It is bad enough when one player character dies, so how do you address the unfortunate possibility of a Total Party Kill?

"Okay guys, we have totally got this! What are the odds that a great wyrm red dragon will kill us all?"

Many view it as a sign of poor skills in a DM.  Others cast blame on the party for not understanding the severity of an encounter before it is too late.  Sometimes, the dice simply refuse to fall in favor of the heroes.  Thanks to the law of large numbers, the possibility of a TPK is present in almost any game, even if every single encounter in the entire campaign is balanced to be fair.  Unless you fudge the numbers, TPKs seem to be an inevitability in any DM’s career.

How, then, do we handle the entire party losing in battle?

"You see, Flash Gordon, that with you and Miss Arden as my captives, Dr. Zarkov will be forced to complete my death ray, and I, Ming the Merciless, who is totally not Anton LaVey in drag, shall rule the planet Mongo FOREVER!"

Captured!

A-ha!  Now that the heroes have been defeated, the villain has them right where he wants them.  He cannot kill them off, however, since he needs their heroic spirit/special knowledge/physical strength/raw charisma to power the Armageddon device/unlock the planetary defenses/fight in the gladiatorial pits/make a nice pot of tea.  The trope of the bad guys capturing the good guys is likely as old as fiction.  While there are many silly or otherwise played-out examples of this behavior in movies, comic books, another media, it can still be handled well.

Ransom

In medieval times, it was common to take exceptional opponents as prisoners and ransom them back to their families.  A dead hero is of little worth, but surely the local lord would be willing to pay many, many gold pieces in  exchange for the safe return of his prized adventurers.  Instead of having the enemies kill all of their downed opponents, have the enemy capture the heroes so they can be ransomed.  This can lend a great impact to your story, because not only does this leave the heroes in debt to the local lord, but it also creates the expectation that the heroes will do the same for their enemies.  How will it be viewed by the population as a whole if the heroes wantonly slaughter the enemies who once showed them mercy?

Sold into Slavery

Surely, soldiers such as the heroes would make excellent slaves.  Once captured, the heroes might need to go through one or more adventures where they escape their slavers, bargain for their freedom, or fight in gladiatorial arenas.

Prisoners of War

The heroes could be a valuable source of intelligence for their enemies.  Keeping them in the dungeons is a much safer investment than outright killing them.  No one has ever escaped from the castle dungeons, so what are the odds the heroes will? (Answer: Very good, but only because no one has ever done it before.  Heroic fantasy metaphysics work like that.)

When dealing with the heroes getting captured, the game rules will sometimes stand in your way.  Many games have rules where unconscious characters will “bleed out” until dead, and you may have one or more dead party members on the field while the rest are still fighting.  There exist creative ways of dealing with this problem, and there is no one right answer.  Often, it may involve fudging the rules a bit for the benefit of the story.  Different players and DMs have different levels of comfort with this idea, so the :right” action in this case is highly dependent upon your gaming group.

Savior Mickey

While the Kingdom Hearts series of games is an odd amalgam that is not everyone’s cup of tea, Kingdom Hearts 2 takes an interesting stance on the TPK.  In certain boss battles, a TPK results in Mickey Mouse, the Badass-in-Chief and King of the game’s universe, arriving to save the day.  The player gains control of Mickey, and he can fight the boss as Mickey before eventually healing the party and resuming standard play.

Skip ahead to about the 43 second mark in the video below to see an example of this feature.

While the Savior Mickey approach works well in Kingdom Hearts 2, it might not be a fit for every tabletop RPG campaign.  With proper structuring, however, it could be a real benefit for your game.  Do the heroes in your game have some sort of powerful, all-seeing benefactor?  Maybe the benefactor can show up to save the day, but is expends a powerful magic item that can only ever be used once.  If you want to run with this approach, keep the potential savior printed out and ready to go in your game files.  Taking a cue from Kingdom Hearts, do not play the savior yourself while in combat.  Hand the character sheet – or monster stat block – over to the players and let them save their own hides.

We often see this approach scripted into various video games and tabletop adventures as an absolute moment in time – the heroes WILL fail in this encounter, so the savior WILL show up then.  Having a savior pre-written as a backup plan allows the introduction of such a character to feel far more organic and less railroaded by the DM.  If it never gets used, then just pat yourself on the back for good encounter design, and thank your lucky stars that the dice never rolled too hard against your players.

