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View Full Version : How should I feel about this player character death?



RobertBrown
2017-01-05, 09:46 PM
My first time playing D&D, and my character just died due to a social interaction. The whole thing seemed a bit random to me. Since I have no basis for comparison, though, I’d be curious to hear others' takes on whether I had it coming or not. I'm not in the game anymore, so this isn't a live issue in any regard, but I think honest feedback would help me to calibrate my expectations and in-game actions in the future.

Long story short, a few months into our campaign my character was in a position where the only logical thing to do was go slightly off the adventure rails. I privately asked the DM if that was alright, and he said that it was. So I began going around and preparing for what would be a big climactic fight. As part of my preparations, I went to get some supplies from a shopkeeper. I had evidence that this shopkeeper had committed illegal activity, and my party had previously killed several of his accomplices. I used both of these facts to try to intimidate the shopkeeper. I rolled well enough to pass a DC 25 intimidation check (this is 5th edition). The shopkeeper gave me what I wanted. Then, as I turned to leave, the shopkeeper attacked me, and between poisoned weapons and some assassin class feature was able to permakill me before I could react.

This happened in the context of a published adventure, and because I was curious what sort of shopkeeper withstands a superhuman intimidation attempt like that, I looked him up (I was also curious about the assassin feature). I was surprised to discover that the shopkeeper isn't even a named character in the adventure, nor is he listed as having class levels.

Given all this, and given that at no point did I have any indication that this was a dangerous character or a dangerous situation, I have the nagging feeling that the DM killed me out of convenience because I went off the rails. But as I said, I don’t really have enough context to know whether this sort of thing is usual. Also, the DM did describe it as a fairly high-lethality campaign, so maybe high lethality means watch out for every shopkeeper? But on the other hand, at all previous times in this campaign dangerous situations were pretty clearly telegraphed as such.

As I said it isn't a live issue, as I'm not playing in that game anymore, but since I'm new to all this I'm wondering for the future (and to inform my own DMing someday) whether this was, in fact, unusual, or whether I should've been more careful.

P.S. From a purely narrative standpoint, I found it odd that my character died during a shopping trip rather than during the climactic showdown I was setting up. I feel like if our roles were reversed, I’d have bent the rules to make the death narratively appropriate. Is that considered okay?

exelsisxax
2017-01-05, 09:57 PM
The DM killed you with a disguised "rocks fall", essentially. You should feel like it sucks because it does. You seem to have described a strictly railroaded game, and the DM killed you for trying to off-board most likely.

If you know the DM personally, tell him that he was an awful DM in that situation. If he's just some DM, don't join his games anymore. He seems to have killed you for being a proactive player, next time it'll probably happen right away as the DM moves to safeguard his precious story.

Beneath
2017-01-05, 10:00 PM
While it's impossible to know without knowing the whole story, yes, suddenly giving an NPC new abilities to kill a PC like that seems out of the ordinary, and "shoots to kill the moment you turn your back" is a weird interpretation of a high Intimidate roll, especially when you turning your back doesn't negate the dirt you and the rest of the party have on him that you intimidated him with.

I don't know how closely the DM was adhering to the adventure though (like, if the shopkeeper wasn't a named character, maybe the entire crime involvement bit was his invention? which means that rogue levels wouldn't be out of the question. Regardless it's strange that a criminal trying to cover his tracks would murder someone during business hours in his own shop, with no guarantee that the person's friends aren't going to get him)

The entire point of playing pen and paper instead of a video game is so that you have a human there who can come up with more plot when you go off what they expected. It can be different in long published adventures (which players shouldn't be reading until after they've played them), but you're in the right for wanting to go off the rails and if this was a punishment for going off them then the DM is in the wrong.

You're right that it's narratively unsatisfying too. "High-lethality" often means "lots of narratively unsatisfying deaths" though, but it varies from DM to DM, and usually those narratively-unsatisfying deaths come from letting the dice fall as they may rather than ambushing the players.

