this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Unless your players are complaining about their characters not dying it's probably a bad decision to kill their characters.
While killing PC for the sake of killing them is, usually, abad practice. PC need to feel the risk of dying when doing dangerous stuff. It changes the way you play, if you know that a knife can kill you. Sure your skill mean you'll most likely win the fight or one shot that kid before they move, but if they pull a knife it's not just 1d4 over your 100 HP but a potential injury or death if you don't use your skills
Players don't NEED anything.
Some players want a challenge and to feel anxious when playing tabletop games.
Some don't want the threat of their characters dying, or a stressful experience when hanging out with their friends.
Personally I want to be then one that decides when I stop playing my character that I spent hours making and flushing out, if my DM killed my character for some random bullshit dice roll i would honestly not want to play anymore.
And some players just want a chance to play another one of the many characters they made.
So make up any other reason your character has to leave instead of your DM deciding when you are done playing.
Fair enough but also that’s kind of lame.
I GM two groups, both in pathfinder 1e.
In one group every player has played three or four characters by now. Death can happen at any time and that is part of the challenge they have to overcome. It's how they prefer it, always having high stacked against them. They are all about min-maxing their builds and finding ways to make my live hard coming up with more or less creative ways to counter their stuff.
In the other grou0 the characters have very clear plot armour, which we agreed upon beforehand. The players have developed their characters and take their fun from seeing how the adventures they have changes, develops and fleshed put their characters. They can die, but we agreed beforehand that there always will be a way of coming back from the dead at some point.
They just prefer role-playing and their challenge is to solve situations in a way that they as players and their characters feel good about. If they fuck it up in how they approach things they still will kill the bad guy in the end and live trough it, but its the difference between leaving back a smouldering ruin full of corpses or a village that sends them back on their way as heroes.
I can appreciate both playstyles and keep them in mind when I give challenges to the two groups. Non feels lame to me. It's just very different ways of playing.
It's baseivly the difference between early season game of throes where everything could happen to anybody and the more tradional style of series, where main character almost never die but the story is about their inner growth and how they deal with what the world throws at them.
That isn't lame, that is just a different playstyle.
It is more fun, you should try it sometime.
There's nothing wrong with running a game explicitly intended to have a chance to kill PCs, as long as everyone is aware of that ahead of time.
Hence Session Zero
Session Zero was also funny, I had a system-neutral list of things people may find triggering and went through it one by one, and the players (who are all more experienced in WFRP than me) kept going "comes with the territorry" on almost every single one.