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I do not seek or avoid character deaths. If they happen they happen. But for those looking to avoid deaths, use hero points. It's a good way to sort have a "get out of jail free" card without having to play the npcs like softies.
I have not had a character die yet, but they have gotten very close. In almost all instances they were up against a creature wih grab and/or constrict, and in almost all cases the hero points saved them.
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Obviously every game differs, but one of the thing that differentiates between role-playing and video games is that players generally become very attached to their characters, and that those characters are more than the accumulation of gear, feats and spells. My players put a lot of work into their characters from well before we ever start a campaign, usually collaborating on backstories and motivations before a single dice is rolled. As such, dying is rarely fun for anyone. In addition to that, we have a slightly different view on the role of divine magic (i.e. it shouldn't be purchasable at every corner store), so no one is running around with fistful of Raise Dead or Resurrection scrolls. Death is generally not fun for our players, but its also meaningful and as often as not, final.
I try to tailor difficulties for my group to keep them challenged and feeling threatened, but not to overwhelm or to 'punish' them for not having a well-balanced party. I have no problem fudging dice rolls or altering encounters on the fly to keep them from getting in over their heads. The goal from the outset is to weave a grand cooperative story, not to 'win' or to have a tactical answer to every possible threat beforehand. Players (and groups) should have vulnerabilities and imperfections and from time to time those should be exploited - but in service to the story, not as a means to their eventual end.
Generally speaking, when a number of deaths might occur its more likely that I'll have the PC's captured and divested of their gear, or an individual PC suffer a permanent disfigurement (usually with a mechanical penalty to go with it) rather than simply announce that they should role up a new character than can be awkwardly and unconvincingly be inserted into the campaign. As a result, deaths rarely take place and when they do its as often as not the result of an intentionally heroic sacrifice or a pre-determined out-of-game discussion with the GM.
In Skull n' Shackles out of four PC's we had no deaths until the climactic conclusion where 1 PC died quite heroically and set up an awesome epilogue for the campaign.
In Rise of the Runelords out of four PC's we had no deaths from beginning to end though there were a handful of near misses.
In Way of the Wicked we had one death in the second book, though that was as much a result of a discussion with the GM as anything else and it was played out to the enjoyment of all involved.
In Wrath of the Righteous, deep into the 5th book, we've had no deaths yet.
All in all its more likely that we lose a player than that a character dies, and its generally agreed that losing valuable gear, an eye or even a hand is better than having the character die. Jamie Lannister and his plight in Game of Thrones as well as his character development afterwards is a classic example of a better way to deal with a character than simply having him cut down on the bridge and forgotten about.
Loos of gear, serious injury or disfigurement and the death of valued or beloved NPC's have always been better ways to deal with my players than arbitrarily killing them due to bad luck or completely missing some random story element.
I never killed anyone as a GM and I don't want to. I don't have raise dead easy but a church should be able to cast it provided you have the body. Though it takes a character out of a campaign for time, having the rest of the party struggle to get the body to the church can be fun. True rez though is next-to-impossible and would require a quest from the church to achieve.
As a player, I had a character die and it was no big deal because I was raised shortly thereafter. This was a good thing because I got botched out by a damn animate house spitting a chair at me.
If you think there was no tension then I point you to another battle against a homebrewed monster. It was a construct the fed on people's souls. We fought against it and it was about to overwhelm us when my magus stood her ground and used everything she had left. It didn't kill it but it stalled it. My Magus was eaten and had 1d4 rounds before her soul was destroyed forever. That was climatic.
Really I don't need permanent death to make a campaign have tension. threatening the heroes and everyone they love with slavery or permanent imprisonment is plenty dramatic and probably even more evil. Either that was have the villain threaten to destroy/take over the whole world. It's not the character's deaths the players are worried about but everyone else's.
One night we had another DM homebrew a monster specifically to kill a specific player in our party. He wasn't exactly new to DMing, but the culture in our group was that people will die. A lot.