Time Goes On

Though this is probably the hardest option to pull off successfully, I feel it can be one of the most rewarding, in terms of story.  Simply put, a TPK can mean that the bad guys win.  The heroes have been defeated, and the evil forces now can operate fairly free of interruption for a time.  New heroes will one day rise to challenge the evil, but not right away.

For this case to work, you need your players to be invested not only in their character, but in the story as a whole.  The death of their party means that the bad guys won that round.  Restart your campaign with a new party, maybe years later in the game world, after the enemy ‘s plans have notably advanced.  Bards now sing of the heroic deeds of the old party, and how they were the best hope for defeating the enemy.  Cut down in their prime, they are martyrs and have become an inspiration for a new generation of heroes.

You need the right narrative style and the right group of players to pull this off successfully, but the rewards can be pretty impressive.  Epic stories are especially well suited to this style of addressing the TPK problem, and player buy-in can hinge on them seeing the advantages to picking up the story from a brand new viewpoint.  The biggest key to success in this scenario is not simply pick up where you left off.  As DMs, most of us have a certain idea of how the story will unfold, and this style requires a willingness to drastically alter that plan.  Staying the same old course with a brand new set of characters is the exact kind of narrative inconsistency that makes the TPK so awful and leads to players losing interest in the campaign.

If handled poorly, a full party wipe can ruin a game.  There is no one correct way to handle such an occasion, as so much is dependent upon the combined temperament of the players and their DM, the trust established between the two, and the agreed-upon goals of the story being told.  Hopefully, the above ideas will spark your own thinking on this topic and leave you better prepared from when it happens at your table.

Have you ever ran a game that resulted in a full TPK?  How did you handle it?  How did the game feel afterwards?  What advice can you offer on this topic?

Death of a player character is often a difficult situation at the game table, but there exist ways of mitigating the damage it does to your game.

Previous editions of Dungeons and Dragons place the cost of a grave digger's services at one silver piece. You know . . . in case it comes up.

In the last article on the price of failure, reader Haywire brings up how character death, or even total party kills, are clear cases of failure that need to be addressed in more detail.  I agree.

The very nature of character death and its frequency varies widely by system and game master.  Some systems, such as Traveller (Mongoose or original) are positively lethal.  Getting in a fight means that someone is going to end up dead, and it could very easily be a hero.  In traditional sword and sorcery games, like Dungeons and Dragons, death is generally little more than a highly inconvenient status ailment, easily curable starting at around 8th or 9th level, depending on the edition.  Some systems, claiming a focus on story-telling and character development, explicitly do not allow for character death without the consent of the  player.

Since I am not a fan of the Raise Dead spell, this article will focus on permanent character death, its complications, and alternative practices.

The biggest problem with permanent character death is generally the disengagement the  player feels from the story.  When we play, our characters capture our imaginations.  We think about what our character might be doing during the down time between adventures.  We get into the character’s head and really try to imagine what he or she is thinking.  Once we mentally and emotionally invest in a character, losing that character can upset some to the point of tears.  Losing our character means we lose our primary mode of interacting with the story.  There are several approaches to this problem.

Death is but a Flesh Wound

When a character “dies” by the rules of the game, there is nothing preventing you, as the game master, from transforming that “death” into a permanent injury.  Maybe that “killing” blow merely hamstrung and incapacitated the character, leaving thew character with an eternal -1 to movement once he or she heals.  Contracting a normally lethal disease could leave the character forever sickly afterwards, giving him or her a -2 penalty on all saving throws.  Losing an arm or an eye would fundamentally change how a character could fight, maybe costing a feat for the character to function as if he or she had no permanent injury.  This preserves death as a real threat, but it does not remove the character from the narrative.  For drama-driven players, this even provides a new angle to explore when role-playing the character.

Death is in the Contract

When the player begins playing a character, give that player a “death certificate” to fill out.  As the cause of death, allow the player to list all the circumstances under which he or she is comfortable with the character permanently dying.  This technique is useful because it allows for different levels of risk within the same group of players.  By defining the narrative structures which can kill the character, be it a bad roll of the dice or a heroic last stand, you dramatically lower the risk of player disenfranchisement if that death does occur.

I cannot claim credit for the above idea, because it was recently suggested in one of my social networks.  If you know who posted this topic in the past few days, please comment and let me know who the original author was.  I would like to give credit where credit is due.

Death is not the End

In fantasy games, there is little reason for character death, even permanent death, to be the end of that character’s story.  Write a final adventure for that character, where the character must cross the land of the dead and find their way to paradise.  On this adventure, all the other players could play shells of the normal characters – simplified versions that reflect how the dead character viewed them.  Instead, maybe the other characters actually cross over to the land of the dead, where they must to escort their fallen friend on his or her final journey.

