Let's Kill A PC! Running the Game #68

hitpoints are interesting concept interesting innovation wargames never used them except insofar as your armies hit points were its soldiers we get hit points along with Armour class from an old Civil War game by the legendary Tom Wham called ironclads when your game is about two metal ships firing cannonballs at each other a battle that in the real world ended because neither ship could really hurt the other hit points make sense the ship is fine this is fine everything's fine ooi sank game over gamers have considered hit points offensive since almost the beginning of the Hobby they don't appear to model anything they don't appear to have any bearing on anything because a high Constitution gets you more of them and taking damage causes you to lose them gamers have always always always assumed they were basically analogous to physical hardiness and stamina and of course they did people are not like iron clads where everything works fine until that last attack delivers a fatal blow people get tired they bleed they lose the use of their limbs and organs way before they collapse as a result one of the first and for decades most popular hacks for D&D was wound levels you take your total HP and divide them into about five levels as you take damage you drop from one level to the other and each level after the first imposes some kind of penalty on you as you run out of stamina and lose steam and deal with all the wounds you've accumulated this is much more realistic everyone says and of course it is yes that is basically how it would work this design is called a death spiral because once you start losing in a system like this you accumulate penalties which causes you to lose faster in other words the rate at which you are losing begins to increase it took about 30 years and two or three generations of gamers before everyone collectively grew out I've tried to fix something that had never been a problem hitpoints work because that's how we wished we worked it's how pulp heroes work John McClane runs barefoot over broken glass but he's basically fine takes a short rest to pick the glass out of his feet with no apparent loss of effectiveness he's fine there's a great video from Tim cask which I'll put a link to in a card where he uses a famous sword fight from Game of Thrones to describe how the original D&D nerds imagined hitpoints worked one character swings her sword and the other character has to bend over backwards to avoid being hit cask describes that moment as in D&D terms I hit if the defender hadn't burned some hit points to stay in the fight that attack would have ended them that's what losing hit points is supposed to look like you pull a crazy stunt to stay in the fight and when you run out of stunt points the next attack takes you down I think we could simulate that pretty easily if after we hit and roll damage we tell the player that blow would have killed you but you and invite the player to describe the stunt they use to stay in the game hit points are a meaningful innovation a great invention because they have no bearing on your characters abilities you are just as effective with 72 hit points as with 2 there's no way for someone to tell based on what you can do how many hit points you have for this reason when someone asks what hit points actually represent I often answer they are a measure of your heroism the more you have the longer you can go on being a hero but they're also a measure of how close you are from depth another useful way of looking at it in fact that's what the only thing they measure while you have hit points you're fine when you lose them your bone I think this design actually encourages a lot of foolhardy behavior without the players even realizing it because nothing bad has actually happened to you in spite of losing 90 percent of your hit points you're more likely to press on we are more likely to take actually stupid risks because of this things regardless of how heroic our characters are they would never actually do the result is characters die everybody not colas here and we're gonna talk about character death in D&D and how to deal with it from the DMS point of view there are three basic ways your character can die in D&D you can take so much damage you end up with a negative number equal to your maximum hit points if your character normally has 34 hit points and you ever for any reason drop to negative 34 you die I don't think that's very common except at low levels but it does happen and it's no coincidence we're talking about this right after talking about fudging die rolls because this is when you fudge die rolls you've got the d20 in your hand and you're like this iron golem could easily do 40 damage if it hits twice this round maybe I misjudged the power level of the PCs maybe I shouldn't have thrown an iron golem at three first level heroes the second way is to fail three death saves while unconscious I think this is probably how most characters die especially when you know they're taking any damage while unconscious causes you to instantly add a failure to your death save total and add two failures if it was a critical hit and here's the tricky thing while you were unconscious any attack from someone standing next to you is automatically a critical hit so you automatically failed two out of your three death saves if you're unconscious character is attacked by someone standing next to them doesn't say that in the section on damage you need to look at the unconscious condition in the back of the book so it's very likely if you start taking damage while unconscious you're going to die I think that's the most common form of death because a lot of creatures in dd5 have multi attack and that's where things get tricky because if the iron Gaul knocks a PC unconscious with its first attack what's it going to do next it's got another attack this is how these two ways of killing a PCS start to blend together into a soup of pain which i think is a kind of chowder your monster has multi attack and chooses a target you start by thinking well we have three attacks they won't hit with each attack but they do hit with all three attacks and maybe one of them is a critical and now you're doing four times the monsters normal attack damage to a PC it will kill them you're pretty sure what do you do are you okay with killing a character are the players okay with it I've seen PCs die and no one got upset usually because the player made some decision they knew ahead of time would likely mean their death but this is rare usually what a PC dies it is a traumatic experience because players like their characters