Funny thing is, his homebrew didn't actually kill that one party member, instead he revealed that he was actually chaotic evil all along (despite showing no RP like that) and betraying all of us. So the encounter killed 4 of the 7 people in our party and the target of the homebrew got away scott-free. Fun times. Needless to say, PCs die a lot in our group. I'm up to DM next, and I hope to change that.
GM'd more than a dozen PFS games
Currently GMing an AP in a home game, in Ch. 2 of Skull & Shackles
no PC deaths at all, but killed NPC Kyra during the one time I needed a pre-gen stand-in to complete a PFS table in Rise of the Goblin Guild
First campaign and 1 death so far. Has to be said it was an Oracle who walked up front and attacked Nualia in RotRL. So yes, kind of had it coming.
For me, it changes with the game. The harder and more time-consuming it is to create a replacement character, the more rare it should be for characters to suffer perma-death.
Pathfinder (and D&D 3.5 and 4E) all require a lot of time to build characters, especially after the first few levels, so I usually provide a reasonable availability of raise dead. Then I don't feel quite so bad about letting the dice fall where they may. (In my current Kingmaker game, I made Raise Dead off limits, and we use customized Reincarnate rolls instead - great fun!)
Just now going into the 6th chapter of Kingmaker, and I think I've had about 7 or 8 deaths, only one of which was "unrecoverable" (the player had to come up with a new character) - the rest led to reincarnations. But at least half of the deaths (including the one perma-death) have been the same player...
As a note, I make all my rolls in the open (so it's harder for me to fudge things, even when I realize I've made a scene unintentionally deadly).
And most PC deaths seem to result from two or more of a set of 3 common factors:
- Long falls
- Separating from the party (usually by positioning in combat somewhere the healers can't get to)
- Making incredibly foolish choices despite other-player-protests and strong DM warnings ("Are you sure you want to do that?" "Are you really sure?" And then the "BIG MISTAKE" eraser thuds down on the table facing the player who keeps saying "Yes!")
Design Manager
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I don't actively try to kill my player's characters, but I don't go out of my way to save them either. I think part of the fun of the game involves the risk/reward dynamic, and if there's no risk the rewards generally aren't very meaningful. We usually see the most deaths early in a campaign when characters are at their squishiest and players sometimes forget exactly how fragile they are and put themselves in precarious situations. If the party's first level Ranger wants to charge 3 ghouls while some of the party memebers are still catching up, more power to him. If he dies, it's a pretty natural and predictable outcome, and if he survives, he gets to be awesome. I'm not going to influence things either way.
I like assassin vines. When my party hits level 2 I usually throw in a solo assassin vine encounter at some point. It has resulted in a player kill or deus ex machina save (depending on the group) pretty much every time. Those things are damn dirty.
You'd think I'd learn but... I can't help it.
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I've been running with kid gloves on for years; the only death I've had over the last 5 campaigns were 2 PCs who actually suicided their characters and an animal companion. As I said though; I've been kind of nerfing it.
Then I rebooted my campaign. Again. Some returning players who were craving action/carnage and some new but experienced players. I decided to take off the training wheels and put them into a sandboxy part of my homebrew that also has a gi-normous megadungeon in the region.
I warned them up front: I will be rolling live and out front of the screens. Whatever wandering monster happens by, it might be out of your league. Decisions you make will have consequences. So on and so forth for a rambling 10 minute diatribe on how no holds would be barred.
They went for it. So far 2 deaths in 2 levels.
Both died very epically. One was a magus who charged into boiling hot chemical bath to retrieve a magic amulet that would end the curse on an entire forest. He pulled off spectacular rolls to achieve a feat steeply pitched against him.
The other was a paladin defending his party from a wyvern. The paladin was level 2 and the wyvern had the Simple: Young template on it. The thing grappled him, hoisted him into the air unconscious and tried to get away but the party from the ground/trees managed to hold it close enough for the cleric to channel enough healing to revive the paladin. Thus revived the paladin critted the beast with Smite running, did significant damage and was dropped forty feet through the canopy - AFTER taking a poisoned stinger to the chest for his trouble.
