As a GM I hate to kill characters, and it’s not just about not wanting to hurt feelings either, there are very practical considerations. I work for hours to help each player carefully construct a detailed background, balancing desires with what the system allows. I also invest more hours creating stories that meld meaningfully with character stories, so players feel like their character is a part of a much larger world. When a character dies, there isn’t just the emotional investment, there is the investment of time. Yet, failure to kill characters can lead to a much more serious problem than losing the time invested.
Players need to feel challenged, they need to feel that there is always a very real threat of character death. Conversely, they also need to feel like it is worth their time to invest in their character because it’s a character which, if they play well, has a realistic chance of a long life. Finding that balance between kill ratios is one of the challenges for a GM, and one that involves working with players.
Kill too often and players simply treat their characters and your game without respect. This is contrary to the belief of many GMs who seem to think if they play hard, players will respect their games because they are hard core. This perception is, in most cases, wrong. It’s wrong because when the death rate is excessive, players stop investing their time in a character. The background story becomes nothing but window dressing and the character is simply a collection of numbers waiting for a cruel world to erase.
Failure to kill has the same result, players stop respecting the game. While they will invest time to ensure their character has a rich background, their actions within the game become excessively bold to the point of foolish. They stand up to encounters they should obviously flee from, and they simply stop respecting the bad guys and any attempt to build threatening situations.
Finding the Balance Point
Each game system, game world and player group has its own balance point. If you play something like the old version of Stormbringer, you can expect characters to die regularly, perhaps at least one per session. In fact, I remember one night at a gaming club where I had a stack of thirty premade characters for a party of six and I had only one or two left in the pile at the end of the night. The game was so brutal, and the character generation system so unfair, that regular death was a game feature.
I prefer game systems that has random unavoidable death limited as much as possible. If a character dies, I want it to be because either players screwed up, or there was an epic stream of bad luck. I hate games which can kill a character outright with a single bad die roll. Rolemaster is a game which I love, yet it has a critical system that can insta-kill characters. So when I run a Rolemaster system I use one of the optional rules of granting the PCs ‘Fate Points’ which can be used in various ways to cheat the dice of that random factor, yet still leave it free for players to have their characters seriously maimed by non-lethal hits. This can result in a system that beats the hell out of characters with detailed wound states, yet makes death more about player choices, not dice choices.
As for finding the balance with players, it’s something that takes time to learn. You have to watch player behaviour in your game, and try to work out how much respect they are giving to the situations you are putting them into. I find that because characters are in life and death situations, one weak link player usually surfaces. This is the player who will regularly be the first to lose their character. There will also be that one player who almost never loses their character because they play smarter than the rest of the group. Adjust your GMing style on these two sides of the scale so the smart player still feels challenged, yet the erm … less skilled player, can still survive long enough to learn from the others.
It’s mostly about respect. If players refuse to respect your encounters they become belligerent, mouthing off to people their characters should respect and not preparing properly for threatening encounters. If you feel your game is not being taken seriously, it’s time for someone to die. Not long back I had a party which had had life a little easy. I was learning a new system so I tend to start a little more reserved then gradually ramp it up until I find the balance point. The party had recently performed brilliantly in a battle with some gryphons, so they were feeling pretty powerful. They then arrived at a cave they were warned was filled with cave drakes and anyone who entered never came out etc. I expected the party to heed the warnings and take their time to observe the cave and maybe ambush one drake to get a feel for how dangerous their foe was. Instead, the party wanders directly into the cave, right into where the drakes had the home ground advantage and numbers. In short the mage had her head bitten off, another swiftly succumbed to venom and bleeding while the remaining two had the good sense (with a little prompting) to flee. Players admitted they screwed up and the deaths were chalked up to learning, but the players regained some respect for the world.
The Right Time to Kill
As Gamesmaster you are around 50% responsible for crafting the situation characters face, players should be responsible for the other 50%. What I mean by this is that any potentially fatal environment should be set up by you, but leave the players free to sculpt that situation for their characters. If players make choices which reduce the life expectancy of their characters and a character dies, they should be able to see the part they played in that character death. If a character dies because you created a situation a character couldn’t escape from, then that death is on your head as GM, and players would be justified in resenting you for it.
So how do you do that? How do you create a 50% situation? The secret is in anticipating player actions, yet not predicting their choices. By this I mean you should be able to anticipate the many ways a player and/or character might react, but not set the encounter based on your expectations of how they will react. That is, you create a setting, but leave the choices to the players.
