watervole | RPG death

I'm feeling like crap today.

This would have been a really good post about how I went to see

emmzii on Saturday and how we did good things with the Odyssey media stream and then went to see Carmen live in HD streamed from the New York Metropolitan Opera which was fab, but things went downhill Sunday evening.

We had a long RPG session starting early afternoon and I just got back in time for the start. We were in a scenario that we'd pretty much been manipulated into. (by a GM who claims he doesn't manipulate)

My character had been wanting to retire for the last two months and the GM was fully aware of this. We'd talked about the replacement character and gone part way towards drawing him up. This was not because I didn't like my current character, quite the contrary. I liked him a lot and wanted him to retire rather than die (the average scenario in this game pushes characters to the very brink of survival - he'd come with a hair's breadth of dying on two previous occasions and there was no way he was going to live to a ripe old age if he carried on adventuring). He was a centaur, and in this part of the game world centaurs are an endangered species, rarely more than one in any decent sized town and hence failing to to maintain their numbers, let alone increase them. His simple objective, from the start of the campaign, was to find a compatible member of the opposite sex and settle down and raise kids.

I made one fatal mistake. I made him a healer. I made him a very good healer - in fact it turns out I made him the best healer this particular game system had ever seen. He became indispensible and the GM didn't want me to retire him, as it would have seriously weakened the party.

After much effort and persistence, Sagittarius finally found a female centaur who wasn't already married. At which point, the scenarios suddenly stopped being 'You can earn money or find something interesting, if you do this', or being things that the players dreamt up for themselves, they became 'People will die if you don't do this'.

Sagittarius was an ethical character, he was a healer. He couldn't refuse without changing who he was.

So he got killed. We were in an 'unspeakable evil will be released upon the world if you don't prevent it' scenario. We'd already done the sensible thing and sent a character off to inform the people most likely to be able to send an army to help. But we were also getting an NPC telling us that the army probably wouldn't get there in time, so we went up against a bunch of NPCs that we already knew were more powerful than we were. (several of the characters who escaped had only a single hit point left, and the big bad guys hadn't even got into the fight.)

I feel cheated. Sagittarius should never have been there. He should have been many miles to the south, in a nice quiet woodland glade learning about healing plants from a lady centaur and working out if they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together.

I'm a role player and a writer. If I play a character, he won't exist in a vacuum. I'll know his family background, the things that motivate him, the personality quirks, etc. I feel like I'd written a novel and someone went and ripped up the last chapter. I've not just lost the character, I've lost his future, the plans he had to re-integrate centaur society. I've lost the future of a species.

The daftest bit is that the thing that preys most on my mind is whether anyone will think to tell his mother what happened. As a character, he wrote home regularly to his parents. I suspect only one of the players will think to do this. To most of them, a character is gone the instant he dies. It was always Sagittarius who thought to check on their religion and try to bury the body and find a meaningful funeral rite. His mother is a figment of my imagination, but I'm a writer. I know how she would feel - I know how I would feel if I lost a son.

As I said, I'm a role-player rather than a roll-player.

Character deaths are par for the course in RPGs (we'd already lost four or more in the last six months or so - this was one of the few original characters left), but I still feel bitter. If the GM hadn't stopped me retiring Sagittarius, he'd still be alive. I was screwed, and I feel miserable,

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Commiserations. I think I understand exactly how you feel.

While I'm not nearly as experienced as you at writing, most of the games I run tend to come from the 'storytelling' perspective rather than the 'burn-fight-kill' perspective.

I've only had one player-character die in my game, and that was fairly early on in the campaign, but the repercussions are still being felt. The character sacrificed himself to save a lot of people. The people he saved knew this, so memorials were set up, along with a new trend of some people wearing his symbol as a tribute.

It makes for a richer world in which to play, which makes it feel more real for the players. And the more real the world is, the better the role-playing. IMHO, of course. :)

I'd like to think that the things he tried to set in motion will carry on after his death (he was doing a lot of stuff to try and connect the scattered centaur community and had ideas to extend/preserve what little of their history and culture were left - but I don't see it happening.

