I think he did the right thing. While the game could deal w/ PC deaths that occurred ‘off-screen’ in a comic book manner, by bringing them back, albeit beat-up, this would have been too much for believability, and had already affected major parts of the plot by the time anything could be done. It also would rob other characters of their chance to shine.

1) The character was a super-powered ex-Mafiosi (this would later come back to bite me on the rear in a major way) with a serious beef against the local family, taking action against them. Impulsive, and obessive to the point of fanaticism. He was also intended to be a tank, capable of guarding characters that were weaker physically.

2) MASSIVE gank by other PCs. One of the PCs had invisibility, another few had telekinesis, and a 4th had shape-changing, mind-control powers, and poisons. Oddly, I had managed to equal the 4th one’s mind control efforts through natural stats. There was also an NPC cop…

I had had a beef with other members of my group in the LARP’s plan, and had the character leave the group to go home till they had finished what they wanted to do. (this really wasn’t as big of a disruption of game flow as you might have thought… I had wanted a bit of a break, and I was intending to use the time that way.)

Now, one of the PCs (who happened to be an assassin working for the government to get rid of superpowered ‘villains’… my character, unfortunately for me/him, qualified) had hid himself in my character’s home, and assaulted me then and there. I had to fight him off (he was the ONLY character with better physical stats than mine, unfortunately.. he had better speed, health, and damage) but I was losing, so I jumped out of a window to escape, but not before I shot the NPC cop, wounding him severely. (Unfortunately, this cop was supposed to be a major NPC… and the only good guy on the police force. And I darn near took him out!)

At this point, the 3 other PCs (who were mafiosi… yeesh.) came into the fray. I managed to run from them.. taking more damage. The 4 PCs then had a mini-tussle between each other, while trying to take me out. So I escaped into a housing complex, and scattered traces, to slow the 4 down. I manage to do so, and am almost on my way out when the 3 mafiosi get to me. So I take a random NPC and use them as a shield (I knew they weren’t capital G Good, and my character was neutral at best, so this was mostly just an attempt at minimizing damage.) while I try to shoot them. One of the PCs uses his telekinesis to render my character’s gun useless, and the shapechanger uses her poisons to knock my character out. I get hit, but save.. and save again, rendering it ineffective. Being trapped, and realizing my general situation, I try to break out of the room using an available window. I fail to break the glass, and the resulting damage knocks my character out.

Now, the cops have caught up to the 3 mafiosi. They run, hoping not to get caught. The invisible PC waits, then takes my unconscious body. My character wakes up somewhere, the assassin gives me a chance to make a prayer.. my PC makes a prayer about his dead wife and kids, and then gets shot through the eyes, executing him. (This was a backstory bit. The wife and kids were the reason he went nuts.)

Sorry for the long description, but it’s kinda hard to exactly describe the way the gank happened and what made it so.. memorable.. without the long version.

3 and 4) Well, originally, I was pissed, but in the end, I accepted it. Partly, because it was cinematic as all get out… and partly because it felt appropriate to the character. He went down the way he was supposed to have lived. Fighting. Even though he was a tank, he managed to survive a lot more than he should have, though the odds were incredibly stacked against him. Under normal circumstances, I shouldn’t have even survived the first PC. However, I managed to survive some pretty brutal combat against a PC that was faster than me, did more damage, had more hits per round, and invisible. In addition to 3 OTHER PCs trying to gank me, who were all hideously effective combat machines.

The GM apologized to me, once he found out, but I was OK with it. Ultimately, all 4 PCs who had ganked me left the LARP group, and we had additional drama concerning 2 of them later. The game hadn’t been intentionally PvP, though it was a WoD game, but the character concepts just worked out that way.

Sadly, this all happened in the first session of the LARP. I made a new character who was much less integrated, but it didn’t go so well.

2. How did the PC die?
friendly fire. another PC strongly objected to her trying to take off with the object of negotiations with some important NPCs, and hit her with a spell. she failed her save, and the damage turned out to be sufficient to kill her.

3. How did your player take it?
fairly pissed off, but not for too long. another character found the wizard’s behaviour unacceptable and walked out on the party. both players continued on with new characters.

6. In retrospect, do you wish things had gone differently?
well, sure, but how the players torment their own characters is their problem. =)

2. How did the PC die?
Meng died at the hands of Apu (a Euthanatos, which is a slightly rival tradition, played by another PC).

3. How did your player take it?
Poorly; he was upset that his character’s core idea (kick butt hand to hand fighter) had been overturned.

4. How did you handle the PC’s death?
Apu had a vision where he was told of his error and asked to guide his fallen foe to wisdom, and to learn restraint himself. Meng’s spirit swore to obey Apu, shuddered and returned from the brink of death.