they build their characters they invest time in their characters a player's character is their window into your world the adventure and the party killing a PC is tough and often in fact I think usually the DM feels bad afterwards and this is not why we play D&D how did you get to that point well let me ask you a question did you ever stop and think about how lethal you intended your game to be how did you communicate that to your players here's another question do you know how deadly D&D is intended to be we know the answer for lots of other games we know Dark Souls for instance is crazy lethal but D&D let's imagine you do your best to play by the rules as written or even intended how often do you think normal play results in dead characters here's my answer I actually don't know I have no idea and I couldn't even find advice for this I don't know why but I suspect it's because if they gave advice on how lethal the game should be then folks would try to make it that lethal which i think is probably a mistake and that other folks would complain if it were more or less lethal so it's probably smart they let each diem decide for themselves so one thing we as Dungeon Master's should do is think about a how lethal we expect our game should be and then be we should communicate that to our players but even this I think I think it's an incredibly thorny issue and what not really talked about because I don't think any DM including myself can really say how lethal their game is going to be it's just not something the game is designed to calibrate there are too many variables I've watched characters die in games where it was clear no one thought mortality was really on the table including the players including the DM narrative games where players implicitly believed they were building a story and part of the contract with the DM was that they were gonna get to see that story play out and everyone sat around stunned when someone died I've run games where I told the players life was cheap in this world and I routinely threw absurdly difficult encounters at them and they won they won every time and no one died I also see DMS run meat-grinder adventures and campaigns where the whole point was the death of PCs each square foot of the dungeon and it's always a dungeon in these games had to be meticulously tested with 10-foot poles mirrors used to look around every corner lots of instant death fun if you know what you're getting into maybe this is the talk we should be having with our players hey here's how I view death in my world it's common or it's rare I run a very narrative game you're only likely to die if you do something foolish I run a very tactical game you are likely to die if you don't think strategically but I am not really in control of who dies or how often it's down to the dice again with the dice I think we should be telling our players all our players in every game that regardless of our intent or their behavior the game is so complex many encounters some with many enemies with many different special abilities and lots of dice being rolled in each one dozens of times that with no one intending to and no one doing anything stupid characters can die I'm gonna say that again because I think it's important the game is so complex that with no one doing anything wrong characters can still die everyone needs to understand this so you've talked to your play about how lethal your game is and now it's the final battle pulling out all the stops in this context the players know death is an option this is a boss monster it's the toughest encounter this iron golem is about to multi attack a PC everyone knows what that means even still is there anything you can do you're not obligated in this scenario to pull your punches but if you decide hang on maybe I don't want to kill this PC in this moment what can be done you actually have a lot of options and the good news is there are the same options and every other encounter probably the easiest thing you can do to give yourself maximum flexibility is not declare all your attacks before your role if you say the iron golem is going to attack you three times now the players know that if after the first one crits and takes someone down you decide not to attack the unconscious PC two more times you're pulling your punches you're taking it easy on them when the players detect this when they believe they know what the monsters would do but you are doing something different to keep them alive they no longer believe their victory is earned this happens all the time in every game players often get a sense that you are pulling your punches and then they no longer believe in the reality of the secondary world and you have to do a little sleight of hand to get them back on board players will know you're pulling your punches if the necromancer kills a PC and shocks everyone and then says now leave and don't come back the players they may be relieved that they get to keep playing the characters they've invested in but they'll know the only reason the necromancer said that was because you didn't want to ruin everyone's fun the worst thing you can do as a DM is break their hearts everything else can be solved what to do certainly the necromancer could kill the party I mean this is how party is wiped this is how a TPK happens things had to be bad if a PC got killed and now they're worse because the party is down at PC so they're much more likely to lose there's no right answer only you know your players yes if the necromancer says go and don't come back the players will know you're pulling your punches but they get to keep playing the characters they're invested in you might say well now you have a recurring villain and this is true but it requires the players to play along if you kill the entire party the players know well that's what would have happened that's the real story and this is satisfying it preserves suspension of disbelief but at what cost now everyone is bummed out which is more important I don't know there's no right answer that's the reason we roll one attack at a time if one attack takes a PC unconscious you can switch to another PC spread the damage around instead of killing a PC and changing your entire game now this is a reasonable thing to do especially if you explain your thinking hey who was the last person to damage this column hey who did the most damage to this column Hey who just attacked the golems master all of these are good reasonable plausible excuses for the Golem to switch its attack to someone else and they will work once you've done this a few times you start to realize that you can plausibly switch to almost any