A thought hit me...not many people really die in PFS adventures. I mean, I have a lvl 4 character. I was thinking back about how many people died for him to reach that level...
Out of 10 adventures, roughly 25 people were killed (not counting prisoners taken, undead, elementals or demons, none of whom count as a 'death.' However, humans, elves, half-elves, troglodytes...pretty much any sentient creature counts). With an average of 6 players per table, that's about 4 people who died so that this dwarf could reach level 4 and could get some gold.
I was wondering, how many people have died for your characters to get where they are?
Define "people".
However, humans, elves, half-elves, troglodytes...pretty much any sentient creature counts).
My half orc inquisitor has probably killed over 200 sentient beings to get to level 15. to be fair most of them are hard-coded evil and didn't accept the chance to surrender.
Goblins, gnolls, intelligent undead...if they are sentient creatures then it counts.
I wouldn't count animals though, as (except for the definition of a very small group of people), animals aren't people.
And Darigaaz...that's quite the body count.
Particularly if one factors in my gaming career from the age of eleven or so, the stack of bodies would probably stretch to the orbit of Neptune...
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Lets just be honest and say our packs of murder hobos are not short on body count. The world of the fantasy rpg is outrageously violent... I was watching a video the other day on youtube that talked about the escalation of violence in rpgs and he mentioned that almost all rpg characters are the pyscopath that goes from name calling to a murder in zero seconds. Theres never any actual escalation that sane real human beings would have to an altercation. You don't shout, posture, maybe push and shove, you almost always skip straight to your most lethal means of engagement immediately.
Goblins, gnolls, intelligent undead...if they are sentient creatures then it counts.
I wouldn't count animals though, as (except for the definition of a very small group of people), animals aren't people.
And Darigaaz...that's quite the body count.
well when your adventure takes you through several tribes of goblins, gnolls, a pack of araneas, one group of kobolds, a buried city full of undead, a pack of lamia and evil werelions, etc. it starts adding up.
EDIT: Oh yeah, one encounter was like 16 dretches at the same time
My dwarven slayer has killed:
10 cannibals, 1 of which was high level
7 ghouls
3 rats
A jungle goat
A big lizard
A weird aberration that shoots out a tongue to reel in things
6 skeletons
A 2nd level core rogue NPC at 1st level with a single swing, an hour into the first session, in solo combat
A giant crab.
He is probably going to keep killing things, frankly. He is uncomfortably good at it. In his backstory, he has also killed
An ogre
3 dwarven nobles
And a teenage dwarf shoved down a mineshaft.
Is not a good man.
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My 7th level Half Orc Empiricist Investigator in Mummy's Mask has killed...a lot of stuff really. Too much to keep track of which things he struck the death blow on specifically. Maybe 10 or so? Maybe more like 20? I must admit I really don't keep track.
Most of the things he's killed have been undead or Evil Outsiders, though, and he's only killed someone in cold blood twice (taking one guy to the authorities was circumstantially nearly impossible, plus he was a cult member who'd just tried to kill us, and the other was a temporarily unconscious invisible stalker who'd just tried to murder my character's cousin), generally preferring to turn people over to the proper authorities if possible.
He is a nice person...PCs (at least weapon users) just wind up with really high death tolls (by most standards) in the course of doing business.
My highest level PC was a 13th level tier 4 mythic battle cleric. If I count kills made by party members (that I assisted with spells and healing) I would say about 60 kills, give or take. This is only "people" as defined by Grumbaki.
This is quite a fun thread, thanks for posting! :P
My most successful character, a 5-20, killed
An assassin named Noname, who later came back to life as an intelligent undead and became a teammate.
Two Mind Flayers.
An Aboleth.
A Bandit.
Two guys in an arena fight that came back to life after the fact. They were cool.
A pit fiend (I did about 1/4 of the damage, so I'm counting it.)
I think that's all the intelligent things we killed to get to that point. For the most part it was just big monsters. And aside from the bandit we killed, all the intelligent beings we killed either came back to life, or were objectively Evil.
Damn, that ain't bad.
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I believe my 5th level Sorceress in Serpent Skull has not killed anyone yet
All the distasteful killing was done by the nice martials
After she heavily debuffed their opponents of course
Haha yeah my slayer is in Serpent's Skull! He did all that before he even hit 3rd level. He was the party martial but he sorta just did a lot of damage, and so he ended up taking most of the kills.
