As a GM, am I out to kill my players?
In a way I am, but it’s more complicated then a yes.
Every role playing game I have played has opportunities for players to die. In campaigns, I have had very few of my characters die since I’m normally very conservative in how I play. When I’m in one-shot adventures I’m not expecting to play the character more, so I try to play to the archetype of the character and choose characters that are different from my normal support styles.
How I play characters in a one-shot has helped shape my view of character death and how it should occur. I will allow a character to die if it’s meaningful for the player or the player is being careless.
Planned character death needs to feel meaningful and warranted. The GM and player should talk about it and find a way for the character to die that provides an extra motivational push to the party for revenge, honor, or even to complete the job of the dead character.
An unplanned character death is the trickiest thing to do well.
The gnarliest knots of GM skull sweat come when players ignore the danger their characters are in and the significance of their enemy. It’s easy for players to get into the mindset that they have to defeat every enemy, and that the easiest way of defeating them is with guns and swords. The players don’t try to see the other ways around a fight if the easiest way is through the fight.
When the players are in a big fight and their characters are pretty beat up, then having a character or two die is a reasonable thing. This resonates with players thanks to the idea of raised stakes and final fights with the Big Bad at the time. The players need to defeat the Big Bad to supplant him as the driving force in the region; if they want to give that power to someone else, such as a king, later it is up to them. This is the epic tale that they’re playing out and by letting one or two die heroically it adds to the import of the tale.
When the players are in a fight that isn’t crucial to the story the chance for character death should be lessened. It isn’t as exciting to have a character’s epic arc end at a minor point in the adventure. This is the reason I do my best not to incur an unwarranted character death. While players may get their characters into a bind at times, I find that if the players are reminded of the exits after a close call it can lead to them retreating and living to fight another day.
Training a player to see the difference between the minions of a Big Bad and the Big Bad themselves is one of the harder things a GM can learn. General encounter difficulty is a hard thing to come to, especially since each party is different in how it acts and reacts to different situations. What each party is able to accomplish is based on what the characters are and who the players are. Two different people can use the same character in completely different ways, just as the same person can use two characters in wildly different ways.
Killing the party is easy when you are expecting the players to put their characters survival first when battling minions and the players have the idea that the GM will always put a winnable situation in front of them. It’s easy to train players to think that combat is the easy thing, especially when you’re learning the system. Combat is always the hardest thing to figure out, especially in space for some weird reason, so this is where people like to spend time learning. Learning the combat system usually starts with using an inappropriate group to attack the players since they’re learning and you’re learning and you want them to succeed so they keep playing this game. Once you start ramping up the difficulty there is a tendency to not go high enough difficulty to force the players to realize that they aren’t going to win every fight. Generally, I want the second combat that the party gets into to be one they should run from, this allows the players to adjust to my expectations of what they’re going to be encountering. This has the added benefit that if I mess up, the players aren’t that attached to their characters.
Character death is like many other mechanics in a game; if it isn’t used or brushed against on a semi regular basis it’s hard to find a use for it. The heroics at the table that we see time and again are death defying so much so that we need the players to realize things aren’t easy for their characters. A dead character along the way to doing something amazing isn’t a bad thing as long as it has some significance to the players and those without characters aren’t without for long. There is nothing worse for any player than to be idle at a table.
