Never On Sunday

An interesting question came up today in the Rancor Pit: how often do PCs die in your campaigns? Interesting because the answer, once I’d thought about it, was a surprise.

In our group, hardly anyone ever dies. In the…um…eight or nine years I’ve been at I with this group, there have been four deaths: two explorers who pushed their luck too far, one bravo who pointlessly leaped into a riot to side against the soldiery, and a steampunk engineer who went mad and had to be put down before he blew up the planet. All four died while I was the GM. The last one was my own character, and he died in the last episode of a short, throwaway campaign as the best I could come up with for a dramatic climax, so he hardly counts as “killing off a PC”—he was an NPC, and it’s not like he was denied participation in the rest of the campaign, in any case.

The other three were genuine PC killings, but even these were taken from among a pool of PCs. For a variety of reasons, I’d asked my players to create two or more characters apiece, which they could rotate in and out of play as the game progressed, but my foremost reason was to permit me to kill a PC now and again to preserve dramatic tension and prove the Evil Conspiracy had teeth. That way, PCs could die and everyone would still have back-ups to play with, and we wouldn’t have to engage in the implausibility of adding new characters—a pain at the best of times, but appallingly difficult in a paranoid conspiracy setting. And now, as we enter the final stages of the campaign, the PCs have developed plot immunity to any but deliberate dramatic death, because I’m too lazy to try to stitch together a climax with half the PCs prematurely dead.

No other GM in our group has ever killed a PC at all. The closest we ever came was with the aforementioned steampunk engineer who, already wounded, took a direct hit from a heavy rifle—we could see the dice, and the deadly success. Before assigning damage, Dave (our resident creampuff GM, sitting behind the figurative screen at the time) wanted to know how many hit points Janos had left. I refused to tell him: “It shouldn’t matter!” So Dave blatantly fudged the results, despite my obvious willingness to confront mortality. Other than that, we haven’t even come close. Combat doesn’t play a big part in our games, which generally emphasize politics and/or mystery, but still. I suspect the fights my fellow gamers design are deliberately designed wimpy, to avoid the risk. Nobody but me is really willing to risk PC death, and even I pull my punches. Some pay lip service to the principle of being willing to kill a PC “who really deserves it,” but I no longer believe them.

There is much to be said for plot immunity. PC death typically forces the player in question either to introduce another character quite like the old one, or to saddle the party with a gaping hole in its collective abilities. Worse, it can cause serious continuity problems, for players and GM alike: players have to take on the new guy, pretending it makes sense that someone “just happened” to pop up to replace the casualty in a quest of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and give up all their investment in intraparty social dynamics; the GM has to ditch or restructure whole chunks of his campaign, working up an entirely new set of individual hooks for the new character and replacing group hooks that depended too heavily on the old one. But it can be taken too far, as it was for Janos.

Empathy, or lack thereof, surely plays a large role in a GM’s willingness to kill off a PC: empathetic GMs are more familiar with the anguish of PC death when it happens to them, and more sensitive to the anguish they may cause. But I think age plays a part, too. I’m the oldest player in our group, starting RPGs in 1980, when PC death was axiomatic. Hack-n-slash wasn’t just a style of RPG; it was the only style of RPG, and the only drama boiled down to risking your life against measured rewards, mostly wealth. You can still find players subscribing to the notions like, “If you can’t die, there’s no challenge,” or “If you can’t die, you aren’t controlling your character and his destiny; you’re just going through the motions while the GM runs the show,” and they appear far more commonly among (A) very new players, who haven’t learned to care about continuity, and (B) very old players, who, having grown up with old school D&D, think casual death is a perfectly normal, almost mandatory, part of a good story.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this attitude; if you’re into hack-n-slash, go for it. Even relatively bloodless games can gain a great deal of dramatic tension from a credible threat of death, and you can’t truly preserve the credibility of that threat unless somebody dies from time to time. But the bulk of RPGs today—even the stubbornly self-absorbed D&D—treat PC death as something to be avoided whenever possible, differing only on how to define “possible,” that is, what a GM should be willing to sacrifice to preserve his PCs’ lives. So it doesn’t surprise me that our group’s PC mortality rate should be low; I’m just astounded by how low it is. And a little chagrined to discover I’m the only source.