Thanks to timely healing and efforts from the other PCs it wasn't the stinger damage that killed him. It wasn't the fall that killed him. It was a spectacular succession of failed Fort saves and Con loss that laid the paladin in his grave.
I could see the looks on my players faces when the paladin died: they realize how serious I was about the game's potential danger. I'm not a killer GM nor am gunning for them. But this isn't the kind of game where there's areas for first level neatly divided from second and so on. A wyvern might happen by to pick off stragglers from a fight with goblins - be prepared to run.
I've been GMing for over 20 years (nobody else seems to want the job...) and I can confidently say that in that time I've never committed suicide.
On the other hand, last session the party did all sort of die... The bard was baleful polymorphed into a sheep, and then the wizard ran into the middle of the fight and broke his fully-charged staff of the magi... Though it was actually a dream, so they all survived. But they didn't know that at the time.
I think it's important to set expectations early. Players can feel betrayed if the game has kid gloves during the early levels and then suddenly gets deadly on them.
Death is just another status condition, and not even that hard of one to remove.
An answer of "it depends" is too dismissive, so let me delve into some details.
My general "kill rate" is just under one PC per AP book. But we have yet to have a permanent death in any campaign, except for when the player quit.
In Rise of the Runelords, I personally spent around 20 hours writing up backgrounds for all the PCs. So when they faced a TPK because of some totally-unfair conditions for 2nd-level characters (-4 to hit and -4 AC because of ambient conditions), I adjusted the conditions on the fly to -2 to hit and -2 AC and that was sufficient to allow the party to survive. Barely.
But the moment they had the resources for Raise Dead, all such considerations were off. Over Books 2-6 I had 4 PC deaths and a Feeblemind, all of which required church intervention to resolve. As other people have posted, once PCs hit 4th or 5th level their players are heavily-invested in them, but Raise Deads are readily available in most Golarion-based campaigns, including most of the APs.
In Carrion Crown, the GM declared a "ruthless, as-written campaign". In spite of that, there was only 1 "permanent" death and 4 "temporary" deaths. (Oh, and a near-TPK that the GM declared "all a dream" because even he thought it was too unfair). And the "permanent" death was because the player thought the situation was so unfair he got up and left the table. We had the money to raise him.
In Curse of the Crimson Throne it's my wife and kids. Totally different. I think we've had 1 death there, though I'm not sure we even had one. It's been a while.
We just started Wrath of the Righteous, and no one is particularly invested in their PCs yet, so if I accidentally kill one or two, I'm going to let the dice fall as they may.
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The dice decide.
If a fight starts getting "tight", the party should run. If they can't run, they should have planned better.
That being said, if the monsters are "having a bad night" I don't fudge my dice either.
I build challenging, motivating encounters, then let fate do the rest. [At least I try to :)]
Firsties? Usually one before they get to second level. Then maybe one every second level until they can afford Raise dead.
Not counting PC's where the Player wants them to die for some reason of course.
Generally, speking from personal experience if you do not modify AP and you have no excessive optimizers with giant levels of system mastery it should average about 4-5 deaths for an AP.
Excessive stupidity by players can throw things off, but finishing 2 AP and 2/3 of another with not especially great players supports these numbers. However, each Ap seems to have a few pivotal fights that are often hard.
Ultimately, the Dm should play to challenge their players.
We have a guy in our social group that no longer DM's who had excessivly high kill counts. Mainly from having NPC's ignore standing opponents whenver a PC was helpless.
So for example, we had one person DM a game to lvl 8 with 1 death, the above mentioned 'killer dm' took over at lvl 8 and we had 1 player go through a Pc every session for 3 sessions followed by a TPK.
Ultimately, DM's shouldnt confuse actively tyring to kill pc's with challenging them, if too many deaths happen players become disconnected from the story.
