characters drop like flies. It becomes a nuisance. You dread it not because it is the death of a character but because, oh great, now we have to stop or slow down as so-and-so rolls up a new guy and the GM works out how to shunt them back into the story.
In the days of AD&D for many groups the solution was often to just change the name on the character sheet. To the point where the 2e core rules say something to the effect of "if/when you do this don't just replace Bob with Bob II."
I eat the corpse because I'm playing a hillbilly bear
Your brother was a fucking pussy, and you should emulate him by fucking killing yourself, you gaping faggot.
This has to be pasta. nobody can misread a post as straightforward as OP's
I hope you feel bad about yourself and your life for a long damn time. Fuck you. Don't go faffing about with the loss of somebodies loved ones. Choke on shame.
Delicious pasta
Thank you guys. It does mean a lot.