I just finished reading/browsing the D&D 4e Core books.
As I let my impressions simmer and fuse into a hopefully unified set of impressions for my reviews, a multitude of D&D souvenirs come to the surface.
One thought that surfaced this morning was that Paladins have the shortest lifespans in my games.
You see, I don’t kill PCs all that often. In a 15-20 session D&D season (bi-weekly games from late August to early June) we usually have one or 2 PC deaths.
Most of these have been paladins in the last 6 years!
Back in 2003-2004, when we started our second (and longest standing) D&D 3.0 campaign, Franky made the first paladin of our group.
Said paladin was brutally slain within the 2nd hour of the game when he got hit by an attack of opportunity from a Troll and had his ribcage cracked open by a successful combination of claw-claw-rend attack on the monster’s turn.
Fast forward to 2008, Eric was playing a Crusader ( a holy warrior from the Tome of Battle, close enough) and used his teleport boots to land right beside a Huge White Dragon. The dragon went next, with only one legal target within melee range.
Claw-Claw-Bite-Wing-Wing-Tail slap… Dead Crusader.
Then last week, Eric (again) was playing a D&D 4e paladin. He was bloodied but valiantly holding the line against an animated statue (yeah, the D&D Game Day ones) when he was KOed by a punch and then trampled to death in the same round.
The moral of this story?
Don’t play a Paladin in Chatty’s games.
(Only one pally ever survived in our campaigns, and that was mostly because the PC in question was really a Silver dragon in disguise. Oh and we abandoned thatr campaign after 4-5 sessions).
Have you had character archetypes in your games that seemed to bite the dust more often that every others?
Was it because of a flawed class or because the specialist player running them had a (not necessarily intentional) deahtwish?
Not classes so much, but Dwarves. I kill dwarves by the bucketload, apparently. Not that you can get many dwarves in a bucket. Not without a decent blender, anyhow.
I think the record for any dwarf is twelve sessions, and that was a Dwarf – Classic D&D, so that was all he was – who had his arm ripped off after insulting an Orc 5 minutes into the first adventure.
It’s nothing personal. It’s just how the dice fall.
Yeh, right 🙂
I like playing paladins, however my first one I was under the impression that he was more powerful then what he really was, and that they are suppose to be played suicidally brave. They aren’t, of course, but it took me getting my butt handed back to me a couple of times before I realized how to play them skillfully enough to keep walking under my own power.
It takes more then one man to win any fight with most monsters in D&D, and the guys in the front always need to know when to step back, even if they are favored by a Lawful Good God.
Ripper Xs last blog post..Using Ranged Weapons In Melee Combat
Hum… I’m not a particularly brutal GM and my kills are fairly well spread across character types. The long term deaths generally come from two places: Players doing something particularly stupid and characters who the rest of the party actively dislikes. My latest campaign, one that ran weekly/biweekly for 6 months, had I think 4 PC kills. Egomaniacal bard who was dropped by a were rat and kicked off the docks into the water by a party member. Obnoxious dusk blade, eaten by a dire tiger. No one in the party was supporting him. Super AC Trip Attack Fighter, killed by critical from a weapon that has since been eratted back into reasonable power levels. Was fighting an opponent that was introduced just for him. Wizard, killed after party had disengaged from a fight due to overwhelming odds showing up to collect their fallen comrade. He fireballed unconscious/bleeding opponent, killing her. Was slain by the reinforcements.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..RE: W3C
@Greywulf: Hmmm, Dwarf pured in a bucket. It’s a troll delicacy… along with Troll finger food… because you never run out!
@RipperX: Pallys are hard to play, it’s a well documented and discussed-to-death topic. But once in a while someone ‘gets’ it and they can be awesome characters!
@Micheal Phillips: Why do I get the feeling that these deaths were somehow satisfying for the other PCs/players. How did the players who lost their PC feel about those? Were they jerks or just ‘playing jerks because that’s what they would do?’
Not a race…not a class…but a specific player, Phil. Dear Phil, of many games and campaigns years ago, had his own feat: get killed. Phil could get his character dead faster, and in more bizarre ways, than any other player I have known in almost 30 years of gaming.