ETA: It occurs to me that, rather than punishing you for stepping off the track, he might have been punishing you for messing with his pet NPC. A lot of DMs have favorite NPCs they re-use, or their old PCs who show up as NPCs. A few will punish you for not acting like their favorite NPCs are as awesome as they think they are. This is generally considered bad practice.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-01-05, 10:09 PM
There's nothing wrong with a DM adding his own things to an adventure that aren't in the module. I think the fact that he was involved in some sort of crime is enough to telegraph the fact that he might be personally dangerous. Dying to a criminal shopkeeper is well within the realm of being reasonable for a D&D game that's advertised to be dangerous.

I would be extremely wary about him reacting like that after a DC 25 intimidation check, though. This is why I personally will always tell the players the target number in advance, and guarantee that if they hit that target number they will achieve the thing they were trying to achieve.

Edit - though I suppose in this context the threat wasn't so much that you're big and scary, but that you have damaging information about him. If you included in the threat that this information is somewhere else that will be released even if you die then I'd say the check should ride. If you didn't then killing you to keep it secret is theoretically plausible. Though personally I'd say that if you didn't make it clear that killing you wouldn't stop the information from coming out then I wouldn't let you make the intimidation check at all.

Templarkommando
2017-01-06, 08:00 AM
Uggh... that's a sticky spot.
.
How attached were you to this character? I ask because it really depends. If you've been sitting up making up stuff for this character's backstory and getting jazzed about what you're going to do with him, there's still a way to get some good out of the story stuff that you've put together. I mean, if you can't realistically get this character raised, is it worth writing a short story about? I mean, your character may have died in the DnD campaign, but the DM can't sneak into your head and kill a beloved character there. There are a couple of ways that you can still resolve the story line that you have going on in your head. If this character has anyone related to him (distant or immediate family, friends, or even enemies) there is a reason that you can play a very similar character in the same campaign world. In fact, you don't even have to go that far if you don't want to. You can basically reroll the same character again with just a couple of tweaks and keep on trucking if you want to. It will be like nothing ever happened for you. Let the DM figure out how your character fits into the lore of the world. If he gets annoyed trying to explain why there are so many people that have the exact same mindset and goals as that one guy that he killed once, good for him, maybe he'll get tired of trying to explain the similarities and just let you play.

As far as the shopkeeper - technically, by rule zero the DM gets to do whatever he wants to do. It still sucks that some random shopkeeper turned out to have class levels and was able to resist a DC 25 intimidate check.

I just reread your thing and saw that you're not playing in that game anymore, and I honestly can't say that I blame you. The first session that I ever played outside of trying to play with my own brothers involved coming within inches of death for a character and then basically getting to sit out the entire four hour session, which sucked. It wasn't because the DM was giving shopkeepers class levels in my case though.

When I DM, I don't go out of my way to kill characters. About the farthest that I want to go is make the party *think* that they're in danger. With very little exception I will typically start fudging rolls to save PCs if the fight starts going too far wrong. First, if a PC dies, I want it to be because something went really badly in the middle of a dire situation. I don't murder PCs for crossing the wrong shopkeeper... my guidelines - especially in the last couple of years - has been the rule of fun and the rule of cool. I try to shy away from much else.

Stealth Marmot
2017-01-06, 03:14 PM
When you found evidence of the illegal activities did you find any evidence that the Shopkeeper himself did any of them personally, thus giving hints to him being an assassin or did they just seem to have him bankrolling the operations?

If the former, then it's your own fault for flat out telling a clearly high level rogue/assassin you were going to blackmail him. If it is the latter, your DM screwed you big time.

RobertBrown
2017-01-06, 03:37 PM
Thanks very much all of you for your honest feedback. I think my conclusion is that I was probably killed off for plot/convenience reasons, though it's obviously hard to know for sure.

