Character Body Count

[doc the grey]

How many characters has a single player lost in a game you've run? My current record is one of my new players with 2 gone in about as many weeks, how bout you?

[pobbes]

I would say 4, but it is kind of cheating. The player was pretty new to the game and very much an instigator of trouble within the group so my players conspired for him to die, repeatedly. One character was killed within ten minutes because he literally walked up and threatened the party. The others killed him and tried convincing me to give them xp for a random encounter. I got them kicked out of the bar before they could loot the corpse. After about three tries he finally seemed to get it right and lived (or at least was brought back to life) for the rest of the campaign.

[Phasics]

Does a Tomb of Horrors run count with multiple spare characters ;)

[doc the grey]

Phasics wrote:

Does a Tomb of Horrors run count with multiple spare characters ;)

lol I would say only if it's like an actual campaign with character development and some rp instead of straight dungeon runs if that makes any sense.

[Borthos Brewhammer]

A buddy of mine loves to make characters which is great, but every new idea he has he wants to play. He'll go through a bunch of characters in a long campaign just because of purposely killing them off for a new guy.

[mem0ri]

We generally don't have a lot of repeat-fatalities with single players ... most in one campaign is probably twice ... though definitely not one right after the other.

[PSY850]

I think the highest body count for one player during one campaign for me is 2 deaths. Oddly enough the first one I killed off for story purposes, then the second one died with almost perfect timing for the first one to be brought back from hell wulfgar style to finish out the storylines involved. As a player on the other hand we used to have a DM who was a total hard ass and almost played like he wanted to win. one day for the weekend game within 3 minutes of starting both myself and the other rogue in the party died to a trap at least 5 cr's higher than we should have been facing. Turns out that the other guy would have had to roll a 19+ to disarm it, and my character who was totally maxed out and optimized for trap finding and disarming only brought it down to a 16+. A little later we ran into some odd dragonesqe monster with a freezing gaze attack that had a DC so high evne the barbarian needed a 15+ on the die to survive it. At the end of the night we had 11 character deaths in one session, with me having 3 of them and another player having 2.

Asta
PSY

[cranewings]

I've had one guy die three times in a single campaign, about 6 months time.

He's one of those anti-authority players who will try to GM while playing. If I flat out tell him that something will kill his character, he will do it, even if it isn't necessary, just to protest my assertion that such and such will kill him. One time he walked directly into a disintegrate trap because, even though he didn't need to, he wanted to show that he thought it was stupid there was a trap on a certain spot... so he got dusted.

[pobbes]

I know I already posted, but seriously, where is Wes from the CheeseGrinder on this thread? I'm trying to find if they ever made an Acheesement for most characters killed for a single player.

[Mike J]

Does death after easy access to Raise Dead count? If so, the count is pretty high - over 9 months every character died at least twice. The front liners died 4+ times each. I think I had one player get killed again before getting rid of the negative levels from the previous raising - so he was walking around with 3 permanent negative levels for the better part of a in-game week, then 2 the next week, etc.

But if you mean roll-up a new character death, than the count is extremely low. You have to excel at being stupid to die in my game if you can't easily be raised. As a GM, I don't like the disruption making a new character creates. But, I'll kill ya if you've earned it.

[Zahubo]

The highest bodycount for my group, was when we were playing Council of thieves, I think our gm ended with having killed us 23 times during the campaign.
That said our ranger took most of the deaths, so he was more or less jumping in and out of the afterlife during most of the campaign.

[Evil Lincoln]

I have one PC who is trying to die... not suicide mind you, he's just at peace with it and so not risk-averse. He wants to set the record for first player to lose two PCs in the campaign (currently 3 dead PCs, all from different players).

[Corum76]

In my Age of Worms campaign i killed the pcs 21 times until now. We are now in Kings of the rift part. I guess the total bodycount until they manage to reach the grand finale against kyuss will be about 30.

[Kurt Grossman]

Among my favorite gaming quotes: "Character death is NOT a reward!

[thenobledrake]

That depends on if "lost" includes those that step out of the plot line to become NPCs at moments that seem right to the player (example: a cleric tasked with hunting undead leaving the party to join the NPC vampire hunters that were encountered while the party was focused on some other task.)

If yes, then 3 so far (over the course of the last 10 months and nearly 5 levels of play).

If not, then 2 - one in a fight with a dragon he talked the party into hunting in hopes of treasure, and the other was poisoned as part of a captured enemy's negotiation for release ("I poisoned your two friends, I can give you the antidote before they die if you you release me and my friend.) that the party refused... he didn't make his save.

...not a lot of death tends to happen in my Pathfinder campaigns...

Now, if we talk other games - I once played 5 different characters in the span of a 5 month campaign and all of them died (along with a significant number of other players' characters) thanks to some pretty terrible DM action.

And then there is Dungeon Crawl Classics - my current campaign PC kill count is at 32, though only 3 of those died after reaching 1st level.

[Iomma]

Only Pathfinder? 13. My entire history as a GM? Countless. I run very high mortality rate games, and with my running group, I kind of have to. Course, being more clever than your players only works once lol. As a player killing other players? I'm up to a PC Kill Count of 103, and I'm not very proud of it. Nothing derails a campaign worse than stabbing your entire party in the back and coming out on top. I'm banned from playing Evil characters or Chaotic Neutral ones.

Still screws the party Conjurer Fetishist when the Orc Cleric casts Protection From Good. Nothing can make a player feel more worthless at lower levels than watching them burn a spell that only lasts a handful of rounds only to discover it's useless. By passed via the more 'neutral' summons, but still.

I don't always run 'cruel GM' games, and typically warn the players ahead of time the difficulty they will be facing off against, and a few players actually enjoy the challenge.

[Rev. Theo D. Williams]

I've had 5 deaths in the first two chapters of Carrion Crown. Three of those were that same player. They seemed to gravitate toward rivers (pun intended). I've only had four deaths in the prior two campaigns I've run. First campaign I was new to GMing and soft on the party. The second campaign only got about 40% done before hiatus due to life events for everyone.