The player in question had never played a tabletop before beginning this game back in august. I had the half-orc ranger already made up, because I like to have a couple random characters on standby. He wanted to play, so he picked that one, and since then he has done nothing but study the CRB. He finally decided he was ready to take it more seriously and make his own character from scratch, and he chose to make a sorcerer. I can't say I blame him.
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If I want one of my characters gone then I find a reason for them to commit suicide.
I don't allow suicides in my game when a player is getting bored with their character.
If they are bored, they can make up a new character and then together, we come up with a reasonable story of why the old character is no longer adventuring (retirement, family emergency, etc). From that point, the character becomes an NPC with the possibility or returning later if the player changes their mind.
The player in question had never played a tabletop before beginning this game back in august. I had the half-orc ranger already made up, because I like to have a couple random characters on standby. He wanted to play, so he picked that one, and since then he has done nothing but study the CRB. He finally decided he was ready to take it more seriously and make his own character from scratch, and he chose to make a sorcerer. I can't say I blame him.
Ok, that's a fair deal.
I won't say that I would prohibit the suicide of one of my PCs so much as I'd say that if that were expressed as a desire, I would attempt to either have them give me a damn good reason why or else try talk them out of it and perhaps collaborate with them to come up with a better reason for their character to die than just because the player felt like it. If the player didn't have any good reason for causing their character to commit suicide (e.g. "because I can"), I might be inclined to think they aren't taking my game seriously enough, and if that's the case they become unwelcome at my gaming table.
Yeah, what Frank and Reddog said. Please don't sabotage a serious game just because you want attention and are too lazy to come up with an actually clever resolution. If you want your PC to ride off into the sunset, have them ride off, or work out a reasonable solution with the GM.
If it's just a mindless hack-and-slash campaign, fine. Otherwise, suicide is not only needlessly dark, it's really lazy and stupid, and will probably hurt any tone the player is trying to set.
I once played in a lighthearted, "cute" game that got totally screwed up when one player decided he wanted to go out "with a bang". So he had his character get killed by a blow that wasn't supposed to kill. The GM made the mistake of letting it stand, and suddenly we were trapped in a much darker story than we'd signed on for.
Well, then we go back to the problem of "laziness". Suicide is an incredibly serious matter, and to just use it as a cheap means of disposing of a character...I mean, how would it go over if a TV show used suicide to get rid of every single character they had to write out?
Wait, so I need you to clarify, am I conflating something?
I can't tell you how many times I've had to remind my players that what we do every Tuesday night is just a game. I take GMing my games seriously enough, but I also take into account the lightheartedness (or lack thereof) of my players. In the case of these guys, they're all pretty into the story and their characters. So, in this particular game, if you don't take the game seriously then GTFO. The other people at my table would be more GRR-y about it than I would. If you wanna play a purely frivolous game, there's always Munchkin.
I think you're conflating the in-game action with the real-life action. Or something. The word's starting to sound like a not word. Conflating. Conflatingconflatingconflating. What the f!&%, I think you just made this word up.
He didn't, it means to combine two things into one.
Same thing happened for me. GM went overboard and basically killed the table because "he wanted to have some fun, too" and ended up wiping out a group of 6th level adventurers as a show of "this is what I can do".
If the GM feels the need to "have some fun too", he's doing it wrong. Everyone should be enjoying themselves. If he doesn't have a good time being a referee/director/storyteller, he has no business GMing in the first place.
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That's also where I was coming from. As I said before, I am not a very big fan of railroading, but if a player comes to a game and tells me his character drank bleach before bed I'm going to tell him to come up with something a better than that. I might even, I don't know, kill him with some draconic sorcerers.
Now, once the characters better arm themselves, gain a few more levels, and then accompany the centaur chieftain on his mad plot to raze an entire twelve-mile hex of forest to the ground, find themselves in the middle of a horrific scene of centaurs (that they can't stop or reason with) killing elf women and children, and fall victim to an ancient elven blood-curse from the defeated leader of the savage elf tribe, then I might accept one or two of them committing suicide as an acceptable means to move on to another character.