5. How did the style of your game affect the answers to questions 2, 3 and 4?
The game was intended as a hybrid, with lots of character specific sub-plots, but with an overarching villainous plot to destroy the world. The characters had non-trivial amounts of background, and this confrontation was very early in the campaign. I hate killing characters before they have a chance to play for at least as long as chargen and background development took…

6. In retrospect, do you wish things had gone differently?
Strongly, but as I return to this event (time and again), I’ve forgiven myself. Some of what I’d done in game setup made this type of conflict more likely, but players took the opportuntity to destroy the game by venting their real life antagonism toward each other. The group was a bad choice and a bad mix. On the other hand, nothing teaches more strictly than failure.

2. How did the PC die?
The party had been trailing a group of religious fanatics who were attempting to open a portal between their world and the Realm of Madness. The fanatics were successful, and their insane elder god (very cthulhu-mythos like; a huge outsider who was a mass of writhing tentacles and unblinking, inky black eyes) came through the portal. During the climactic bettle, the party did manage to kill of the cultists, but Victoria was swallowed whole by the summoned elder god. The rest of the party managed to weaken the beast to the point that it went back through the portal, taking the body of the PC with it. When the beast returned to its plane, the portal sealed.

3. How did your player take it?
He was not happy. He had been running Victoria for several months and there were many directions he wanted to take this character. He felt that the battle had been played out fairly (he had several unfortunately bad rolls) and that he shouldn’t have put his character so close to the action. He said he would be ready with a new character the following week.

4. How did you handle the PC’s death?
I gave the player a glimmer of hope and the party a plot hook for a potential future adventure. After the encounter they learned a bit more background on the cult and the creature. Although Victoria had been swallowed whole, the digestion process takes centuries, kinda like the Sarlac pit from Episode 6, so there was a chance to retrieve the body if the party wanted to try to find a way to re-open the portal.

5. How did the style of your game affect the answers to questions 2, 3 and 4?
I’m very much into the story aspect of the game and who the PCs grow with it. However, I don’t ever want the players to grow bored with a campaign because they feel like their PCs are immortal because of the story. The player had some really bad rolls, so much to the point that it would have been obvious if I had been fudging my own.

6. In retrospect, do you wish things had gone differently?
Yes and no. The final battle was quite spectacular. Everybody was playing to the fullest. By going in for a kill, Victoria sacrificed herself in a very dramatic fashion. Despite the loss of the character, the adventure was very fun and memorable, and for that, I wouldn’t want things to change. Despite that, I had outline some plot hooks for this particular character and probably won’t get the chance to play them out exactly as written.

2. How did the PC die?
He plummeted to his death down a 60 foot deep pit trap that was lined with spiked chains all the way down. He was dead before reaching the bottom, a 10 foot deep pool of pirhana infested water. All that remained was his sword.

3. How did your player take it?
He felt a little silly for sending his character too far ahead of the rest of the party. But the death was so amusing and sudden that it lightened the blow.

4. How did you handle the PC’s death?
It was a great way to score my first PC kill!

5. How did the style of your game affect the answers to questions 2, 3 and 4?
The campaign was a whimsical blend of dungeon crawling high fantasy adventure and geopolitical intrigue. There was a strange light heartedness to the campaign that allowed the players to really play the PCs the way that felt right with out any pressure to out perform one another.

6. In retrospect, do you wish things had gone differently?
Not in the least. I drew a character portrait post-mortem and he still hangs on the wall of the game room, watching over the players reminding them death is around every corner.

Luhoran. A female kitsune ex-sex slave Rogue with a bone to pick with the world.

(The PC had been RPing her in a free-form for years. It isn’t as bad as it sounds.)

2. How did the PC die?

While time-traveling into the campaign’s equivalent of thw Wild West, she found herself on the wrong end of a critical. From a hunting rifle.

3. How did your player take it?

Not well — especially when the party got her reincarnated on the cheap and she came back as a kobold.

4. How did you handle the PC’s death?

I gave a slight description from her POV of the death event, tacked on an I’m Sorry, and let it go.

5. How did the style of your game affect the answers to questions 2, 3 and 4?

Well, first off, it used rifles in D&D. Second off, the game was really rather light-hearted; hence, the kobold.

6. In retrospect, do you wish things had gone differently?

No. Why?

It was an online session. I didn’t even roll for that crit.

I’m not gonna lie: I wanted that character DEAD. The group had a wonderfully serious dynamic, until this player (new to D&D) found out that her character had the freedom to sleep with every whore in town. (The char was, of course, bisexual.) The game then became “let’s all just have fun screwing around” — sometimes literally. After several attempts to get the party back on track (this was one of them) I finally just discontinued the campaign.

