What was it like to kill a player for the first time?

Let them die in combat or if they do something dumb, like poke a sleeping dragon in its eyeball. You shouldn't deliberately set up an encounter for the sole purpose of killing a player.

A DM gets really mad at a player for optimizing and tries to "put her in her place", just like in the OP.

Yeah. What the fuck is a kyton doing in a forest by itself anyways.

thats true
I haven't done this since
I do regret it, but it changed the flavor of all proceeding campaigns because everyone knew they could die

I thought chain devils looked cool so I put one in the campaign

For real though:

>running a Dark Heresy game
>party is trying to ambush a bunch of feral guardsmen
>sew dissent between their enemies through some successful fuckery
>one of them decides to throw a hallucinogen grenade
>lands right between them
>everyone gets effects
>all effects are either pinning them in place or making them run around like crazy
>all feral guardsmen get frenzy
>poor screaming assassin gets hacked to pieces
>psycher gets her arm cut off and bleeds to death
>everyone runs away once the effects wear off

This is what happens when you play with fire.

I've only ever killed two player characters. Both were the same player, and both were entirely circumstantial.

The player I described in this story died a second time.
Him and another player both play monks and really wanted a noodle cart they could wheel around. I gave it to them but they said it has a secret that they will reveal in time, and I let them do it because I know it's not some OP bullshit.
They encounter a hostile giant who they try to sell noodles to. The giant drop kicks their cart and BOOM, turns out the surprise was a giant bomb in the cart, and the player fails to doge the explosion and dies along with the hill giant

You and all of your players sound terrible

I've killed quite a few PCs during my Curse of Strahd game - the most lethal encounters were the final boss of the Death House, where three died, and Coffin maker's shop, which claimed two.

Both were very memorable to me. In the first encounter, the boss swallowed the dragonborn character, and each round the dragonborn was inside his maw, he took acid damage. Eventually, he started dying - and that meant making death throws. He rolled 20 on those three times, and kept rolling really well otherwise - which meant constantly recovering from dying, only to start dying again. He managed to spend about 12 rounds or so in such a near-death state, until eventually succumbing.

In coffin maker shop, there was a vampire spawn ambush that almost immediately resulted in the party fighter being surrounded and absolutely gangraped with basically no way of escaping or surviving. The vampire spawns were not the ones who killed him, though.
It was the party wizard (the only survivor of death's house, who lived by running away), who threw a fireball at them all - his reasoning was, the fighter was gonna die anyway, so might as well spare him becoming a vampire himself and do some damage to the enemies.
He then ran away AGAIN, leaving another PC to her death. The fourth one managed to escape with him.
The fighter player took it very much on the chin - the other player was somewhat mad, but shaked it off later.

>but it changed the flavor of all proceeding campaigns because everyone knew they could die
Which is a good thing. Player character death should be a relatively common thing.

Player sacrificed himself to dive down and get in the face of a giant octopus that was wrecking the group and the ship they were on. Scored a crit, pissed off octopus who proceeded to drag him down and drown and crush him for the next 3 rounds.

Bard finally dives in, burns 3 spells to teleport to him and teleport his body back up to the surface. It was pretty rough.

I can honestly say that this is typical RP stuff except for keeping secrets from the DM

I've been playing ttrpgs for 20 years and this still sounds like terrible bullshit teens or undeveloped twenty somethings would do. You and your players sound like shit.

This

well we were 16 so could you stop being a needless asshole?

I killed my first player just recently. I'm a new DM.

>Running spooky 5e one-shot
>Party has six players
>Playing Death House (investigating old creepy house + dungeon cellar)
>Party Rogue sneaks ahead
>Makes it into a room with a huge statue holding a shiny crystal gem
>"I take the gem out of the statue's hand!"
>Five angry ghosts spawn
>They kill him before the party can even react

I had a cool plan for when/if someone died, so it all worked out nicely. In my LMoP campaign with my friends, however, I recently had to fudge a lot of dice to keep the fucking morons from killing themselves. After LMoP there's no more Mr. Nice DM.

Is this relatable yet?

He knew he dun goofed when the ghosts spawned all around him. It was an obvious trap and he had a good time.

The picture is more appropriate for what followed after actually:

>Tabaxi warlock has been reduced to 9 max HP after fighting the dead nanny
>Party is fighting off ghosts that killed rogue
>One ghost gets turned and has to run away
>Warlock decides to chase the ghost
>He runs straight into the mimic door and almost loses his hand

He shat himself when he realized what had happened. It was great (he survived).

I can't tell you what it was like killing a player for the first time. I'm not out of statute of limitations range yet.

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>the joke
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>your head