Also,
My slayer is kinda scary...
Oh, and I forgot that he actually killed a fellow PC while under a Dominate Person. That counts I think.
I feel like if you contributed to the death of a enemy, you can add him to your kill list.
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Does it count as having "killed" someone if you raised them from the dead later...?
>.>
(This changes the answer rather significantly.)
Up close and personal? I dunno, a couple hundred.
But if we count how many people certain characters of mine have killed by doing things like manipulating an orc army into butchering a nation or destroying cities by making pacts with powerful beings... Well that's quite a bit higher now isn't it?
The body count in PF is nowhere remotely close to that in 1e, where a room might easily contain 2 dozen opponents (=1 fireball). Somewhere I have a list of everything a PC killed on his way to about 10th level, and it numbers several hundred. And that's just confirmed killing blows.
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Oddly, our alternate campaign is one that is chaotic evil -- and we tend to not kill. It's harder to sell someone into slavery if they are dead. It spoils the profit margin.
(Obviously not a PFS campaign).
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Do you count the flakes when it snows?
And do you count the leaves when they fall?
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Do you count the flakes when it snows?
And do you count the leaves when they fall?
How many loaves of bread have you eaten in your life?
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It tends to differ from character to character.
The only character of mine to directly take a living sentient life was my monk, due to a critical hit. She didn't mean to.
The character of mine to actively attempt to take the most lives was my magus, who contributed in several fights but never landed the killing blow.
Meanwhile, the character who has contributed to the most deaths was my bard, who actively attempted to resolve battles without blood, but a trigger happy archer under the influence of Inspire Courage tended to turn enemies into red paste.
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After some research, barring PFS specials that I don't have access to, I have done a tally for my level 10 Ninja. He has killed, or had a hand in killing;
90 Humans
6 Half-orcs
2 Goblins
23 Tengu
1 Grippli
1 Vishkanya
4 Ifrit
37 Monstrous Humanoids
7 Fey/Other
5 Armies/troops of Human/Tieflings
When I said I would return it after we finished our meeting he got angry and started casting a spell. I didn't know what he was casting, so AoO + crit=dead bard.
A homegame I'm in has a local tradition of Knife Fight Fridays in my characters home city. It started as a joke, but the other PCs rolled with it (three of us are from the same city) and the GM ended up canonizing it.
A lot of people have died in the climb from level 1 to 7.
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My Gnome lore Oracle started his campaign as a lowly bureaucrat... I don't *think* he's directly killed anyone? Maybe finished someone off with a bolt or something. However, he's summoned a good few planar buddies with blood on their hands, and by virtue of being at war, his party have killed quite a lot of humans.
Well, okay. There was that one time he freaked out and directly ordered the death of a Rakshasa who was minding his own business.
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Then there's my young, emotional manchild of a divine commander who's on multiple occasions met the child of people he killed in battle. He wants to follow the path of chivalry but is finding it to be a much more difficult experience than he imagined.
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My inquisitor probably has the highest body count of all my characters, considering both a combat-heavy campaign, and her being on the extreme end of Chaotic, having the philosophy that death generally is/should be preferable to captivity, and not trusting that turning any defeated enemies over to whoever would be a very good idea. (...and there was also that mercy killing people before another of the PCs got to them was definitely a part of it.)
There were some goblins, one orc, a couple of undead, a small band of giants, a skulk, some higher undead (slain with heal ;)), an evil mystic theurge and one elder dragon. All the others died by the hand of my group-members :)
To speak with Cohen the Barbarian it was a climb over mountains of skulls and wading through seas of blood. Being the healer, I know it took a lot of healing, curing, buffing and a couple of resurrections to get to level 17, even if I cannot remember all the casualties.
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Do they still count as sentient if I Feeblemind them first? There are formerly-intelligent undead that I have outright killed with the spell, on top of that...
The other consideration to put forth for some characters (mainly PFS) is how/whether you count GM chronicles. Do I count it as my players did it?
Looking back over my 15th level Psychic's career (much of the early levels were GM credits), he has remarkably few kills from things that didn't try to kill him first. Unfortunately, I don't have many totals at this point to quantify things, but I do have a "take prisoners" policy if possible. Usually, while a Feebleminded opponent will still view me as an enemy, they're not in great shape to do much about that after the fact.