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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?

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