This experience has been fruitful to think about. It seems like there's a real tension between keeping the game realistic/lethal on the one hand and discouraging players from doing interesting and risky things on the other. I've been trying to figure out how I'd strike that balance in my own games. Does anybody have any tips?

JNAProductions
2017-01-06, 03:38 PM
It sounds like your DM was not being a good one. I'd sit down and talk with him-ESPECIALLY since you asked if going off the rails was okay, and that seems to possibly be why he killed you.

GungHo
2017-01-09, 10:30 AM
I see three issues.

1) The DM offed you for not going with his plans.
2) You cross checked the DM by looking at the adventure to see whether or not a character was capable in order to defend yourself.
3) Both of you forgot to work as a team.

Both of these are beginner issues, but they can become more problematic with time, as it's a set of habits that can die hard if not curbed. You've said this was your first time, but I don't know about the DM.

It's the DMs discretion to turn a shop keeper into an assassin, even on the spot, if it would make the story more fun (with some exceptions... mostly that being all other evidence displayed previously was to the contrary... like the beautiful Elven princess you rescued being revealed to be a tall, shaved Dwarven day laborer [unless it's supposed to be a farce]). He doesn't need to hew to the text as written, and an "unnamed" character can be promoted if the DM wishes it (I do this all the time.) It's not your position to pull out the adventure and say "well, this guy isn't written this way, so you shouldn't do that" (I realize this may have been done well after the fact). If you just want the adventure to be executed as written, then play a computer game.

However, on the other side, the DM's discretion isn't really meant to be used for punishment. Yes, you raised the stakes by going in and intimidating the shopkeeper (even if you passed an intimidate roll), and yes, the DM can decide how the shop keeper would react to that (I'd probably have had him hire thugs to go after you rather than turn him into Sho Kosugi), but he decided to skip that and just give you a Sierra end screen. If he only wants things to happen that he's planned for or he's decided, then he should write just write a novel or a play.

On both sides, tabletop roleplaying is about improvisation as a team, and the DM is on that team. Watch [I]Who's Line is it Anyway?. Do those people step on each other? They work with each other within the frame provided. They don't walk off to the side of the stage and make car honking sounds if they didn't feel like being one of the pound puppies and the moderator doesn't say "you aren't funny so go sit in the audience for awhile". You both failed that. You went and did your own thing and then he punished you. You did the right thing by asking, though. He should have been straight with you and told you he didn't want you to do it or provided you a framework that allowed you to do so and said "if you do something dumb, remember you're on your own".

Knaight
2017-01-09, 10:48 AM
This experience has been fruitful to think about. It seems like there's a real tension between keeping the game realistic/lethal on the one hand and discouraging players from doing interesting and risky things on the other. I've been trying to figure out how I'd strike that balance in my own games. Does anybody have any tips?

Because when I think about shopkeepers with some criminal connections, I think about highly competent professional assassins, able to feign being cowed then pulling a poisoned weapon they always have on hand out and instantly killing hardened adventurers from behind while the rest of their party is presumably near by.

Wait, no, that's exactly what doesn't come to mind in terms of realism. It's high lethality, but then I'd generally associate high lethality with a dangerous world in general, where competent NPCs are less likely to take stupid risks, so even then it's iffy. This isn't a conflict between discouraging players from doing interesting things and keeping the game realistic. This is sabotoging the realism of the game to maintain the railroad. It's bad GMing, and as someone who has been GMing for a while and remembers with chagrin early GMing mistakes, I can say that it's bad even by the standard of rank novices.


Long story short, a few months into our campaign my character was in a position where the only logical thing to do was go slightly off the adventure rails. I privately asked the DM if that was alright, and he said that it was.
This also sends up alarm bells. You shouldn't have been trying to follow the rails to begin with, and while you feeling like you should doesn't mean much (it's not that rare in new players accustomed to more linear games from video games and the like), the DM responding that yes, you can go off the rails instead of stating that there are no rails is not a good sign.