2. How did the PC die?
I misread the rules on wandering monsters, making them a lot more frequent in the little sample adventure that came in the boxed set. The party spent the whole adventure running from them. When the rest of the party went down to a terribly overpowered ambush from two sides, he decided to run for it. He had lots of treasure, but wasn’t the guy with the map or the torch. So I made him remember the turns to get out and some kind of check to feel his way. He found the entrance, navigated the spiked pit trap, and was heading for daylight. I rolled wandering monsters again, and got 3 kobolds…but on the other side of the pit…but wielding javelins. They needed a 20 to hit him, and he had 3 hit points left. On that dinky little, rounded-corner d20 that came in the box, out in the open, I rolled 20..and 1 point of damage. Then 20…and 1 point of damage. And you guessed it, 20 again.

3. How did your player take it?
Stunned silence. Followed immediately by, “That was so cool, let’s try that again.”

4. How did you handle the PC’s death?
Just fine at the time. I suspected my understanding of the rules was not so hot, but we went through another 4 or 5 parties that weekend before I got a chance to review.

5. How did the style of your game affect the answers to questions 2, 3 and 4?
That set me on a trajectory of playing strictly by the rules, then over-reaction into blatant fudging all the time, before I finally settled to my current style of very careful zero fudge. I never forgot how much fun we had when all the dice were in the open. (We only had the one set.)

6. In retrospect, do you wish things had gone differently?
I wish I had picked up on a better mix, sooner, but I wouldn’t trade that first weekend for nothing.

The one character decided to make a last minute attempt to stop this thing by sacrificing a 12 foot long magic draining chain. Since there wasn’t a clear definition if he would be able to act before the blast went off I had him roll percentile dice and gave him only a 10% chance. He rolled right at the 90% he needed and threw the chain into the big blast. It negated it and while the dragon was still able to claw them and got some of the party members down to critical, it saved them.

I would have hated to TPK them, but didn’t want to fudge such a big important thing. It definitely caused a sense of tension (in game) and worry at the time since they knew TPK was a possibility, and a huge sense of relief and accomplishment that they actually succeeded.

I always like the idea of player death being out there, but I rarely ever use it.

1. Tell us a little bit about the PC.
I was running Call of Cthulhu d20, normally a game that has lots of PC deaths. However this game was a bit different: everyone was playing a college student and related well to their characters. Jason was a psychology major whose ineptitude at computers was his defining feature.

2. How did the PC die?
Everyone was in the groove of investigating campus weirdness, and discovered a sunken city beneath the campus. They found various artifacts that depicted the squid creatures that the Native Americans battled. Meanwhile, they were picking up these artifacts, and I thought they’d use these to fight against the main Squid creature, or at least show some discretion… instead, one of the PCs charged the thing, without any kind of weapon, and was heavily damaged right away. Jason stepped up and held the thing back, and heroically sacrificed himself to hold back the creature as everyone else fled (still ignoring the use of the artifacts). Jason’s head was soon crunched.

3. How did your player take it?
Well, considering it was the same characters since the beginning of the game, and introducing a new character was going to prove difficult. (This player also DMed D&D and had no problems with TPK’s, so it was almost poetic justice.) He was genuinely worried about not being able to play anymore though.

4. How did you handle the PC’s death?
After it happened (and I decided not to fudge any die rolls), I thought about ways to bring the character back, but it would all seem suspicious. However, without any encouragement from me, one of the other PCs started to put a plan into motion. She recovered his body from underground, stashed his body in a Bell Tower, and noted that on her character sheet was a Book that she had discovered on the very first adventure to summon an Elder God. The party was understandably hesitant about using it, so I had forgotten it existed. Soon, the ritual was used (which involved a new human sacrifice- did I mention this pc was a little unhinged?) and she summoned an Elder God and said to it, “Bring my friend back to life.”

It was genius, and built upon everything else well, so I let it work (though he came back a bit… wrong.) Both the PCs lost some serious sanity, but it kept the player in the game, and ended up being a great adventure AFTER the one I had planned. The summoner also did not tell the rest of the party she was doing this- so in character they began to morn, and then were surprised (and suspicious) when he showed up alive…

5. How did the style of your game affect the answers to questions 2, 3 and 4?
In other games, especially D&D, death wouldn’t have seemed like a big deal, and resurrection less so. The very real threat that there would be no good way to introduce someone new and have them be as interesting a character as the previous one made it sting, but the party dealt with the situation in a way that I hadn’t thought of.

6. In retrospect, do you wish things had gone differently?
In some ways yes, other ways no. In retrospect it was a really bad adventure- I filled in a little backstory, but then threw in a combat that was fairly meaningless and had a strong risk of PC death. I also didn’t give enough hints to the PCs about how to approach it. However, the death and resurrection lead to some of my all time favorite rpg moments, so it worked out despite my GMing.