I killed my DMs waifu

[Douche]

He had a female NPC as the captain of the guard in some town we were visiting. I was at the tavern with my bros when it turns out that the lord had been slain, and the first people to be suspected were the outsiders. So Marion Suella shows up at the tavern with her Joe Schmoe guard bros. They made their entrance quite obnoxiously so I hid up in the rafters. My party failed in talking their way out of it, so I fired my hand crossbow and crit her in the face, killing her instantly.

The DM was not pleased. He ended the session early, right there, and stormed off. He left his belongings and I saw like 20 printouts of some nymph-looking anime pictures or something. I asked some of the party members what was the deal with him. They said he used that character in all of his campaigns. It was his waifu. I killed her.

What do

[Geddy2112]

Don't play with people who have pet NPC's like this.

Although if she was such a waifu, I am surprised her plot armor was not three miles thick....

[Keltest]

Don't play with people who have pet NPC's like this.

Although if she was such a waifu, I am surprised her plot armor was not three miles thick....

Yeah, pretty much. A DM should never stat out an NPC he isn't prepared to lose.

Having said that, what level were you guys at where a single shot from a hand crossbow, even a crit, was enough to kill someone outright?

[Kelb_Panthera]

He had a female NPC as the captain of the guard in some town we were visiting. I was at the tavern with my bros when it turns out that the lord had been slain, and the first people to be suspected were the outsiders. So Marion Suella shows up at the tavern with her Joe Schmoe guard bros. They made their entrance quite obnoxiously so I hid up in the rafters. My party failed in talking their way out of it, so I fired my hand crossbow and crit her in the face, killing her instantly.

The DM was not pleased. He ended the session early, right there, and stormed off. He left his belongings and I saw like 20 printouts of some nymph-looking anime pictures or something. I asked some of the party members what was the deal with him. They said he used that character in all of his campaigns. It was his waifu. I killed her.

What do

Nothing. Your DM is in the wrong here. You didn't do anything -entirely- unreasoable for a typical murder-hobo rogue. It's his own fault for getting overly attached to a character he puts in potentially lethal situations.

You tell him, "I'm sorry the character you liked got herself killed but what did you expect?" If he's -smart- he'll just have her raised by the local church. If not, well, **** happens.

[Gildedragon]

Nothing. Your DM is in the wrong here. You didn't do anything -entirely- unreasoable for a typical murder-hobo rogue. It's his own fault for getting overly attached to a character he puts in potentially lethal situations.

You tell him, "I'm sorry the character you liked got herself killed but what did you expect?" If he's -smart- he'll just have her raised by the local church. If not, well, **** happens.

if he's very smart* he'll raise her into an unstoppable force. She's back from the grave and craving vengeance...
or you know, she goes on to the outer planes and becomes a goddess...

*ie: vindictive

[AvatarVecna]

He had a female NPC as the captain of the guard in some town we were visiting. I was at the tavern with my bros when it turns out that the lord had been slain, and the first people to be suspected were the outsiders. So Marion Suella shows up at the tavern with her Joe Schmoe guard bros. They made their entrance quite obnoxiously so I hid up in the rafters. My party failed in talking their way out of it, so I fired my hand crossbow and crit her in the face, killing her instantly.

The DM was not pleased. He ended the session early, right there, and stormed off. He left his belongings and I saw like 20 printouts of some nymph-looking anime pictures or something. I asked some of the party members what was the deal with him. They said he used that character in all of his campaigns. It was his waifu. I killed her.

What do

Well loot the body for starters. If you're high enough level and of the appropriate class/alignment, you may as well put that dead body to work and animate it to carry stuff for you (if it's the captain of the guard, they're likely very strong, so this works out well).

A DM including some Mary Sue waifu character in their story should never pit said MSW against the PCs unless they have some kind of plot armor, or the PCs will try and kill the MSW, because that's what PCs do to uppity NPCs that try to get in their way.

