The Session

So, I didn’t have much time to plan anything for this session I was kept busy with a toddler and making dinner before people showed up but it was still a fun session which changed some things up again. You can catch up on what happened in what I called Session 22. But the players immediately jump back into it filling in Assendial on more of what had happened.

They were also curious about what was going on with the Winter Court. It turns out that the member of the winter court has been trying to broker and agreement with Strawgoh to use some students to deal with a Rainman. The group, Barrai, Bokken and Kip immediately volunteer. And try and broker a deal which the school actually takes care of for them. They wanted 60 gold for it but ended up getting 250 which they do agree to split 4 ways with Thrain.

They kill a little bit of time with Bokken getting another fight scheduled at the bar and Barrai wrote a letter to his patron. But Kip puts the time to good use and researches what Rainman are. They are fey creatures who hide in the rain and aren’t fully corporeal. But more so, they try and drown you with their aqueous form and that will turn you into a puddle.

Going over to the embassy of the Winter Court in the town they set-up a trap for the Rainman. They make it look like the powerful fey princess of the Winter Court is standing out in the courtyard talking. Bokken spots the Rainman who is watching what is going on, but has realized that something is off. Mainly that the rain is still rain not snow like it’d be turning into surrounding a member of the winter court. So the Rainman is looking around for someone who is controlling this illusion. Bokken charges and the group gets into battle.

Things didn’t go completely as plan. Barrai does a great job opening up a barrage of magic missiles on the one of the Rainmen. And that’s where the issue really is, while the Winter Court had thought there was one Rainman there win in fact two that had been stalking the embassy. They initially focus on Kip because he looks like he’s the smallest and weakest. But when Barrai uses his magic missiles which is way more effective against them, the second one switches it’s focus to try and drown Barrai. Unfortunately for Barrai he rolls a 0 (1 with a -1 modifier) when it grapples him and he gets hit hard with a lot of damage. Eventually he becomes a puddle.

Bokken finishes off the last Rainman and feels very guilty about letting Barrai die. Some of that also due to the fact that one of his attacks had dealt damage to Barrai while he was trapped inside the figure. Kip and Bokken manage to get the puddle that was Barrai into a water skin and they rush his puddle to Assendial whom Bokken had seen use the reincarnation spell before. She is able to use it on him, but he comes back not as a Tiefling but as a forest Gnome.

Behind the DM’s Screen

Like I said, this was a lightly planned session. When they started asking about the member of the Winter Court, I knew that is the direction that I’d been taking the session and two Rainman were going to make a hard/deadly encounter for the three of them. Turns out it was in fact deadly.

And Barrai, and the player, actually got to pick between two different races. Normally you just get whatever you roll but because Kip had used prestidigitation to help get the puddle form of Barrai into the water skin. I decided to make it more interesting than just a straight roll. The player could have picked between human and forest gnome. Thematically they decided that it made more sense to be a forest gnome after all the torturing of Dorin that he had done over the school year.

Have you had a character die and become reincarnated in a game before?

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“True.”

“Bring forth the character sheet and the lighter to usher Gornag to the afterlife.”

“He shall be remembered.”

“We send him back into the ether from whence he came.”

“He shall be remembered.”

Alright, that might be very goofy, and you don’t need to do any routine or anything like that, but it’s a topic that I don’t think ends up being talked about that much in Dungeons and Dragons or any RPG, how do you handle the death of a character.

It isn’t something that I’ve had a ton of experience with, I’ve “killed” three characters. The first was a convention game at the end of the one shot, so it worked out well, and technically, it was another character failing to throw a dart horribly and then hitting the unconscious character who was one death saving throw short and floating face down in water. Then, in Dungeons and Flagons, Finja died, sacrificing her life in their successful attempt to destroy a beholder. It was a sad but fitting end for that character. Finally, a barbarian who was amazing and smashing everything came up against some specters that he couldn’t kill as easily and he was rolling poorly. He got to come back, but with some pretty dire consequences for the party.

