Quote Originally Posted by notXanathar View Post
I'm thinking about working on a horror style game, a result of which may be a high PC mortality rate. How do other games deal with this, and how would you deal with it? Do you just assume that the player of a dead character just leaves (assuming no replacement characters) or continues to play through a different role in the game? If the second, what kind of role? What good options might there be to limit players dying before the final act of the adventure? Do you have any other thoughts that may be useful?

Thanks in advance.
I ran a game based on WWI-style trench warfare (but with magic instead of artillary) and I really wanted to hammer home the horror of it. I told my players from the start that the campaign would be lethal, and as such rather than have them come up with detailed background for their PCs (who were unlikely to make it through even the first encounter) each would would instead invent a minor nation which is involved in this war, and their characters would each be raw recruits from said nation. Whenever a PC died, the next round they would simply come to inhabit one of the other faceless multitude of allied NPC soldiers nearby them.

The first encounter saw the enemy charge their trenches, launching fireballs at randomly selected positions and killing scores in one burst, lobbing "skeleton bombs" behind their lines (modified bags of holding packed with 20 skeletons each, engineered to invert the bag and release the skeletons on impact) as expected, the PCs really had no chance and some players lost a character every round.

Once the first encounter was over the players were free to write the backstory for whatever surviving PC they were left with, and begin to become attached to them as characters as the campaign settled into slightly more survivable storytelling.