Example 1, Cyberpunk 2020: Phil makes a cop — a pretty tough guy, at that. When ambushed by a superior street gang, said cop decides that making his stand in the middle of the street is a good idea. It wasn’t.
Example 2: CPunk 2020: Phil as ace pilot…decides to wait in the aircar on the roof while others are on bodyguard detail inside…made aware that someone was one the roof…none of the other PCs…stayed…got spike through head.
3: World of Darkness: Phil’s character joins the group anew…PCs just got their arses handed to them in a big fight…PCs make it clear they know they were betrayed…Phil’s character makes it equally clear that he was sent by their former employer/betrayer. Phil’s character ends up being thrown out of an airplane over the ocean.
4: World of Darkness: Phil’s most obtuse character yet, with a bizarre backstory too long and convoluted to recount here, decides to go it alone and investigate the house where the baddies are probably hiding out…said obtuse character is captured and disposed of with a blow torch.
And the list goes on. Dear Phil, no matter what bizarre or clearly stupid things he did to get killed could never…EVER…see why his actions had led to his demise. I used to be a nice GM, so I would let him make another character (always with an obtuse backstory) and incorporate him back into the game. He set a record one night: in a 5-hour session I think he went through 6 characters. Amazing.
@Jeremy:
Lol! I had 2 players like that.
Yan, one of my long running players, loves to make crazy cool stunts, knowing full well his character may die from it if the Rule of Cool rolls a fumble.
He especially loves being used as improvised weapons by dragons.
Another one, no longer with us, had a knack of making tactical choices that very often lead to his character’s demise. Playing keep away with a Dracolich’s phylactery being the most notorious occurrence.
2 of the three players involved were fairly jerky. If I’d been running in a private venue I’d probably not have invited either of them. Mostly, they took character deaths in stride. This was largely because I had a pretty strong grip on the appearance of danger in the game. I tended to run a few very hard fights instead of a bunch of level appropriate fights, and while I was careful to not put the party in danger of a real TPK, I was pretty good at making my players think that not only were they in danger of such, but that I was looking forward to it, so I was never accused of singling people out for death. (On average we had one PC go into negatives per fight, including the time the sorcerer with no spells and a heavy crossbow was the only one standing at the end and a fair number of “oh my, that was easier than I expected it was going to be” fights where I didn’t drop anyone. Of course, I did tend to keep the party well stocked in healing as well.) The Bard and the Tripping Fighter were min-maxed characters from the same player. The fighter wasn’t an intentional kill, though the opponent was designed specifically to counter his uberness. 4X crit with a flaming 2 handed weapon and a high strength modifier and a power attack is a real bad way to stay alive. The Duskblade hadn’t actually been pleasant to anyone. He turned around, made a warlock, and then decided that he didn’t really like non-modern fantasy gaming (he was a Shadowrun player.)
The sorcerer took it in stride. Since it was a willful action on his part to attack a downed opponent during a truce there wasn’t much he could say about getting wiped (by the NPC who killed the Trip Fighter now that I think about it. We were building up to a climatic battle against that one. Eventually he was going to be in a position where neither side was willing to disengage before the other died.)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..RE: W3C
Oh also, the Sorcerer’s death was more “oh shit what did you just do? We are injured and not sure that we can take him if we weren’t!” from the other players.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..RE: W3C
Those statues from the Gameday were freaking brutal as all hell!
My friend Jon’s characters had a tendency to die a lot in my games… Once he got killed by the party’s paladin once when the paladin attacked the statue grappling Jon’s character and rolled poorly.
Actually, another time he died because he was playing a paladin and the barbarian decided that the pally’s advice to turn himself in wasn’t good, so he cleft the pally in twain.
Asmors last blog post..4th Edition Monster Math Cruncher
A member of my gaming group is playing a Paladin in our 4E game. She is a Paladin of Raven (the god of death), she is scary, is really weird seeing a Paladin use (for a lack of a bettor word) Vampiric attacks. I guess the Paladin duos not have to be Good or Lawful anymore.
I know that you love the new D&D system and everything the new D&D brings with it, you have only critic it mildly and have tons of good things to say about the new D&D. I have to say I hate it. =*(
I really wanted to like this system but after building characters(almost every class and race combination) and playing the game, it just duos not feel like D&D. Is a shadow of D&D, It feels like a video game version of D&D.