target and trick the players into thinking it's what the Golem would have done just by the questions you asked it sounds like you're asking tactical questions but you're really just giving the players a good excuse to hang their suspension of disbelief on and it works this works if you do it it will work there's another solution far more time-intensive but it also works and that is track everyone's hit points live my friend George did this when he ran D&D for us at last unicorn games and while it was a lot of work for him basically writing down how many hit points every piece he had left after every attack it meant he was phenomenally well armed to decide who to attack next in other words if you know Bob only has five hit points left you're not going to attack him thinking he has 45 don't get me wrong it's perfectly reasonable for the Golem to attack someone with only 5 hit points this is D&D golems attack people Kasey's dime the thing we're trying to avoid is that moment when you didn't even realize this was on the table it's a wildly different thing to attack someone when you didn't even realize they were close to death if you suddenly ask before deciding who to attack hey how many hit points does everyone have left no one will want to answer and yeah that's because some of them are afraid they'll become the target of the attack but more common is the player not answering because they believe you will use the answer to take it easy on them let the Golem do what the Golem would do I usually hear so I don't ask that question but I can make intelligent decisions regarding who to attack without doing all the work Jorge did by using magnets under magnetized bases on minis a character that has no damage has no magnet under them once they've taken a little damage they get a green magnet once they are bloodied and half hit points or fewer they get an orange magnet once they are close to death by whatever metric you choose to measure maybe 20% hit points or fewer they get a red magnet we did this for the good guys and the bad guys and it was actually awesome it helped everyone and felt much more realistic whatever hit points represent to you whether physical damage or grit and determination or some combination of the two you could see when that was wearing out you would know just by looking now we have a couple of ways of avoiding killing a PC if we don't want to but a PC drops unconscious through normal play and the enemy is still right there what do we do attacking a PC while they're down seems it seems incredibly unsporting to me for one thing they instantly accumulate to death save failures so this is something to be clear you only do because you're trying to kill the character I think this comes down to the expectations in your game I would only do that if I had told my players ahead of time this is how the bad guys behave in this style of game falling unconscious is basically the same as dying because unless the other heroes act very quickly and effectively neither of which they are completely in control of you are going to accumulate a lot of failed death saves very quickly if we started the game by saying listen folks I run a game where the bad guys want to win and they are going to act the same way you do and for the same reason they may ignore an unconscious PC under the quite reasonable premise that they are no longer a threat or they may kill that same PC to remove a potential threat then I think you start to put the fear of God into your players they begin to realize this is not a video game with scripted behavior the bad guys are smart and will adapt however they need to so for whatever reason maybe bad choices on their part or your encounter design or random chance a PC has died now what something I've seen DMS do a lot is claim the lethal encounter the players just experienced didn't have to be lethal if only what comes next is different every time if only they had listened to the hints the DM gave if only they had scouted the enemy talked to someone before attacking them there's always a reason the DM can always imagine something the players could have done differently but something I've learned over 30 years those conversations aren't usually useful when a character dies players often ask what could I have done differently they ask this because they are frustrated and unhappy and if you answer them all you're doing is giving them something to argue about and that is not helpful it's the opposite it's feeding their anger and frustration every time I have answered that I've regretted it when I switched to well there's always something different you could have done and otherwise kept my mouth shut pretty quickly the other players start unraveling the puzzle the other players start thinking about their options and realizing they took a lot of stuff for granted when those discussions come from the other players people react very differently than when it comes from the DM when it comes from the DM it sounds like I told you so when it comes from the other players it becomes problem-solving and how do we avoid this in the future if we set expectations if we explain that dandy is a game and that even a mundane encounter could go south without anyone intending it to if we explain that the bad guys want to win if we spread our attacks around to take it easy on the unconscious character if we track hit points to make intelligent decisions about who to attack then we reduce the likelihood of an untimely PC death and we minimize the bitterness I say untimely because death is always a possibility you knew the job was dangerous when you took it apart from death from massive damage and failing three death saving throws there is a third way a character can die and that is the DM just says you die and that's it somehow for some reason a PC got themselves into a situation where life and death weren't based on chance and die roles and your DM informs you that your character is now of interest only to historians I have done this it's rare but it happens typically the character is helpless and someone else with the power of life or death over them decides dead is better sometimes or the player does something so spectacularly reckless no die roll is necessary like leap into a volcano or plunge into the black portal to save a doomed I mean literally doomed for I was once playing Jim Murphy's paladin because he was out and he trusted me to do it a demon teleported him into hell and gave him an ultimatum serve me as a double agent on your team or suffer the consequences I thought I knew Jim's character pretty well and so I didn't hesitate what was there to think about I said