[Nerd-o-rama]

I never let important NPCs within Teleport distance or Rifle range of players unless they have heavy sniper protection, resurrection insurance, or plain old invulnerability to the players' weapons, as appropriate to the setting, for exactly this reason.

Of course, I judge an NPC's importance based on the plot, not emotional connection. Ultimately, anyone who opposes player characters in any way has at least a 75% chance of attempted murder, and PC allies aren't much safer. Getting attached is just asking for trouble.

[JNAProductions]

Is the DM otherwise good? Then say "Sorry, but it made perfect sense to do."

Is the DM otherwise not so good? Express your opinion with your feet, and walk out.

[Deophaun]

Do what I do: get a small tattoo of the NPC's face on side of your arm, next to the faces of all the other DMPCs you have killed.

[noob]

You do not understand: you need to make the death of the dmpc definitive as quick as possible.
So for example convince a barghest or something else to eat the soul of the dmpc(I think that would count as exalted player(on the player GM axis)) and then carry the body of the dmpc on a quest to find a sphere of annihilation to prevent resurrection even more.
Or buy a scroll of trap the soul and cast it on the body.

[Anonymouswizard]

He had a female NPC as the captain of the guard in some town we were visiting. I was at the tavern with my bros when it turns out that the lord had been slain, and the first people to be suspected were the outsiders. So Marion Suella shows up at the tavern with her Joe Schmoe guard bros. They made their entrance quite obnoxiously so I hid up in the rafters. My party failed in talking their way out of it, so I fired my hand crossbow and crit her in the face, killing her instantly.

The DM was not pleased. He ended the session early, right there, and stormed off. He left his belongings and I saw like 20 printouts of some nymph-looking anime pictures or something. I asked some of the party members what was the deal with him. They said he used that character in all of his campaigns. It was his waifu. I killed her.

Few things here:
1) good in-character call from you, as long as the party can beat the guards and get the heck out of town.
2) yeah, you really couldn't have done anything wrong here. If you had been informed of this beforehand then you could have taken precautions (I just retired my character because he clashes with the DMPC and would end up just murdering him in broad daylight, which would cause both in-game and out-of-game ****storms), but you weren't.
3) there are legitimately good reasons to cancel or pause the session here. You just killed the plot hook, so I'd need time to think up something new (some DMs wouldn't), but your DM's behaviour sounds extreme.

What do

As you asked...
1) kill the Joe Schmoe guards. Crossbows to the face while they are still surprised, and then mop them up in a couple of rounds.
2) Loot the bodies. Especially Marian Susan, she'll probably have magical goodies.
3) Get out of town, like now. If you need supplies hit the market on the way out, ideally willing to grab and run if guards try to stop you.
4) lie low for a little while, find a dungeon or something and raid it.
5) Head vaguely away from this city.

Now there are a few problems with this plan, your DM could beef up the guards to insanely high levels or Marian Susan could have a lack of goodies. But everything from step 3 onwards should be fine.

[Quertus]

I remember running a game, and one of the PCs suddenly murder hobos a priest of his own religion. I just sat there stunned for several seconds, before the player asked, "sorry, was that one of your PCs?" My response was, "no, and I wouldn't have wanted you to change your actions if it was (I'm murder on my PCs as a GM), I just didn't expect you to murder him in cold blood, is all."

That twist was stunning for me; I can scarcely imagine what it must be like for DMs with plots and important NPCs and desired outcomes, let alone a waifu.

As to what you do now...

1) kill the Joe Schmoe guards. Crossbows to the face while they are still surprised, and then mop them up in a couple of rounds.
2) Loot the bodies. Especially Marian Susan, she'll probably have magical goodies.
3) Get out of town, like now. If you need supplies hit the market on the way out, ideally willing to grab and run if guards try to stop you.
4) lie low for a little while, find a dungeon or something and raid it.
5) Head vaguely away from this city.

I would add

6a) hope for the generosity of whoever actually killed the lord, or
6b) level up, travel back in time, and actually be the ones who killed the lord.

Which route you take depends largely on the DM.

