Skip to main content

When not to kill a PC? When you have the chance to kill a lot more!

I am a huge fan of the Old School philosophy of "let the dice fall where they may". If this means the PCs die falling into a pit trap in the first room of the dungeon, so be it. Being an adventurer ain't easy. It's a shitty life, really. On the other hand, if it means they scored a critical hit and killed a very important NPC, getting awesome loot early on, so be it too. Adventurers sometimes get lucky! That's my usual and default drill when playing any RPG.

However, I also like to put tough choices in front of the PCs and see what happens. Do they risk carrying all that gold, being slowed, and giving a chance for the terrible thing that is following them catch up with the party, or do they drop the gold and just get the hell out of there? Do they take the fastest but dangerous path to their objective, or do they take the safe but slower one, knowing a rival party is on the way there too? This does not seem immediately correlated, right? But something happened in a recent game session that got me thinking.

I was judging the marvelous Sailors of the Starless Sea for DCC RPG and written by the great +Harley Stroh, and at the end of the adventure, after the big Chaos General is defeated, the cavern he is in starts to collapse, rocks falling from the ceiling, possibly hitting PCs if they fail a Luck Check (I actually had to check if that was just me being my usual sadistic self or if it was written this way, and it's a little bit of both).

They were already reduced to a few characters (as it should be in a DCC RPG funnel), but then one of them failed the Luck check and a rock fell right on top of him (he also spent too much time collecting gold as the cavern started to collapse). I was going to simply declare him dead, as the adventure suggest as "their doom", but seeing the desperate eyes of the players at the table, I just said the rock fell over him and they could hear him scream. Is he dead? Is he not? Do you want to go back and check it out?

Do you see what I did there? The character was going to die, and he still is if nothing is done, but I gave the players a tough choice, one that might actually kill them! If they ignore it, a companion is going to die, if they don't, themselves might die too. I called it the "PCs Death Savings Account" technique. You prevent a PC from dying in the hopes of possible killing more PCs! Of course, that's a joke. The main reason to do this is to provide tough choices without minimizing the consequences of previous actions.

So, for now on, I think I will take a look at similar situations and think about how I can turn that into more hard decisions. Of course not all PC's death can be used with this. Someone stabbed through the heart is still stabbed through the heart, but I think you understand what I mean, right?

So what do you think? I am becoming too soft?

If you like what you've just read, check out my books over RPGNow and Lulu.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

My RPG Zine Trilogy is on Kickstarter!

 I can't believe I didn't post about it here! The Dead are Coming, Screams Amongst the Stars and Running Out of Time are on Kickstarter right now! These are 3 complete games, made using the system of Electric Bastionland and Mausritter as the basis (and with some modifications to fit my vision for each of them). As with my games, they all come filled with many tools and tables to generate gaming content, adventures, locations, NPCs and much more. They are compact, easy to use, and equipped to provide you with years of entertainment! Here's a brief description of each of the games. The Dead Are Coming The first of them is called The Dead Are Coming, a minimalist, OSR style RPG about survival in a post-apocalyptic world where the dead have risen and other survivors can be much worse than the undead. Characters in this game are common people who have been struggling to survive, find their loved ones, keep them safe and just trying to keep living. They all carry resources like
Read more

How to never describe a dungeon!

Artwork by Luigi Castellani I've heard it a thousand times. You probably heard it too. Some people , I don't know why, say that dungeons , especially large ones, are boring . The endless repetitions of rooms and corridors and having to choose to go left, right, north or south depresses them. I don't know why. Actually, I do know why. Because they don't really know how to run a dungeon in play. It seems easy, effortless. Just say what's in the room the PCs are in and where the passages going out of it go. But it's not. They get bored with the "you get to a intersection and there is a door to the north and two passages, one going east and one going west" because that's a terrible way of describing a dungeon environment and gives nothing really useful to the players to choose from. You never describe a dungeon like that . There's a lot more going on that we can initially see. A good referee will take all the context of what the dungeon w
Read more

Dark Streets & Darker Secrets - Complete Game Text

November was NaGaDeMon (National Game Design Month), and I decided to create an Action Horror RPG using my system (updated with all the modifications of Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells). Inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, X-Files, The Chilling Tales of Sabrina, Grimm and many more TV Shows, comics and books, I quickly worte Dark Streets & Darker Secrets . It is written in a very direct and simple way, similar to Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells originally was, but with uodated rules and a lot of tools and tables to assist the Referee in creating adventures, NPCs, locations, artifacts, monsters and much more. The book itself will eventually be release in partnership with Gallant Knight Games , but the text is already written and ready to be used, so I am sharing it here with you all! There is no official character sheet yet. I am working on it. But a simple Index Card will work just as well! So here it is:  https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QlFYafvxvJAyk
Read more