So I haven’t done a TPK (total party kill) and have to end a campaign because of that, or pick it up with new characters. I’ve knocked out characters before, but that was all with a plan of what was going to happen next and with a reason why the monsters wouldn’t just kill the players.

There are several questions that come out of death, but let’s start for a Dungeon Master even before death of a character.

Do you need to have the threat of death in your game?

It might seem like you need to, but do you really need to have that threat of death in your game? I would say that yes, death is something that has to be a threat in your game, but it should be a rare threat. You are playing with heroes, so why should these heroes be likely to go down in every fight? They shouldn’t, is my answer. There will be times when fighting against a level boss that it should be a threat, but if they are fighting a random encounter of goblins on the road, it probably shouldn’t be enough to kill them, unless I’m rolling very hot and they are rolling ice cold.

What do you do when death does happen?

This is a harder question, because you need to know how your players would react and how it happened. If it happened because a character jumped out of a fourth story window as a first level wizard, yeah, it’s going to be easier because that player was doing something dumb with their character.

If it’s because it was in an epic combat, I think that most players would still be pretty cool with it. Especially if they sacrificed themselves to do damage to get that BBEG to deaths doorsteps and the party was able to kill them. That sort of heroes death can even be a big story element and driving force for a character if you want it. But even if it wasn’t something for the character, that death feels like it has meaning.

The harder ones to deal with are the ones that come out of the blue. It could be that the monsters were rolling hot, like I said, and the player was doing poorly, and with a critical failure on a death saving throw, you can be out fast. How do you as a DM deal with that, and then, how do you as a player deal with that?

I think as a DM, it’s about giving some time. I wouldn’t gloat about it, I wouldn’t rush quickly into the next thing. It’s fairly dumb in movies when you get that moment where the protagonists best friend dies in a fight and you get that flow motion moment of the protagonist crying, but that’s what you kind of want to do in your game. Give the players at the table that reprieve from the battle, don’t ask for any rolls, any checks, just let the players process it. Then, once there has been a little bit of time, or the players have said their piece, then you jump back into what was happening. And once that is done, you can give the other players the options of things that they can do.

Also know that players will act differently. Some are going to try and find a way that the encounter was unbalanced or something along those lines and justify why they shouldn’t have died. Others are going to find that whole moment just humorous. Then there are others who are going to be ready to start rolling up their next character right then and there. The best thing, as a DM you can do in any of those situations is just give them a moment and be considerate.

As a player, how do you deal with it when another character dies, not yours? It’s pretty similar to the DM, you give it some time. You buy into the moment and are there for the player as you can be, and in character, you play out that movie moment where you fight your way to the side of your dead comrade and pick up their body in your arms and scream at the sky. You don’t treat it lightly.

If it was your character that died, it can be tough. You grow to like your character, you want to know what is going to happen with your character and you had ideas of the story that was going to continue with them for longer in the campaign until the campaign was done. You wrote a backstory for them, you drew a picture of them, it is hard to lose something that you put time and effort into. It is kind of hard to write, because it is fairly trite to say, but remember that this is a game. You are going to like the new character that you roll up as well. The best I can liken this to is Doctor Who when you get a new Doctor, I’m always a bit hesitant with the new Doctor and I don’t think I like them as well, but basically all of them have grown on me to the point where I’m sad to see them leave. That’s the case with your D&D character as well, you might not like the new one as well at the start, but you’ll grow to love them too.

But allow yourself some time to soak in the death of the character. Don’t rush yourself into creating that new character if you don’t want to. Don’t feel like you need to be more than an observer for the rest of the session. It’s fine to wait and then when the next session is come back with a new character for the game.

Finally, as a group, when you have that first character death, come up with a way that you are going to memorialize it. I have a very silly thing written at the top, but figure out what you want to do. It doesn’t need to be much, but do something in game or out of game that you want to do for future deaths. This will help with the sense of closure for the dead character and it can be something fun to do. Toasting the fallen character in and out of game would make a lot of sense. Or, if the person doesn’t want to keep the character sheet, burning it, ideally after being folded into a paper boat and floating in a bathtub to give it a proper Viking burial, would make a lot of sense as well, but that’s going to be up to your group.

