Character Death
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I agree it does depend on what exactly is being consented to. I’ve had one PK that I sort of consented to back in the day? A player I had known IC tension with pinged me wanting to RP, I said sure, we met up, there was an OOC warning that ‘this might turn violent if they dont’ like what they hear’.
And AFTER I said ‘sure, that’s fine, I’m good with whatever’, their werewolf buddy suddenly joined the scene and itg quickly became apparent that this was an assassination, not a ‘might turn violent’ thing. Dunno if that counts as me consenting to PC death. I guess it kinda does.
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I feel like “consenting to death” for me is, like — fully giving a player the choice. Or the player chooses to have their PC die in a scene. I think any death where a character’s death comes down to dice rolls in some way isn’t a fully consensual death.
That said, I do think it’s a sliding scale. A lot of games nowadays fall somewhere in the middle, rather than on the extremes; I feel like a general attitude of “keep players informed when they’re getting into situations where death is a possibility” has become a lot more common, and “you can be PKed on a whim for dumb, petty reasons” has become a lot less common.
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I am happy to risk death on a character that I love and want to keep playing if the death is part of an epic plot where I had a fair chance of survival if things went differently or maybe an unfair chance of survival, but a fair warning that this was very risky.
I would also need to feel like that the staffer was being fair. I have seen staffer make things harder on players they like less and it was probably never intentional, but bias working its way into things.
Clearly the only death by another player that I would find acceptable would be one that is well earned or one that I fully consented too as an intentional way to end a story.
I also don’t like character death or even heavily damage to a character (perm wounds, expensive hard to get equip loss and etc) for plot that is really small and not that important. I had a character suffer a big loss on a poorly ran plot that was a had zero impact on the overall storyline of the game, with the odds heavily stacked against us while the real heroes were in other scenes and that was sucky. I was like I would happily take this damage if my character helped to save the day or didn’t help to save the day, but just did something stupid to earn it.
But my character was not acting foolish. The storyteller just had different characters in different scenes in mind to be the real hero of the storyline. Our scene was largely a distraction minor scene for people who were not the heroes to be given a little something to do that ultimately impacted nothing. I felt like with the high risk, the chance of death and the damage we were taking to our characters some of which was perm damage they should have had our scene at least help the heroes save the day in some way. If that wasn’t doable, it should have been a low-risk scene so long as we weren’t being idiots.
In other words, a high-risk scene should come with high rewards unless the scene only became high risk because of characters foolish choices. And if staff is unwilling to give rewards (they helped save the day or whatever) to a particular group, they should keep the risk low.
However, if my character took this damage or even died, in the actual save the world scene, I would have been so happy with it.
And when I had characters, I loved and was not ready to depart with die in epic plot, I was quite happy with the outcome.
I do think that people who die by dice (if they were mature oocly about the death), should be given support in making a new character who while may not be as powerful as the character they lost, can start with some decent stuff
I actually quit a game over being n very high risk and near zero rewards scenes while the staffer’s buddies were in very low risk and very high rewards scenes.
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I also had a scene once where a staffer who disliked me ooc, gave me a dice roll diff that I probably had less than 5 percent chance of making and if I failed, my character would have been on shot killed by their powerful npc.
I made the roll, surprising myself and the staffer who wasn’t super amused.
That also turned my character into the big hero of the scene, which the staffer downplayed, and another character claimed it was them instead of me both ooc and ic who had that wild hero moment.
When I went into a second scene with said staffer, I had still extremely difficult rolls and almost died again and this scene came with almost no reward. My character dodged death a second time.
Same game as above, but I did quit. I realized that I had three choices, quit, play in the plot scenes until I finally fail the near impossible dice rolls and have a likely pointless death or play and avoid doing plot or staff run scenes. I decided just to quietly walk and vote with my feet and move on.
While I like a good death, I don’t like an unfair death and I decided not to stay around for it.
Or TLDR: I love a good death, but I think storytellers should be careful to make sure that high risk scenes come with high rewards.
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I haven’t seen a non-consent permadeath in more than a decade. Again, back on KotOR, there was a crewman of the Sith Empire who mouthed off to both superior officers and Sith, and when threatened with the brig, attacked a superior officer and Sith. They were OOCly told by a Staffer that it would likely result in character death, and that led to OOC yelling about how it wasn’t fair and they weren’t going to the brig and they would leave the game. The character chose to attack the other PCs, was killed, and left the game. Everyone was happier (save perhaps the player of the dead character).
On another note, one thing that I really appreciated from The Network was that the short seasons (4-6 months usually) meant that character death was less painful. You could have a complete arc for your character within a season, and end it with riding off into the sunset, death, a cliffhanger, or whatever else you liked, without worrying about being “behind” people who kept their character in the midst of their story. The only downside was that if there was a second season in the same world, you might have problems bringing your character back for another go-around (except during the Soap Opera season, that one would have been easy).
