...when you've never seen a PC killed in a game before?
That was the first question that came to mind when I ran across this post at the poorly subtitled "The D&D Resource Blog for DMs & Players". A more fitting subtitle would be 'a wrong-headed newbie's best guess at how things should be done'.
Maybe to be fair, I should note that they have more than one writer on that blog. The others might be better.
Other than that, the article is about one of the first conflicts new DMs encounter when first taking up the hobby. Is one manly and thus goes with the truth of the game world? Or is one a wimp that alters that reality at whim to overturn the errors of their players?
Ameron is a wimp, willing to trade anything for 'fun'. A rather good definition of hedonism if one thinks about it, and a very short-sighted approach to just about anything.
I would have done the same as the DM who was running the game with but a couple of exceptions.
First, I wouldn't have told them a thing about the number or nature of the encounters ahead. That's knowledge they should have.
And second, the player who lost his character could run (within limits) some of the NPCs they encounter later in the game. Like some of the people they were trying to save. Sure, those may not be exciting as his former PC...
...but they're alive. And the player did get his character killed afterall.
And finally, by enforcing the reality of the game world- it remains alive too.
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8 comments:
I wish I had the cash flow to be a hedonist... cause I would be.
Anyways, I think the important thing to remember here is the context. It's a Living Forgotten Realms game for the D&D Organized Play arm, the RPGA.
So this isn't a long-term homebrew game where you have far more room to maneuver. This is a 4 hour slot, with a limited module and a DM that you probably don't know. And chances are, you paid sit at the table.
Now, you could look at it from the perspective that this is a sort of contest to see if you can survive to the end of the module, but it's not like you get a cash prize at the end.
It's game... games are supposed to be fun, if challenging. It would definitely suck to spend $5 dollars and die in the 1st encounter. It may or may not be your fault. 4e is definitely team orientated, so the other guys at the table could have failed you, or the DM may have screwed up and ran the wrong tier, or the damn dice just weren't rolling in your favor.
Do I think the character should be arbitrarily restored, or the story altered, or the dice fudged? Nope. I don't ever skew things. And I definitely don't reveal what's ahead (though in LFR modules, there is definitely a algorithm at work, so it can be calculated).
Do I think that the player should get his $5 worth of fun? Hell yeah. I would have allowed a "raise dead" to occur, for a price. One, since it is tournament, the dead guy won't be getting the full XP or treasure parcel. Two, there needs to be some roleplaying, you have to convince me.
I don't think Ameron is wimp for wanting the game to fun. I think there are options that don't destroy the reality of the game but still allow for fun.
Are there lessons to be learned here? Definitely.
1) Organized play games can be gamble. You might pay for a four event and only get 15 minutes of play.
2) It doesn't have to be that way. And if the DM is creative enough, you don't even have to break the reality of the game.
Unless you are at a convention (in which case you might pay whatever the convention charges) it is very very unlikely that you paid for LFR. LFR is free, RPGA is free, people run these all the time for free.
I didn't realize that this was part of some organized tournament thing...then, yeah, if the rules forbid you to run a second character or NPC, you're just SOL.
..And I just realized this is Brian Gleichman's blog... Hi Brian, I'm a longtime fan.
Well, anyhow, in short, this is indeed an organized play campaign (it is Living Realms) which means playing the NPCs aren't an option, nor is fudging the dice to keep someone alive. There is a "stay in the game" option which amounts to getting a raise dead ritual, which should have been affordable at that level (around 500-600gp) (and easily affordable if they split the cost, and easier still if the DM had the NPC cleric show up and take it out as an IOU against future rewards)- generally characters get "paid" at the end of an adventure in LFR (a typical endgame reward at the 4-7th level range is between 200-400gp). This is what DM seems to have been offering the PCs when he said they could go back to town. The Dead PC likely had valuable-enough gear on him to pay for the ritual as well.
The thing here is: probably the players don't all know each other or the DM, so maybe some characters were less willing to kick in some gold to keep the guy in the game.
What I think this blog post really illustrates is players coming upon a situation they hadn't handled before.
Thanks for the shout out. Clearly we have different opinions on how to handle a situation where a PC is killed.
My position is that in a short-term, one-off game where a PC is killed during the first encounter you'd like to try and find a way to get him back in the game. It usually means performing a raise dead ritual, but that's not the only option. Letting that player run a back-up NPC is another excellent idea.
In-game death should, and usually does have consequences. Character death in a long-term, home-game is a big deal and is usually handled differently then it would in a one-off game at you FLGS. When it comes to these one-off FLR games, or any pick up game for that matter, people are just there to have fun. I'd prefer that everyone has a good time and keeps playing then have an angry player leave the table after 45 minutes.
As pseckler13 states above, part of the reason for my original post was to share my thoughts on a situation I'd never experienced before in 4e.
I would also like to address your comment on our blog name: "Dungeon's Master - A Resource Blog for DMs and Players." Part of being a resource blog is to provide our options. We know that some people will disagree with our take on a topic. Our goal is to create discussion (much like this one) in order to make the game better. Thanks for contributing.
pseckler13: Thanks for the information on the LFR, very useful.
This makes the DM's action even more understandable, indeed required.
Ameron: I don't think you can really consider LFR games to be 'one-offs' as they must follow rather specific rules.
But I still stand by my opinion, that a game is a one off is no reason to alter the realities of the world due to player error. There are other less harmful options.
LFR sort of straddles the line between what is a one off and what isn't. For example, in a 1st-4th game (all characters start at 1st in LFR) one of the players may be treating it as a one-off, and 4 or 5 other players might not be.
At the 4th-7th level, you can be assured that everyone there had played that specific character at least 12-15 times.
However, they may never see (or game) with these people ever again after this game, so in a way it is similar to a one-off. More like a pickup basketball game, sort of.
I'm not a fan of fudging die rolls, but no matter how die-hard you are about game-world integrity, the decision about what player controls what character is entirely meta. There may be some situations where there just don't exist any potential characters that aren't already assigned to a player, maybe in locked room mystery set in a lifeboat, but in most games you can't even begin to GM unless you're capable of constructing ways that don't violate the logic of the game world for the players to introduce characters. In this specific instance it was apparently against the tournament rules or something to do so, but in the general case dead characters get replaced and the game moves on.
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