skin that smoke wagon and the DM smiled and nodded and that was it Jim's paladin was dead no die roll necessary when a player decides to plunge heedless into oblivion it's rare the player is unaware of the consequences when my friend Craig ran into the black portal to save Geordi from the abyss he knew what he was getting into it was the end of his character but he died doing something heroic his choice Jim's character really didn't have a choice nothing about how he had run his PC indicated he would for an instant entertain the notion of making a deal with a real demonic evil jim was satisfied I made the same decision he would have made but there wasn't really any decision I once killed my friend Phil's PC the Wizards Kouros and it almost ended the campaign he was a prisoner at an evil paladin's mercy and she had been humiliated by the escape of another PC prisoner someone had to pay and this was an explicitly cruel and capricious character with an even harsher master I decided she would execute score us she could not allow the possibility that a second prisoner might escape it was the wrong thing to do I did a whole video on it you can see how people responded overwhelmingly everyone responding wanted to tell me I did the right thing the players knew well ahead of the fatal blow what was at stake they had many opportunities they ignored so what I do not play this game to execute people's characters I do not run D&D to say well you should have known better it was not fun and it almost ruined the game no Madame sofa story will fix that in reality what I should have done was switch the camera view to the other players who were in the middle of making friends with folks who would help them spring the captive pcs from jail it was entirely my fault a failure of my pacing and I knew it the only thing we can do is learn from these experiences and move on sometimes there isn't a clear way out but if we talk to our players about the game we're running if we make careful choices about how we use our bad guy I think PC death can be mitigated actually you know if the necromancer kills a PC and says this is the end now you will join your friend and your corpses will serve my undying will it's time to stop the game say we'll pick this up next week and next week hand the players a whole different set of high-level characters let them pick new heroes to play and play for two or three weeks as this new party delves through the other half of the dungeon until the new party arrives in the necromancer sanctum just after the death of that PC now the heroes aren't down a PC they're up a whole party of reinforcements who they just spent a few weeks playing and getting to know and who can be more colorful and weird and things they would never normally play now two groups face the necromancer instead of one you see there's always a way that's it folks that's the killing a PC video I hope there was something in there that was useful or interesting I have no idea what the next video is going to be because I'm gonna take a couple of weeks off and prep the D&D stream this is the D&D stream that we did the Kickstarter in order to have fun in order to get this office I'm gonna get all this gear and equipment my players have been waiting for over a year to play so a part of my prep is going to be running D&D for a couple of friends a small group a one-shot nothing elaborate we will film it but I'm not gonna upload it until after the D&D stream starts I just need to get the sent back I don't want the first time I run dandy in over a year to be live in front of at least dozens of people in the meantime we're still gonna do the stuff that we do just have fun we're still gonna do code names on Tuesday night come follow us on Twitch and we may upload a code names video after this one so you get a running the game video and then you can't complain about the fact that there is something else live that we did this fun some people like those will probably keep playing that hack on Twitch which has no real schedule it's whenever I feel like it it's just something I do to blow off steam it's kind of fun and we may record a couple of running the game videos because I may just get bored spending weeks getting a campaign ready I've never really spent that much time preparing a campaign before part of that prep work is gonna be building the city of capital which some of which I will livestream I just don't know when we did already livestream and I think it's on YouTube several sessions of me building the Pantheon for rioja which is where the city of capital is and the only reason really was stop doing that was because I was crunching on the manuscript for strongholds and followers but that's all done and I am free I am free now just to work on the campaign it's gonna be super interesting to see what kind of Dungeons & Dragons is produced by me spending literally weeks prepping a campaign hopefully it's better than the campaign's that I normally run we're gonna find out together any campaign prep that we do live on Twitch we will upload to YouTube so you're not gonna miss anything this video and this office and everything is brought to you by strongholds and followers you can pre-order the book it will be out soon we're just waiting for it to be laid out you'll know that we are close to releasing the PDF when I release a sample of the book that has been laid out the physical copy the hardcover of strongholds and followers will ship early next year along with all the miniatures and the stickers and the shirts all in one big box that's what's gonna show up to your house and all that stuff is in good hands there's no there's no there's no risk there we're literally just waiting for the book to be laid out and and launch the D&D stream so that's what I'm gonna go do I'm gonna go work on that if you want to keep track of Matt Colville and what he's doing on a day to day or week to week basis between now and the next run in the game video I encourage you to follow us on Twitter or we have a great discord that's super cool and subscribe or follow or whatever on twitch so they get alerts when I go live because there may be a point where I'm gonna start working on the on the city of capital the greatest city in this or any age and if you want to see that happen live and be part of the process you're gonna have to follow us on Twitter otherwise we'll upload it to YouTube when it's done depending on how things go depending on whether you follow us on Twitter or not the next time we see each other it may be it may be when we launch the D&D stream it's crazy but it's gonna happen it's gonna happen soon until then peace out