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I wonder if others have had players attempt things that would guarantee their death, explain this to them OOC, and they still push for it, and then when they failed and had to suffer the consequences, thrown a total fit.
In one case, the player of a Mage was chasing a bad guy across the rooftops of the city’s downtown area, and the bad guy used his hyper-science rocket boots to jump from the roof of one building to the roof of the building across the 4 lane street below. PC witnesses this, their character has the right skills and knowledge to understand what’s happened, but still chooses to attempt the jump themselves. Their character does not have hyper-science rocket boots, or even the Mage spheres that could feasibly allow them to get across the gap. I explain to them that they’re 14 stories up, the gap is easily 70 feet (four lanes of street + two sidewalks) and they have nothing to help them make that. Their response is “My character is a highly trained freerunner, and will be able to handle that.” I tell them if they attempt they’ll be subject to the falling rules, and likely also get hit by a car depending on how they roll. The roll goes poorly, they fall roughly 100+ feet, basically splatter on the ground. They didn’t die, but they hit that point in the OWoD health track where any single point of damage will kill them. It’s basically the “Aim for the Bushes” scene from The Other Guys but not funny.
They then threw a fit, and told me that I was concealing information from them, and quit the game without even giving the other PCs at the scene a chance to get down to them and help them. I asked the other players if they felt I was concealing things from the nearly dead player and they all agreed I had explained it well enough for them. The player in question didn’t come back.
Has anyone else been witness too or heard about this phenomenon?
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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It sounds like you were generous for not killing them and like they were being stupid.
That being said I feel for staffers who probably sometimes find themselves going…
That was really dumb and should probably kill them.
But I don’t want to kill their pc.
And omg the fit they are going to throw.
It sounds like you were more than fair by having them almost die, but not die.
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@MisterBoring said in Character Death:
Has anyone else been witness too or heard about this phenomenon?
Long ago I was the co-head (though this was referred to as god because good lord we were full of ourselves) of Metro 2 and also the Changeling wiz. I was running a Changeling scene and I forget a lot of the actual details on how this came about, but there was this Sidhe who was fighting a handful of Thallain during a plot I had been running for a bit. The sidhe had prided himself on being this impressive duelist and was OOCly a bit of an upstart by comparison to some of the more established characters. I warned him that the Thallain he was fighting, which were Shadow Courtiers (I wish I could remember what their kiths were, it was 2nd edition since this was back in the late 00s) were very accomplished and he could quickly find himself outmatched. I even gave him narrative reason to back down and flee, and he wasn’t part of a noble house that was particularly martial or had reasons to stand and fight. I think he might have even been an Eiluned. Anyway, he absolutely did not take me up on this. I explained that even if it’s not lethal, he may be captured. No change to his actions. I don’t remember the exact conversation, but I feel confident saying he told me he would go down fighting. There had recently been a lot of heroic battle on the game since we had just had this big Halloween weekend event thing.
Cut to getting, as I suspected, trashed by the NPCs. Man, he was pissed. He didn’t die. The goal of the Shadow Court was to acquire assets in the Freehold, not to kill them. I told him that he would end up being a prisoner and he threw a fit and quit the game. This actually left me in a lurch because we had some difficulties with our previous characters who had been in control of the Freehold (a Liam and a Dougal Sidhe pair who were transitioning out of the game) and I had hoped that this other Sidhe would step up to take the county.
I feel like there have been a handful of these kinds of cases at everywhere I’ve staffed except maybe Darkwater. I actually haven’t killed a lot of PCs, despite having staffed on places that had a fairly high death count. There were only a few times where it felt like it would be a fitting end to the character’s story and that the other player agreed. I think with this sort of thing where they get angry about it, people think they want to play through big consequences and that their luck will hold and they’re going to be a big damn hero that people will tell stories about, but come to realize that they have the same luck as anyone else. Then they realize that the heroics they attempted to perform weren’t worth it by comparison to what they stood to lose.
To quote Cormac Mccarthy, “Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased.” He was probably talking about pretending to be a werewolf on the internet here.
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@MisterBoring said in Character Death:
@somasatori said in Character Death:
I feel like there can be this push to misery-porn WoD games
I want a push to a different kind of WoD game. I want a WoD game that focuses very deeply on the struggle to maintain basic utilities when you’re a walking reality bending monster.
all i want is to run up the side of a building while wearing ten inch heels and then cut off an angel’s head with a gigantic praying mantis arm and nobody will let you do that anymore
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I love a good Actual Death For Realsies. It contributes to the scene, it raises stakes, it opens the door to the idea that this isn’t a sandpit of make-pretend toys, and it can evoke strong feeling, which is always one of my highest goals as a storyteller. Even an Actual Death For Realsies that is in-universe pointless has an OOC effect.
- I’ve had at least two characters die who could have escaped their fates quickly and easily but they would have had to give up their pride/wrath/ego/etc. The natural end to their character arcs was being unable to overcome their flaws and succumbing to them.
