Do any of you actually insta-kill 1st level characters with critical hits, or do you fudge rolls, redesign encounters, or introduce house rules to avoid it?
I roll dice openly. My one concession to reducing sudden death is a house rule that PCs add their level to the negative hit points total at which they die.
I'd rather have a death at level 1 to remind players not to take survival for granted than a death at level 5 when the PC has become integral to the campaign's plot.
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I'd rather have a death at level 1 to remind players not to take survival for granted than a death at level 5 when the PC has become integral to the campaign's plot.
Remember, though: This thread is not about characters dying in general. It's about low-level characters dying (not merely getting knocked out) in one hit, going from full health to below negative Con without any chance of reacting or being saved by their companions.
To be clear, I enjoy hardcore games, too. Some of the best stories I have about gaming emerge when a player character dies in some heroic fashion. This isn't about reducing the game's difficulty or risk, just toning down the frequency of insta-killing low-level characters, especially those played by people new to Pathfinder (or RPGs in general).
I'd rather have a death at level 1 to remind players not to take survival for granted than a death at level 5 when the PC has become integral to the campaign's plot.Remember, though: This thread is not about characters dying in general. It's about low-level characters dying (not merely getting knocked out) in one hit, going from full health to below negative Con without any chance of reacting or being saved by their companions.
My very first D&D game in 1979 resulted in a total party kill in the first room. The players and the DM were inexperienced.
However, the PC death that most resembled the one-shot kill from full hit points happened to a 4th-level druid in 1983. The party was mixed levels since characters joined the existing party at first level, and the DM assigned XP proportional to level so it stayed at mixed levels. My druid reached 4th level in a party with average level 6 or 7.
A drow wizard suddenly stepped out of a room and cast fireball, relying on his own saves to protect himself because under the old AD&D rules, the fireball filled the corridors with fire until it expanded to its full volume. My druid was around the corner and never saw the drow before the fire killed him.
The death was disappointing.
Do any of you actually insta-kill 1st level characters with critical hits, or do you fudge rolls, redesign encounters, or introduce house rules to avoid it?
In the games I run in Pathfinder, I use the Hero Points from the Advanced Player's Guide. The Cheat Death option gives the player character one chance to survive bad luck. That is all they ever needed and it does feel like paying a heavy price to survive.
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My very first D&D game in 1979 resulted in a total party kill in the first room. The players and the DM were inexperienced.
Yeah, a lot of us old people probably have stories like that, but the truth of the matter is: There weren't a lot of options for nerds like us back then. It was either the handful of RPGs that existed (which were all confusing jumbles of tables and charts) or tactical war games.
In the modern RPG environment, if you TPK a bunch of newbies in their first experience with Pathfinder, they're just going to go back to World of Warcraft... or, if they still want to to tabletop RPGs, they'll just move on to any of the hundreds of others out there.
Using Hero Points allows players a chance to avoid insta-death at any level. I like that they give the players a bit of control over their own destiny.