I remember semi-fondly your Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign journal, with the "send in the clones" set-up. ;)I have no idea what you're talking about. ^^I think I've killed more or less two characters per campaign. Not for a lack of trying, but my guys are genuinely good at avoiding character death, especially at the higher levels. Also, I am not perfect in adjusting AP encounters so that they always threaten competently built player characters.
Seriously, where is Turin? I think he'd win this thread hands-down with his GM'ing style. ^^
;) Hey, they only shoved a wall of iron atop the PCs down a glorified ventilation shaft!
And I didn't even read that part, but it sounds glorious. ^^
And I didn't even read that part, but it sounds glorious. ^^
5 successful aid another checks helps a lot. It was glorious ... briefly, for those poor simulacrums. ^^
On topic, I couldn't really provide a "kill rate" per se. At a guess it is on a descending scale over time. Granted, that's a pretty shallow slope since we're talking about a roughly 30 year GMing curve. <grin>
In Ye Olde Days of Yore, probably at least 2-3 per session was the norm.
In 3e, the fatality rate started shallow (1-2 a session), spiked massively at 3-4 per session largely due to far greater system mastery than most of the players of the time and has decreased to where it might average - not accounting for Hero Point expenditures or the like - at 1 every other session at the present time.
Keep in mind that most of the time "back then" the accepted practice was to write in Roman numerals after a character's name. It made it super easy to get back into the game and kill that/those rat bastich villain(s). Like, a minute, tops.
Different game systems have different expectations. At certain points in D&D/Pathfinder, death is oft times little more than a downtime inconvenience barring house rules to the contrary.
In other game systems, death is a huge deal, so there's little call for it barring either
- (a) martyrdom - something I tend to be guilty of. Example: passing the GM a note saying that my engineer has rigged both a cockpit button trigger and a vital sign remote trigger to detonate a starship's reactor and liquid hydrogen fuel tanks as an 'insurance policy' - GM forgot about it - Hugely Nasty Bad Guys were coming, so I set of the greatest explosion in space due to being docked in a refuelling bay of a rather large space station at the time of detonation when I knew that these jerkfaces were going to capture/kill us all and blow up the station anyway - they really should have done a wee bit more damage, since pushing that cockpit button was my last conscious act;
- (b) Incredible Stupidity - " I know, let's go into the hospital from that Chow Yun Fat movie with the Tong running guns out of the basement! Surely we can get stitched up with no one the wiser there!" " Uh, you're running from the Tong guys ... " " Nah, we're good to go! " " Okay, you wake up dead. Your toe tag says 'accidental overdose of general anesthetic for multiple gunshot wounds'. " " ... Oh, well, yeah, that wasn't so bright an idea after all. " " Ah ... nope. "
- or (c) Completely Unavoidable Bad Luck with no alternatives available.
So excepting Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu, a massive kill rate is unheard of in my non-D&D campaigns. Paranoia hasn't been a going concern since ~1990, and CoC is just plain deadly - although the newest 7th edition rules I've not seen just yet. Usually CoC results in committals to asylums barring extreme stupidity. Such as making the Italian Fascists very, very mad at you at a time when they have bored mountain troops and a few capitol ships on standby. Murdering party officials in cold blood, in front of a LOT of witnesses ... yeah, pretty good way to get shot full of holes and filled full of lead. If they capture you... eek.