For example, I had the characters trapped underground where they were able to sneak around and catch some bad guys in the act of setting a trap for some nefarious scheme. Players were able to see that, as a group, the bad guys were highly skilled and stronger than the PC group, yet with the advantage of surprise and scouting the PCs would be able to ambush them one by one and foil the plot. What I didn’t expect was for the PCs to surrender at the first opportunity. If I was going to play the bad guys as the professionals they were, I wasn’t going to turn this into some silly James Bond plot with the bad guy stroking his cat and revealing the master plan before putting the PCs in a situation where they could escape and ruin everything. These were hard core nasty guys. After questioning the PCs they simply slit their throats and the result was a complete party wipe. My players were actually pretty happy with the result because they realised there was ample opportunity for them to have won, they just screwed up and made bad choices. Of course I had hours of created adventure material for the campaign but I just file that away and hope to use it at a later date.
After Death GMing
I remember this one GM. He was a decent GM and prided himself on playing everything fairly. He rolled every NPC dice roll out in front of players so if players died to a bad dice roll, it was right in front of them to see. However, this GM also tended to be a little competitive and secretly took pride in killing characters. When the party inevitably wiped he expressed commiserations but you could see his poorly concealed gloating. As a player I found that offensive, not because I had lost my character to his ‘fair’ dice rolling, but because I had lost my character to the unfair situation he had put the party in. Sure, success might have been possible, but it was unlikely when the NPCs were more powerful, had the advantage of ambush and had the advantage of mystically knowing everything about every member of our party so they had time to prepare specifically for each.
So my first piece of advice is that if you enjoy killing parties, then if you must GM pick a game where players expect to die. Party deaths should be a time of reflection, as players and GM discuss what happened in an open and honest discourse. Players should have a good idea where things went wrong and you as GM should share a little from behind the curtain. I find that sharing a little about what the players were investigating provides a little closure for players, who are probably really curious about the events behind what brought their characters to that moment. In my example with the party who surrendered, the players discovered the complex politics behind interaction with dragons and it excited them to know their characters had stumbled upon something big. It excited them about creating new characters to spend more time in the world.
I advise that apologies are kept to a minimum, unless you are the one who screwed up as GM. Just one honest “Wow, sorry you died guys, it was going so well,” or something like that. If you are overly apologetic you are saying there is something you did wrong which just killed their characters. You shouldn’t feel it was your fault if it isn’t, so don’t pretend it was. A character death should be a lesson for your player to learn from the situation, you don’t have to baby them, that’s being disrespectful.
Cheating Done Right
I hide my dice rolls as a GM, making full use of the GM screen to conceal the adventure, my notes and the piles of dice I push around. I rarely fudge a dice roll, but if it means creating a better game I believe it’s the responsibility of the GM to craft the game everyone wants. I will fudge a dice roll in the players favour if the results rolled are simply unrealistic or if I want the plot to move one direction but the dice refuse to cooperate. A very simple example is if the continuation of a story depends on a character perception roll, then that dice roll is never meant to be made by players. Roll some dice, players should never know you are fudging a roll, but let the check succeed so you can get on with the story. Seriously, I’ve had modules which start with the players finding a secret door in order to begin the adventure. If they don’t find it, throw the module away. Forget that, you simply don’t roll for it (not seriously anyway), it just happens.
I will very rarely adjust a dice roll which makes the player’s situation worse. I’ve done this most often when I’m learning a new system and I realise the encounter I set is weak. Just a few adjusted dice rolls and it can make for a more dramatic fight and not rob players of their climactic moment. Be careful though, as players can have a run of bad luck suddenly and then your innocent dice fudging might threaten to lead to a party wipe. Always rebalance if things have gone bad.
That said, players must always be able to believe your dice rolls are never adjusted. It’s all about illusion, and players are trusting you to create a realistic illusion for them. So always give the appearance of playing fair and leave the dice as they lay in almost all situations. Yet if everyone is having fun and it makes for a good game, maybe roll the dice only for effect and keep the story rolling. However, relying on creating a story without the dice is just reading a book to the players as if they were children. Honestly, some of my best gaming moments came from bad dice rolls, so let the randomness happen as well.
Final Word
I’ve gone on long enough about the subject so I should sign off. I was going to do a section on making a character death meaningful, but I realised death isn’t always meaningful, sometimes it just happens. However every death can teach us something. It should teach you as a GM where to set the difficulty level, and it should teach players something about risk management and smart choices.
Ultimately all deaths are about respect. Players need to respect the game world and you as GM, so if a death has to happen then let it happen. The occasional death makes for a more tense and dangerous world which players should enjoy more. Yet don’t rely on deaths to create tension for you. A good GM creates tension my creating compelling stories with strong narrative. If your only way to cower players is by killing their characters then look at diversifying your skills as a GM. Players don’t need to be taught you can kill them, they know that already. Players should know you will kill them, but only if they screw up.
Players should feel capable of keeping the same character for years, so every brick they lay in creating their character is richly rewarded. The only way to really make their achievement rewarding is to make death a constant companion, always looming, always threatening, and always waiting to strike the unwary or incautious.
Happy gaming!