Campaigns I've played in in the past have had very long-lived characters. I've played some characters for over a decade.

I've got a very good idea about how I would feel, I've been in similar situations. I do remember actually having to take half an hour out partway through a game once when a long standing NPC died. And feeling you had no choice about it all sucks even more.

I had to leave the room. I didn't want the other players to see me crying.

{hugs}
And if they don't get that, then maybe they aren't people you want to play RPGs with. If it isn't fun any longer, don't play.

I have never done RPG but I understand and I offer *HUGS*.

That's not manipulation, that's just plain old-fashioned blackmail. Now in my current campaign, I had the PCs turn down a mission I offered them because it was against the King and therefore treasonous. (I don't think that in itself bothered them, they just didn't like contemplating the possible repercussions.) And now the King, or at least one of his advisors, has come to them asking them to perform exactly the same mission. With the same horrible repercussions if they don't go for it.

I have let them know that they have the option to run away and hide. Or at least try to. Nearest border of the kingdom is several hundred miles away.

I am also not an RPGer but what you say here reminds me of what David Lodge wrote in The British Museum is Falling Down about character death and how hard it was for an author. I am sorry your GM was so manipulative.

The GM didn't want the party to break up. The characters were getting more and more incompatible ethics-wise and I think he was trying to find something that would force all the pieces together.

The other reason my character wanted out (apart from having met a nice girl and wanting to settle down) was that he was the good guy in a group of people who were increasingly neutral at best and veering towards evil at worst.

I think I'd almost be angry enough with that to want to stop playing with that GM.

{hugs}
I do get how you feel. {hugs} If it was me, I would be angry and miserable too.

It's worse than if a beloved character gets killed off in a novel; at least, I found when I was doing RPGs, if I was playing a character for a reasonable amount of time, they were living in my head, just as close or closer than if I'd written them. (Actually, one of the reasons I got out of RPG-ing was that I decided I didn't want to have a character living in my head who was required by the rules of the game to have a world-view that clashed with my own)

I hesitate to suggest fanfic-therapy; I mean, if it were a bad ending to a TV series, fixit-fanfic would be the thing, but with a RPG, it's more "real" and I don't think fanfic would help overcome that "realness" to give him the future he ought to have had.

{hugs}

I think the problem here is that his world views were almost too close to my own - that's why it hurts so much. (Or rather, I see the world through his mother's eyes and feel that I've lost grandchildren that I've never had.)

You're right that writing fic wouldn't do it. It wouldn't feel real.

I've run at least one game which I've told the players that they can kill each other, let alone via NPC. But that was a short one-off.

Your GM could easily fudge stuff if your character looked at risk. The fact that he killed him is a pretty shitty thing to do. Especially as you clearly cared for your character and wanted to create a new one and leave this one with a happy ending. I think you should tell your GM exactly how upset you are, not just by losing your character but by his clearly inconsiderate nature.

I don't think he ever fudges die rolls - but I agree - I know exactly which roll killed me (the one that lost me 7 hp and endurance every single round) and he could have fudged that one if he'd chosen to do so without any of us being any the wiser.

I think if I were you I'd be seriously pi$$ed off.

IMO characters in an RPG (once you get past the munchkin/ roll playing stage) should only die because:

a) even though they know the risks, they go up against ridiculous odds *of their own free will* or

b) they sacrifice themselves heroically.

From what you say, it sounds like the GM forced you into a position where you had no free will without compromising the character's basic ethos and that's just bad GMing.

Indeed. He loaded it from the start. The news of the big bad was brought to us by an NPC whom we had previously saved from being bound into a magic item - he would have died bringing us the news, if a critical roll from one of the party hadn't pulled off a bit of divine intervention.

As a character, you can't not go when someone whose life you value is willing to die to bring you the news. (I'm not sure that anything else would have got me to go. My character had spent his entire game career trying to get to the point where he was at that moment).

That sounds like bad GMing to me.

HUGS

RPG death

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