Comments on: I’m Dead?

By: Fail Squad Games

Fail Squad Games — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 17:15:58 +0000

In reply to Elite DM.

I know some of the old school TSR guys put on no velvet gloves when it comes to death. Newer systems seem to go quite soft on character loss.
With a three life system even, I would think for the first two lives players would be rather reckless and fearless.
We used to have “Luck” as an attribute. It can be fun, but high luck scores would get a player ‘Luck points’ which were essentially a get out of jail free card. It would reverse a dice roll, or avoid certain doom by dumb luck.
A similar situation to your 3 life scenario.

By: Elite DM

Elite DM — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 16:51:12 +0000

My group has never handled death well, the first thing they always say when someone dies is “why did you make the fight so hard”. One of the things I found to handle death is the 3 life variant. With this variant the first 2 times you would die you are instead just out of the game until the fight is over, the 3rd time you are dead. Spells like revivify get you back in the fight and stop you from losing a life. My group has somewhat accepted this.

By: RPG GM

RPG GM — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 22:11:31 +0000

Good article and one I think players and GMs should look at prior to characters dying. Unfortunately all too often this is investigated after a players death and the emotions and frustration can make it much worse than it is. It is a game after all.

These are lots of the considerations I put into when thinking about how to handle death in my tabletop rpg, the Fyxt RPG. Ultimately it came down to players are far more interested and invested in games when their characters survive. So I made it easy to drop players but hard to actually kill a player off. This way the drama and excitement of death or being out of the fight is still very real but the investment in time and effort on a character is rarely “wasted” on death. Keep in mind that they system is designed for regular groups that will run multiple quests in a more episodic style.

I loved the unconscious mechanic. So that is there. However, the amount below 0 changes with level so there is always a balanced amount of unconsciousness. Unlike a static number where low level is hard to kill and high level might as well not even have -10 because it is not enough. Then there is a bleeding mechanic where players can bleed out. But also they can be healed easily and jump back into the fight.

All in all I think death in RPG is always a specter hanging over players and GM alike and it is important for everyone to know how to handle it when it does crop up.