Is not D&D, is something els trying to be D&D.
This will be like when D&D 2E came out, people were unhappy, so unhappy that they looked for other gaming systems…hell if it was not for 2E I would have never discovered GURPS, ShadowRun, StarWarsD6, DeadLands, ext. Anyhow, when 2E came out there were plenty of people that liked it but for the most part, most people were unhappy and disliked the new edition.
My Prediction is that history will repeat it self, it will bring a new era of Table Top Gaming, people will want to look for other systems or maybe create a system there very own.
@Chatty: Out of curiosity, Did you like 2E when it first came out?
@Lokycat:
I freaking hated 2e. It’s in my opinion, the worse version of the game. Mostly because I almost never DMed it, but also because it failed to address my needs as a Roleplayer when it came out.
I was sick and tired of A D&D 1e and wanted something grittier and more crunchy… I discovered Gurps and was very happy for 8 years… then I rediscovered D&D with 3e.
I like 4e because it will make my job as DM easier. I also like how fast and action-oriented it is so far.
But as I always say, it’s not for everyone. At least you are one of this who tried it before making your mind about it.
That’s fancy schmancy for ‘cut in half’ right?
I don’t do English no good!
I can’t think of any character class or race that I’ve killed more often than others. My trademark is to more transform characters into something different, and harass their loved ones NPCs.
However, TheMainEvent ran a Dark Sun campaign, and Bartoneus died Every. Single. Adventure. New character each time. I’m sure that either of them can fill in more details.
Dave T. Games last blog post..Gaming in Ancient Rome
I havn’t played a 4E game yet, however my group(s) don’t normally have Paladin because of the strict code, except for one player who almost always plays a Paladin. He normally survives a very long time but not as a Paladin. He almost always loses his abilities cause he breaks the code somehow before he makes level 2, including when he had been warned out of character, anot to do something because he will lose his abilities.
I havn’t played a 4E game yet, however my group(s) don’t normally have Paladin because of the strict code, except for one player who almost always plays a Paladin. He normally survives a very long time but not as a Paladin. He almost always loses his abilities cause he breaks the code somehow before he makes level 2, including when he had been warned out of character, anot to do something because he will lose his abilities.
Joey. I never thought of the paladin’s code as being particularly strict… and the new ones don’t actually have a unified code.
I don’t know, when I’ve decided that I want to play the stalwart hero type, I’ve never had a problem sticking to the Paladin’s code.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..RE: W3C
Well, from a player’s perspective, sometimes you die. There was a time in college that I went to a game session with no less than THREE characters because my mortality rate was that high. It seemed that no matter what I had created, the GM (Rolemaster group) had exactly the right thing planned to tweak their buttons (and he never saw the characters previous to the sessions).
I make an ice elementalist- he had a fire elemental that hands me my butt.
I make a heavy armor warrior- weight limit on the bridge over the chasm.
Etc. Etc.
Granted, I did play them a bit over the top and more fanatical than what I would now, but still…
It was fun, though. If it wasn’t, then I probably would have settled down faster.
The only character I’ve made that has died was my first, a gnome rogue…’twas an almost TPK, the only survivor being an elf ranger with Int 5…
Since, I’ve always played incredibly gung-ho suicidal characters, almost begging for death…might explain my trend of fighters…about a year ago, I was playing an elf knight who I had gotten bored with after making him into quite possibly the greatest braggart our game has seen…I asked the DM to do something to kill him off so I could give a bard a try, for a more modest support position…
A Balor tore a portal onto the Material Plane one day to fight me…I killed it without the assistance of the party…we were lv. 15…to solve this dilemna, he jumped into the portal it came from and as far as we know, he’s still wandering through the Abyss slaying everything he sees…
As far as consistent deaths go, in that same campaign, our player Greg has his elf ninja die TWELVE TIMES…we Resurrected her each time and each death put her in a different plane…at number 12, our DM awarded her with the outsider template…save or die effects are gone now…but oh, the hilarity of the nat 1’s Greg rolled…
Paladin and Fighter are the front line… By their definition they are bound to have the most casuality, crazy stunts aside. 😉
Were they jerks or just ‘playing jerks because that’s what they would do?’