Alternatively, you could place the character aside, and the player know that the character’s spirit has just enough energy left to return for one final battle when the heroes need it most.  The player can choose which battle the dead character joins.  To make it clear the character is a spirit, you can make the character incorporeal and give him or her a few ghost-like powers.

In a science fiction setting, the character’s final adventure could  fill the role of a flashback episode, similar to the Firefly episode “Out of Gas”.  Use this adventure to illustrate actions the fallen hero might have taken in the past to give the party one big help later in the story.  This also gives the player a chance to flesh out any final details of his or her story by simply implying that they had happened “off-screen” with respect to the previous adventures in the campaign.

Death is not (very) Important

Rather than investing the player in his or her character, try to invest the player in the story of your campaign.  Provide numerous, colorful, useful NPCs in your game.  Give the players allies in the form of companion characters that join them often, especially in major battles.  Give the companion characters just enough flavor to be interesting, but make it clear to your players that they should run the characters how they wish.  Let them know that their actions when playing this companion character dictate that character’s personality.  If you do this frequently enough, then the players will begin to cheer for more than just their own characters.

The benefit in this process is twofold.  First and foremost, when a character dies, the player of that character has a huge cast of characters to draw on with whom an emotional attachment has already been made.  This should ease the transition notably, and it is the approach I use in my current home campaign.  Most of my players have expressed interest in turning at least one of these NPCs into their PC in the event of PC death.  It would not be very weird at all for Eoindeln the elven Gheal or Diviner Marcus to join the party if Javiero the human ranger dies.  The party knows both of these characters through previous dealings, and the players have a good handle on the personalities of these individuals.

The second benefit of this  approach is that it also gives you plenty of meaningful characters to kill, if the story demands it.  The death of a frequent companion character can be a very dramatic, heart-wrenching moment for the party, and you can let the character die without any guilt about a player feeling upset about the death of his or her PC.

With the above strategies, you can hopefully find a technique that removes some of the sting of character death while still preserving an appropriate sense of risk in your game.  In a future article, we will look at the total party kill, its impact on a campaign, and alternatives to that scenario.

How do you handle PC death in your game?  Have you used something like one of the above strategies, or do you do something completely different?  How do the players in your game or the system you are using influence this decision?

As we age, our games change with us.

Aging brings changes both obvious and subtle.

Aging does funny things to us.  When I was a teenager, gaming was my primary social activity.  My high school buddies and I would get together for entire weekends, playing game after game after game.  Everyone had a campaign to run, and we would stay up all night fueled by a powerful mixture of Doritos and Mountain Dew.  Flash forward almost twenty years to today.  As an adult, gaming is still my primary social activity, but boy has my table changed.

Time and Trappings

My D&D game often begins as early as nine in the morning on Saturdays, now.  We never start play before eleven on Sundays, but that is only because the entire crew will first go out to brunch at a lovely bed and breakfast.  Doritos and Mountain Dew still have a place at my table, but crudite, cheese and crackers, and calorie-free drinks are more common.  If we are playing all day, we will often break for a homemade dinner.

Companionship

For gaming to remain sustainable for my group, it has had to become part of a larger set of people and activities that share the day at my house.  All of my weekend players are now married or in a serious, cohabitating relationships, and we often have two or three extra people puttering around the house as we play.  No one has children yet, but it is pretty clear that children will also be joining us on game day when they come around.  Gaming day is also crafting day is also hangout day.  We do get interrupted a fair amount, but this is really just the social tax we pay for choosing a hobby that can be so time-intensive.

Content

As the DM, the biggest age-related change I see at my table is in the content of my game and the actions of my players.  As we are all solidly in our family-making years, children and families have taken on an increasingly important role in the campaign world.  One character began play with a twelve-year-old daughter, and the party adopted an orphan boy, who also happened to be a wererat, when he was abandoned by his caretaker.  Characters of noble title are seriously considering finding  spouses and producing heirs to their fledgling empires.  When one hero received a letter that mentioned one of her brothers was ill and possibly dying, she insisted that the party make an extended detour to go visit her family.  It is unsurprising, but I find it fascinating how the values of the characters at my table have changed as our gaming group has “grown up”.

How has your gaming table changed over the years?  Are your games noticeably different now from when you were younger?  How do you address the issues that arise, like the social limits that can come with a career and a family?