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I have a good amount of player deaths, some are die to the players not thinking (a barbarian with low hp grappled a mythic lich last game (it did not go well) other times a player died to a group of ghouls and a few bad saving throws. One failed his save vs a grave knights armor regeneration and it was not pretty. Often times it's a bad save or bad decision. As a player most games I play I rarely die but I am very careful, in one campaign it is expected one person die per session or more but raise dead scrolls are cheap as dirt in the world.
I think it's important to set expectations early. Players can feel betrayed if the game has kid gloves during the early levels and then suddenly gets deadly on them.
I could not agree with this more. It's very true.
Taking a sudden turn into serious isn't a great thing for a game. I experienced this first-hand in a game a couple years ago. The first session was great fun, with a lighthearted feel. The second session was like being the pinata at little league party. I and the other player began to hate the game with a burning passion. We tried a third session, but our lack of interest in the plot, it didn't go anywhere.
In answer to the OP: I average one character death per game. Only permanent if the player so chooses. I don't require a character to die in order for the player to switch to another, so it's extremely rare.
My overall philosophy when running is to make things exciting, and have the feel of risk and danger while mostly ensuring that death only results from stupid choices or the intention of self-sacrifice. I'm honestly more interested in telling a memorable story together with the players than in facing the players down in lethal combat constantly.
Edit: by per game I mean per story arc, not per session. Sorry, I realized that might be misleading.
Ive had 1 tpk before. That sucked big time and i hated it but i dont fudge the dice.
i will say the last time a player "died" it really pissed him off especially since i made him go to a different room and think of a new character in Carrion Crown book 1 after meeting a certain ghost. Ow he was red in the face and i know he was holding back from cussing me out and walking out....thankfully he stayed and bout 10 mins later was very happy and relieved.
Where's Turin when you need him?
Pathfinder? Never got a kill.
Shadowrun? LET THE BODIES PILE HIGHER! Lack of resurrection magic, highly lethal system and players with a tenancy to make dumb decisions add up to a lot of corpses.
Zero.
Granted, I haven't DM'd that much compared to how much I've played.
I'm quite happy with the number. I consider it best to take PCs to the edge, to make them fear death and defeat...but never quite cross the threshold. Walking that tight rope without fudging is hard, way harder than just indifferently wasting characters.
Now, I do "cheat" in some ways... One of the one shots was an arena fight monitored so that none of the participants could die. And in my current campaign each person in the party has both a 1/day ability to turn a death strike into one that leaves them at -9 hp (it's D&D 3.5, you die at -10) and stable and one of the players has a limited use immediate action ability to "see the future" and change it (he can force a reroll, let an ally move out of the way, etc...). The former's from the campaign setting, the latter I added in. I also point out spells like Breath of Life or the 3E Revivify and Close Wounds and encourage their use.
Also, I did kill off a PC a week after the player left after throwing a fit at another player and refused to come back. But...that's what happens when you go up close to a raging barbarian to deliver a color spray and he makes the save. ;)
I don't think that should count... It was basically an NPC at that point. I kill off NPCs with gusto.
The dice decide.
If a fight starts getting "tight", the party should run. If they can't run, they should have planned better.
That being said, if the monsters are "having a bad night" I don't fudge my dice either.
I build challenging, motivating encounters, then let fate do the rest. [At least I try to :)]
This is how I do it. My group isn't afraid of death, it just gives us a chance to burn through all the character concepts we're constant cobbling together. I ran Shackled City once and I think one of the players had about a dozen characters die over the course of the AP. AND, they got almost TPKed right at the end and lost Cauldron to the demodand forces.
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I rarely kill PCs, although if I run a campaign long enough we're likely to see one or two character deaths eventually.
I am not shy about throwing in really deadly encounters from time to time, but I accept that my players are generally better at the game than I am so it almost never comes off. They're a wily lot!
Also I do all my rolling in the open - no GM screen, and (almost) no fudging rolls.