How have you dealt with the death of character in your Dungeons and Dragons games? Have you had a particularly epic character death or any really funny one?

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What do you do? What happens in your game?

It doesn’t have to be D&D, it could be a Sith cutting a character in a Star Wars game in half, or anything like that. I’ll just mainly be talking about it in a D&D sense.

Before you get to the point described above, as a group, you need to decide if there is going to be character death in your games. It is a part of every system, but just because it’s part of every system doesn’t mean that you have to use it. You can choose that you are going to have a more epic party or have some sort of resurrection option always available for the players. Or, you can decide that resurrections are extremely expensive in your games and that if a character dies, they are most likely going to be dead for all time. Maybe in the case of the dragon, if the rest of the party can kill the dragon or drive them off, they can steal enough from the dragon’s horde that they could get a spell done, but that would be about the only time they’d have enough money. But this is something to think about as a group or something to adjust accordingly in the game.

Now we’re at the point where the dragon has chomped down on the bard, in our scenario, how are you going to deal with this death exactly?

To me there are a couple of things that will influence this. First, is the player done with the bard, it’s possible, without knowing context, that the player fully knew that their character was going to die, because they wanted to play a different character. That’s totally fine to do in a game and totally acceptable for a player to want to do. However, I would limit it some so that a player who wants to play everything wouldn’t be able to play anything and everything that they wanted as that would hurt party cohesion (I’ll likely write a post about this later).

Otherwise, the other thing to think about would be, what sort of arc has led up to this? Maybe it was obvious what was going to happen, there were hints that they couldn’t try and talk to the dragon and the bard needed to do it anyways because they are a pacifist. So maybe it is a fitting end to a bard who was having troubles accepting the world and life style that she had joined. But if the story built up to this point, not just for telling the story to the players but also the characters own journey directed by the player, it might be a fitting end for the bard, even if she wasn’t completely ready to retire as a character. The story impact can sometimes be that important. This works especially well if you’re planning on going into a combat quickly and have an NPC would the party that the player can control for the battle. Or if you’ve warned the players ahead of time to have back-up characters who can join the game quickly. You don’t want a player sitting there too long, or if it’s a player who doesn’t like combat for some reason, try and keep them engaged somehow though, they may just be engaged in the story.

For example, in the first season of Dungeons and Flagons Finja was killed in the final battle before the end of that battle. Now, Kristen, who was playing Finja, isn’t someone who loves combat, and because the action and emotions that were going on in the scene and in the story were compelling at that point, it made a lot of sense in game for her to drop out of action and Kristen still enjoyed what was going on. I don’t know if it’s on the podcast, but we all agreed it was a fitting end for Finja who would definitely have sacrificed herself to stop a great evil from being fully realized. If we had continued with those same characters, I’m not sure that Finja would have wanted to be brought back or that Kristen would have wanted Finja to be brought it. It was a fitting end to Finja’s arc in the game.

Now, that isn’t always the case, maybe that comes out of no where in your game and it’s a character that the player is very attached to. If that’s the case, find a way, storyline wise to bring the character back from the dead. It could be that someone owes her a debt and will pay for the resurrection for her. It could be in place of a reward that is what the quest giver offers. It could be that a deity says that it isn’t the time or place for the bard to die. If I were to do that last one with the deity, I’d probably hint or give a prophecy about the time, place, or way the bard will die as that would be an interesting character development. Or you could also just end up making it a quest for the players to get back the bards soul. That would work well if you know you’re going to have that player missing for a couple of sessions, you could then have her bard be an NPC spirit in your control and play through that quest without advancing the main plot.

With all of these suggestions and ideas, you’re going to have to read the table. Depending on what has happened in your game, how the players are reacting, and how it was set-up, you’re going to have to judge it for yourself. Hopefully these are some tips that might give you a basis for handling character death at your table.

When you’ve had this happen to you in a game or caused it to happen in a game, a character dying that is, what have you done?

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