It’s hard to tell the difference, isn’t it? My group just entered the “storming phase” (in my ninth session playing D&D) and I’ve been asking myself, “If D&D is supposed to allow you to do ‘anything,’ why would you choose ‘find out what it’s like to hang out with a bunch of violent assholes?'”
Yan.
I don’t know, as a player, I’ve scrapped more than my share of wizards too. Even when you don’t run them in the front line, they are pretty squishy. Especially pre-3rd edition.
Of course, I have run more than a few front line wizards over the years. And a wild mage who’se only memorized spell a lot of the time was reckless deowmer…
That was the fine print associated with the “crazy stunts aside” remark.
In my case I love rogue and they died pretty often too, but I’m always doing crazy stunts! 😉
That just made me remember one of the more flashy death I’ve had with a cleric… We had an encounter with a Balor or something alike and Chatty use it’s meteor storm spell using the spread that has the equivalent of 4 fireball in one spot… Well I was in that spot… He was rolling damage looking at me after each “fireball” expecting something but I was looking back at him saying bring it on… He goes on and on and after all of it he goes:
-You’re still alive!?!?
-Well I think that at -80 hp only my boots are left with little smoky bit on top…
😀 good time…
One of my buddies had a horrible knack for dying in un-resurrectable fashion in a 2e forgotten realms campaign over a decade ago. Whether it was getting bit in half by a neo-otyugh, having a dragon fall on him, getting disintegrated or getting lost and killed by himself in a dungeon, my buddy Chuck could not keep a character in the loop. And this was a game that was generous with the resurrections!
Going away from 4e for a second — the most difficult but fun transition we ever made in gaming was from 3e to CP2020. I ran about 10 game sessions before we had one that was not a TPK. My group took their time figuring out they weren’t gods of the battlefield in that game, so they ended up just meat. But far from turning them from the game, we grew to love it’s grittiness and the setting in general. I was deadset on enforcing CP’s unforgivingness in firefights, so my PCs knew they were going to have to get their kicks some other way. I got some of the best roleplaying, characters, and stories out of our CP2020 sessions after this.
gamefiends last blog post..Beautiful Power Cards
Yan
I was playing a wizard in a campaign where almost all of the magic was gone. There were pools of magical energy that casters could find and claim allowing them access to very specific sets of spells. The only one I had found to that date’s best spell was smoke form or some such. On the other hand, due to a number of events in game, I had the ability to act as a power amplifier for magic. We had just found a major cache of magical gear, all of which was quickly losing its enchantment. At the same time, by escaping with said gear, we unbound its guardian. The terasque. In the end, all we had left was an artifact version of a staff of power and the party’s airship. I convinced the party to lead the monster to an area controlled by folks we didn’t like. I then told them to flee, that they had the duration of my smoke form spell to clear the blast radius. Cast the spell, jumped ship and entered the beast. When I materialized as the spell ended, I used all of my remaining power up juice and used the artifact’s final strike ability. The DM agreed that this was sufficient to overcome the specific requirements for killing the Terrasque, the party, with a fair number of exceptional piloting rolls, managed to ride the blast wave to safety, and there was a crater where once there had been people we disliked.
Sadly I did not make the 50% chance to be expelled into another plane.
(That character showed up in at least three other campaigns over the years.)
It’s interesting to note how Roleplaying often crops up in systems that discourages players from being violent Big Heroes.
Be it that the ruleset is too heavy and made fights to long (Gurps, Rolemaster, High Level D&D) or just too deadly (CP2020, O D&D), I’ve often read that Roleplaying took over you couldn’t play the game otherwise.
Definitively a subject for a future post.
BTW. I love those stories. Keep them coming, I’m writing a huge text for Johnn Four’s newsletter and I probably won’t post anything here until tomorow night.
Also? The wildmage survived the campaign. Never managed to cast the intended spell with reckless Deowmer, but survived.
My first HackMaster character was a berserk cleric of Odin. He died in the first battle, when he failed his Self-Control check and tried to kill a pack of skeletons with a spear. (Max of 1 dmg a hit.)
Hackmaster wears it’s name so well… While I perused the main book (it truly is 1E 2.0) I was never sure how serious a RPG it was.