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I DM Ravenloft,
Nuff Said
Not killed any PCs in an AP yet (run most of 1st 2 books of CoTCT, and most of book 1 RoTRL). My fortnightly 4e campaign last had PCs killed in late 2012. I killed my 6 yr old son's PC Ezren recently when putting 3 1st level Iconics up against a CR 4 Faceless Stalker; it felled Valeros too but Merisiel killed it! :D I was kind, and Ezren got Raised back in Magnimar at the cost of all the party's magic loot.
I guess on average I probably kill a PC per 10-12 sessions of play, but it varies a lot by rules system, character level, and player - some players are diehards, some lose PCs all the time.
I will never fudge for or against the PCs; I probably GM a bit more brutally with adult grognards than with 6 year old children, but my son is much better at keeping his PC & comrades alive than are some of my adult players, anyway. I think it's important to have a real risk of failure, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a *high* risk of failure. PF/3e is a particularly swingy & lethal system, so I'm more likely to have deaths there than in AD&D or 4e D&D. I houserule crits & saves in my PF game, which reduces lethality a bit.
I gm for one player mostly and every few sessions I have to fiat his character back to life after hints being ignored.
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I kill 100% of my players 100% of the time, immediately.
That is, whenever I get a chance to run my favorite game, Wraith: The Oblivion.
Other than that, our groups lean more heavily toward the style of the original poster (with the inclusion of the occasional heroic sacrifice). Even though death in game terms is relatively easy to overcome, for some reason no one in our group really feels comfortable with it. Most would rather make a new character than play one who has already died.
Which may be why I so rarely get to run my beloved Wraith games.
As others have pointed out, it doesn't help that death is cheap (really, really cheap - seriously, raise dead costs less than a longsword +1?!?)
Isn't it 5450 (5000 to do it yourself) for the raise dead and 2320 for the sword? Not to mention the price of the restorations?
As others have pointed out, it doesn't help that death is cheap (really, really cheap - seriously, raise dead costs less than a longsword +1?!?) in Pathfinder. Characters are more seriously handicapped by theft than they are by roasted alive by a dragon. Does that seem right to you?
Raise dead is too easy ?:Oh yeah. So the alternatives are:
Players: “Hey Bob, we have to go on a quest for about 4 nites of gaming in order to raise you, so I guess you can just stay home or you can play my Mount.”
Bob: “yeah, sounds like real fun. Look, instead- here’s Knuckles the 87th , go ahead and loot Knuckles the 86th body. He's got some cool stuff."
The whole idea of “death should mean something” becomes meaningless when we all realize that D&D is a Game, Games should be Fun, and in order to have Fun you have to Play. Thereby, when a Player’s PC dies either you Raise him or he brings in another. Raising is preferable story-wise, and costs resources. Bringing in another costs continuity and actually increases party wealth. Not to mention, instead of an organic played-from-1st-PC we have a PC generated at that level, which can lead to some odd min/maxing.
The third alternative is “Sorry Bob, Knuckles is dead. You’re out of the campaign, we’ll let you know when the next one is starting, should be in about a year or so.’ Really?
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I ran the Age of Worms AP for my face-to-face group, and the character corpses piled up pretty quickly.
None of the original character survived to the conclusion, and every player in the group had gone through at least 3 characters by the time they reached the Final Battle with
Kyuss
This was with a group of 6 characters, built on 20-point-buy, and me as GM nerfing a lot of the encounters.
I happened to catch Gamers: Dorkness Rising a year or so afterwards, and had to laugh at the player who created 50 back-up characters because he kept getting killed. It was awfully close to the truth, in our case.
I think we tallied up 23 character deaths over the entire campaign.
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My GM kill rate? Is probably too damn high. My philosophy is that the GM should not cheat, just as the players do not cheat. It is for this reason that I allow the dice to fall where they may, at least after the party has enough levels to survive. Critting someone to death with a pick wielding kobold at level 1 isn't fun for anybody, after all. Add my "the dice fall where they may" attitude with the fact that I generally roll hot while GMing (too bad I can't do it while playing, eh?) and you wind up with a pretty huge pile of bodies.
While I cannot provide an exact number, I would estimate around a hundred character deaths over the last year of me running games.