Channel: Matthew Colville

Views: 552,880

Rating: 4.9508572 out of 5

Keywords: dungeons and dragons, D&D, running the game, matt colville, learn to play, PC death

Id: xZdS8lP-Sdo

Length: 23min 38sec (1418 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 31 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Varandru]

One thing I've done a couple of times: my players can see when the TPK is imminent. Whenever they start losing hope, I ask a forward question: "How do you survive?". It helps as a reminder that they may have creative ways to get out, to parlay or do some other unexpected thing, and that I am open to it. Whenever they tunnel vision on combat, that can let them save themselves without me as the DM creating a solution.

[u/BoboTheTalkingClown]

The obvious issue with presenting HP as a measure of resolve or heroism is that effects that are explicitly 'healing' effects increase HP.

What is the solution? Simply do not address wounds or healing except when they are important for narrative or immersion. Did the cleric cast a healing spell on you? Well, then you were injured. Did the fighter use their second wind to restore HP? Well, they were just beat up and tired.

I haven't found a useful cheat that both retains the elegance of the HP system while still keeping verisimilitude. I don't think one exists.

[u/Jene_Jene]

I personaly like to run with a rule we came up with about ten years back.

A single players has the chance to, once per story arch, survive an attack if the player, on purpose, excepts a crippling injury. In game context that means the character is near death..and the enemies start to ignore them since the character is no longer a threat. The character however pulls through.. with a limb or sense less.

[u/LaserPoweredDeviltry]

Once upon a time, most groups played DnD like a wargame. The story was about the campaign. "What was the mission?" "Was it successful?" "Who died along the way?" Now most people I meet see the game as narrative focused. "Who is my character?" "What adventures did they have along the way?" These are both perfectly valid ways to play, but I agree with Matt, you need to determine at the beginning what kind of game you are playing, especially if your play group is mixed in their expectations. Smoothing those all out will go a long way. So definitely throw the question "Is this story about the characters, or the mission?" into your session zero.

The second thing I think should be considered when thinking about character death is a paradigm shift in thought. Instead of thinking of the TPK as the end of the story, you as a DM should be thinking about it as "where does the story go next?" There are dozens of perfectly good reasons other than "the gods did it" to bring back dead PCs, usually in an even deeper mess than we left them. They could be thralls, zombies, slaves, failed experiments, debtors, ghosts, or worse. The story only needs to shift away from these characters when all the players and DM are ready.

[u/Ds0990]

One thing I hated about a game a friend of mine ran. I had a character become basically a lord of a region, and I had been a bit bored of the character at that point so I took the opportunity to create a samurai like character sworn to be a vassal of my old character. At some point my old character was kidnapped, and when we found him what we found was now a vampire.

On the one hand it was a great bit of role playing, and narratively it certainly had a shock factor I wasn't expecting.

On the other hand I really hated that my character died off screen so to speak. If my character had fallen in some heroic battle against some vampire lord, only to come back at a later date to harass the party I don't think I would of been nearly as angry.

So my advice is this. If you are going to kill a character do it on screen and make sure that the PCs see it. Even if they can't actually do anything to prevent it.

[u/Tired_An_Hungry]

I really like the idea of having another party coming in to save the original party. Especially if the original party managed to sneak or find an alternative way into the necromancer’s lair. I can imagine the original party finding the path too easy while having most of the necromancer’s forces be occupied with the new party. It can be a good way to introduce new npcs or fresh out old ones

[u/[deleted]]

One of the most fun things to do to preserve the integrity of the narrative while also stopping short of a TPK is to leave one party member alive.

Note: This only works if you're working with a sadistic, tropey BBEG.

As an example, your party is fighting the necromancer and 3/4 of you have died. The necromancer walks up to the final party member, already on death's door, and picks him/her up by the chin.

You... you will live. You will tell others of my power and mercy, for I am great and terrible.

Then the necromancer raises the fallen party members from the dead and leaves the 4th battered on the ground.

Now you've got a great villain for the rest of the players to rally around and you still have that 4th party member to carry the story.

[u/Ramminchuck]

Did he actually link that Tim Kask video he talked about like...2 min into the video? I kinda wanted to watch it myself.... >.>

[u/catskillingwizards]

I've DM'd some very death heavy and light games. When I'm playing a game that I expect the villians to have higher odds of killing players is "this game can be as deadly as you are foolish". It lets them know to play smarter off the bat and that foolish moves can and will be punished.