Showing posts with label challenge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label challenge. Show all posts

Monday, October 21, 2013

Killing Your Characters

It should go without saying that death is an important part of RPGs.  Not just the death of monsters and bad guys, but death of characters.  That isn't to say that character death should be particularly common (though in some games it is), but it should always be there, lurking in the background.  After all, the rules for death and dying don't just apply to the bad guys.  For an RPG to really feel engaging, you need the threat of death, or the players' actions aren't realistic: "Oh man, this dragon is hitting us pretty hard! If we don't kill it soon, we may all end up... going unconscious for 8 hours and then having to try again."

In this post, I'll talk about PC death from both sides of the GM screen, NPC death, and raising the dead.