- I’ve had one die to bad rolls in a hellish combat scene. I made a snap decision in the moment to kill him off because I thought “something’s lacking if everyone survives this”. His death wasn’t dignified or heroic, he just met his end the same way a sentence meets a full stop.
- I’ve killed one off because it kicked off combat in a hilarious manner, and no one was sad to see that wanker get eaten lol.
While I do get attached to characters, and there are some I would never kill off no matter how much they deserve it because they’re too fun, it’s sometimes refreshing and electrifying to sacrifice a character you’ve invested in for the sake of the story. Sometimes it’s a snap decision, sometimes it’s calculated and planned as a story beat.
And to be fair if I’m retiring a character to make way for an alt I like to kill them off in a good story for the benefit of others. I say this, knowing that one of those deaths got my next character tangible XP benefits, so perhaps I’m biased!
I do believe a character’s Actual Death For Realsies should be in the hands of the player the vast majority of the time. The times where it isn’t? That’s when we get “Aim for the bushes” from @MisterBoring, with whom I disagree, reading that I thought it was very funny.
After thinking for 5min, you could probably make a short Consent To Actual Death For Realsies checklist:
- Does the player agree to Actual Death For Realsies?
- If not, is the risk of Actual Death For Realsies clear, apparent, conveyed, and as blatantly clear as crystal?
If those two points are not met, then there is no Actual Death For Realsies.
So yes, I love this topic, I love exploring it, and I love seeing it done for many many reasons. I could ramble about this for hours but my RL time to post this has run out lol.
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@Prototart said in Character Death:
@MisterBoring said in Character Death:
@somasatori said in Character Death:
I feel like there can be this push to misery-porn WoD games
I want a push to a different kind of WoD game. I want a WoD game that focuses very deeply on the struggle to maintain basic utilities when you’re a walking reality bending monster.
all i want is to run up the side of a building while wearing ten inch heels and then cut off an angel’s head with a gigantic praying mantis arm and nobody will let you do that anymore
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@Prototart said in Character Death:
@MisterBoring said in Character Death:
@somasatori said in Character Death:
I feel like there can be this push to misery-porn WoD games
I want a push to a different kind of WoD game. I want a WoD game that focuses very deeply on the struggle to maintain basic utilities when you’re a walking reality bending monster.
all i want is to run up the side of a building while wearing ten inch heels and then cut off an angel’s head with a gigantic praying mantis arm and nobody will let you do that anymore
I will Demon with you if you Mum-Rah with meeee~
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@Jennkryst Can I be a Mekhet vamp mummy cultist whose bloodline serves your tomb?
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@labsunlimited said in Character Death:
@Jennkryst Can I be a Mekhet vamp mummy cultist whose bloodline serves your tomb?
Absolutely! My only regret is that as walking corpses, I forget if they can Blood Doll.
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While I’m a big proponent of character-death-when-it’s-appropriate-to-the-story, one thing that I think needs to be talked about a little bit is how that death will impact other characters. Do the players of your character’s loved ones (family, significant others, packmates, etc) want to play out grief?
While I think that character death should pretty much always be done with player consent (except in the case of Aim for the Bushes, but I consider that consent-by-continuation-after-warnings), there’s also the non-death effects on everyone around the character to consider, and a lot of folks (myself included) who have gone for death-for-drama’s-sake haven’t always considered the knock-on effects.
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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@Roadspike said in Character Death:
Do the players of your character’s loved ones (family, significant others, packmates, etc) want to play out grief?
Take this with the extreme sarcastic tone as it is intended to have… people can’t mention real life events on channels because it reminds everyone else that the real world is shit and we are on games for pretendy-good-fun-times. Grieving over dead characters just reminds people that death exists and the real world is shit and we are on games for pretendy-good-fun-times.
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@Roadspike said in Character Death:
Do the players of your character’s loved ones (family, significant others, packmates, etc) want to play out grief?
I think that question is ultimately answered by asking a second question:
Do the players of your character’s loved ones understand your approach and willingness to participate in character death?
I think it’s a serious conversation that needs to happen anytime someone wants to play a PC with an emotional bond with another PC. How much grief are you willing to deal with as their bonded PC? This goes beyond character death and into just the consequences of failure or social conflict in general. Are you okay with witnessing a character your character is bonded to in some way going through all manner of tragedy and tribulations?
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I love rping eulogizing a dead character. Non-sarcastic. I got a lot of practice at this and discovered I really enjoy it. Real characters are best, I also did a spider funeral at one point but that was for specific IC reasons and I had fun with that too.
let it be a challenge to you
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@sao said in Character Death:
I also did a spider funeral at one point but that was for specific IC reasons and I had fun with that too.
A Gangrel in a Vampire LARP I played in would make his entire Clan attend funerals for animals that died in service to his needs.
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When I RP’d a preacher on good ol’ Fort Bloodshed I had a tally of how many weddings I did vs how many funerals. Weddings were ahead but just barely. The funerals were far and away the better RP of the two.
