Death in P&Ps...

Okay, so I just watched a video of this GM talking about how he intends to kill one of his player characters tonight.  And I can't say how much I disagree with this notion.  And it stimulated to write this post.

First off, let me categorically state that I am utterly opposed to planning to kill one of the player characters.  That seems like killing for the sake of it.  Like its some power-trip for the GM.  It has no place, IMHO, in mature gaming.  And if a player found out that you set out to kill their character - that you had that objective in mind before you even started the game - I don't think they'd be particularly happy with you.  For a start, a GM has ultimate power, above all the gods, and so killing a player is easy, if thats what they want to happen.  But as a wise man once said, with great power comes great responsibility.

The only time I would condone planning to kill a PC, is under these particular circumstances.  And I've found it works really well to build tension.  Sometimes when I'm running a game, one of my experienced players can't make the full session (I tend to game on occassional long weekends these days as mentioned in a previous post), but want to come along for a few hours one evening.  If this is the case, and if it fits the game, I ask them if they mind if I kill their character.  And I dont tell the other players this is going to happen. In these cases, having a player turn up for a cameo - especially at the beginning of the game.  With the other players thinking the cameo player is there for the full session, it comes as a terrible shock when the cameo PC dies after a few short hours, or in the opening scene.

Or perhaps the cameo player rocks up mid-game.  Whatever the case, I let the other players believe that the cameo player (I never openly refer to them as that) is going to be there for the rest of the game.  They're just a regular player.  And wham, I kill them off within a few short hours and it brings shock and tension to the remaining players and their characters.  -Man, this guy is serious, he's not pulling any punches!-  It works great in any game, but especially horror games which hang off their atmosphere more than any kind of roleplaying.  Some genres are more forgiving than others for allowing comic asides.  My advice is to avoid them in games where you want players to feel fear and dread.

So apart from that specific example, where you pre-plan with the player's approval that you're going to use their character as shock-tactics to instil fear into the surviving party members, by having them think you're that brutal.  I do not condone planning to kill of a PC.  It's just to easy anyway.  You're the GM, you decide what happens.

So when do I kill off PCs?  Death can be a tricky concept to manage in P&P games.  On the one hand, players invest a considerable amount of time and effort in developing and playing their characters, so you don't really want to go round slaughtering them willy-nilly.  That said, you also don't want them to think their characters are 'immune to the plot' as John Wick puts it.  As a GM you often tread a fine line between wanting to kill the PCs to maintain realism and tension, and not wanting to kill them so at least the majority of them experience the full story.  After all, much of GMing is about crafting an immersive world in which the players contribute to the story.

I'll happily kill off a PC if the player is repeatedly doing something stupid.  Not heeding the warnings, trying to take on too much.  Generally playing unrealistically.  This has happened a few times in my games.  On one particular occassion, in a fantasy game, the players were tricked into opening a daemonic gate.  As the rift between worlds began to form, one particularly reckless player said he dived in.  I looked at him sternly, hopefully coveying with my expression: "are you freaking nuts?" and gave them once chance to reverse their decision.  They repeated they wanted to jump into the gate.  So I took them to oneside, described in detail the experience of doing so and what unimaginable horrors awaited them on the other side.  I then gave them an extremely hard sanity check to flee.  They MADE their sanity check but refused to budge!  I shook my head in amazement and led them back to the table.  I then announced to all the players the results of this one reckless player's actions.  And descibed how bits of him - by all means not all of him - just some random bits, were emitted from the gate a few moments later, bubbling, hissing and still writhing, as if some warped fragment of life still possessed some of the parts, a quivering cheek, a blinking eye torn from its socket.  And some greasy loops of intestine which defyed gravity in the vicinity of the gate, and hung there, ejected the last of its faecal matter.

In my next post, I'll talk about some interesting ways you can handle death.