I mean the 7 volume monster books was ludicrous…
Wait a minute… how many did WotC create for 3.5? 5 + fiend folio + both codexes+…
I’ll shut up now.
Whenever I played, I usually seemed to be the one who died off in spectacular fashion. Never because the GM didn’t like me (I think), not because the party didn’t like me, and not because I did anything particularly stupid. It was more like a comedy of errors that ended in my character’s death. I think that the funniest thing about them is that our gaming stories don’t revolve around the spectacular things the living characters did, but how various characters managed to shuffle off their mortal coil.
The quote on the pic is actually from one of my favorite movies as a kid: The Flight of Dragons. I highly recommend every gamer sees it.
Make sure you check out the cast!
More info:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083951/
Once while wandering through a dungeon, we entered a dark corridor ending in a seemingly bottomless pit…that is until the resident dwarf remembered his darkvision and discovered a pool of water at the bottom…since it was the only real option for our party to explore at the time, we began discussing how we would get down safely…bored with our cautious rhetoric, the resident gnome sorcerer dove into the pit, echoing a resounding splash…
When our companion didn’t rise to the surface to tell us what was down there, we began to worry (only slightly, since he was a rather troublesome gnome, but we worried nonetheless)…after some quick piton pounding, the resident halfling rappelled down the shaft, torch in hand, only to realize a horrible mistake had been made…on account of darkvision providing a black and white image (one w/o color due to lack of light), what was mistaken for a pool of water was really a pool of acid…
After a hearty laugh, we continued on with our lives…
Also, at one point in time, I had a level 20 knight on my hands…they have this ridiculous ability called Loyal Beyond Death that allows them to stay concious and alive no matter how badly hurt they are…for each round they do this, they must expend one use of their Knight’s Challenge per day (14 for me)…when we took on the BBEG, I used my Test of Mettle ability to hold him off, while my compatriots dealt with his minions, occasionally peppering my opponent with damage…by the end of the fight I was kicking around at -163 hp with 9 rounds of life left in me…but thanks to some swift healing by the party’s two clerics, I came out not dead…
What a day that was…
sorry for 2ble post my mistake
solodire que mis clases favoritas son los barbaros y los paladines;
ser el guerrero aventado que se arriesga hasta que no queda ni una gota de sangre y sudor en su cuerpo es lo que me enseñaron en la escuela naval, asi qeu me identifico con ellos
I have a tendency for killing tieflings, and minimaxxers. I don’t know how. In 2nd Ed, it was the obligatory Mage who kicked off. In 3rd, Hunters (specifically a set of buddies- one ALWAYS made a Drizzt clone…tiefling… and he ended up just running head long into just about every poison, trap, and monster that one person just could not take on their own and SWEARING he would be fine…). Since 3.5 and 4th, it’s pretty much tieflings. I run a tough system with some tough house rules but have ended up with a TPK 3 times initiated by a tiefling Rogue, a tiefling Warlock, and a gnome that acted like the original tiefling warlock.
I find a lot of the beasties in the books if against characters of similar level and layout either don’t last too long or dominate very hard. I think when it boils down on the actual use of monsters, using tactics and considering the group you can make either outcome INTERESTING (they may hate GETTING hit and decimated, but when you throw the right words out, and make it personal, they want to come back for more lol). As a DM, we want to consider when our enemies want to cut and run(leaving them alive), or get nitty gritty.
The class I can’t touch as a DM is a Warlock. They give me nothing but headaches in 4e with an addiction to curses and a lot of Striker tactics, one Dark Lock can take out half of the enemies with a Daily.
I haven’t had any significant deaths in 4e. After playing our campaign for one year, the death toll is at 0.
I’ve already read your play preferences so I’m not going to argue about the warlock except to say that Warlocks should hit like hell and kill monsters with Daily… they were designed for that. In fact, they seem to be demonstrably weaker than newer ranged strikers like the Sorcerer.
If you haven’t seen them already, Barbarians are exceedingly scary too. I killed Controllers and Artillery in one round using At-wills. That’s what Strikers do, when played intelligently. The other classes’ role is to give the striker the best opportunities to dish out maximum damage.