[Kane0]

Send him a message saying "Sorry bro, didn't realize she was important to you"

Nothing to gain from more hurt feelings, eh?

[SethoMarkus]

OOC apologise to the GM that you killed an important NPC, but explain that you felt it was the right thing to do IC at the time, given the information you and your PC had. Following that, let the GM know that it was just an in-game action and that you weren't trying to make an attack against the GM OOC.

The GM is definitely over-reacting, but that doesn't mean that you can't try to diffuse the situation. Neither you nor your character did anything wrong, definitely not intentionally, but it still upset your GM. Before you try to do anything in-game, make sure things are good at the table.

[Vitruviansquid]

Better start looking for another group

[Final Hyena]

The DM stormed off because his waifu was killed when he sent her after you..... A waifu he uses in every game.... And has loads of sexy pics of....

WOW.

Your DM has some problems. Now I can understand if your PCs do some crazy **** and you need to stop before continuing but this sounds like he was emotionally hurt. I would walk out, a good DM should be willing to accept in a game of D&D that people die, that anyone can die.

[Douche]

So you guys are suggesting I take her corpse with me and skip town, then destroy all trace of it so she can never be true resurrected?

[mephnick]

Never get attached to anything as a DM.

Cool character die randomly? Oh well.

Players bypassed a sweet encounter? Oh well.

Players missed a cool location? Eh, re-purpose it for later if it makes sense.

This is why you don't spend too much time prepping specific things. If you spend an hour creating a cool NPC or location you're already too attached to it. You'll force it into the session even if it doesn't fit and your campaign will suffer for it. Only get into specifics if your players show an interest in that thing. I had an entire 3 month campaign arc come out of a random encounter while travelling. Guess what I had originally prepped for that? "Revenant + cultist" on a table of 20 other random encounters. Once they focused on that unwritten story I prepped more specific things for it. They got dungeon crawls, NPCs and a whole new city out of a two word thing on a list of two word things.

[Kish]

That's not how True Resurrection works. *blinks at the OP's name*

[Zombimode]

So you guys are suggesting I take her corpse with me and skip town, then destroy all trace of it so she can never be true resurrected?

I can't speak for everyone, but that is not at all what I would suggest. Doing so would be dealing with an out-of-game problem in-game. And that almost never works.

[Douche]

That's not how True Resurrection works. *blinks at the OP's name*

Oh goddammit I didn't see the part where it creates a new body of there is none (5e)

So what, do I keep like her hand or something so I can kill her again each time?

[Jormengand]

Oh goddammit I didn't see the part where it creates a new body of there is none (5e)

So what, do I keep like her hand or something so I can kill her again each time?

If 5e TR is anything like in 3.5, the entire body is remade, so you'd just have a spare hand if you cut it off. Though if scrying works anything like 3.5, the hand would be useful for that.

[Anonymouswizard]

So you guys are suggesting I take her corpse with me and skip town, then destroy all trace of it so she can never be true resurrected?

Skip town, because it's a good idea in character. I'd suggest not taking and destroying the body, just take any goodies, because you really don't want to annoy your DM anymore (seriously, a DM can just escalate until one of you two loses, you can't).

Eh, re-purpose it for later if it makes sense.

This is the first piece of GM advice I ever give. I plan to run an Eberron campaign at uni and the first mission will be to protect an official. If he gets killed in the first session or the PCs decide not to take it I'll repurpose the encounters (including the cool one where they fight an Artificier and his horde of golems and other constructs).

[Talakeal]

This is an odd story, and I think we are missing a lot of vital contextual information.

Whose house was this at?

If the DM stomped out and left his stuff, why are you then going through his game notes?

I would honestly be surprised if you have the chance to "do" anything, the DM is probably not going to resume the game, or at least not without some significant demands.

Also, what alignment are your characters? Because that sort of behavior requires one to be seriously chaotic and or evil, and if the DM was expecting a standard "heroic" game this is probably a bigger problem then killing NPCs.

I mean, imagine in real life if the police came in to take an innocent suspect in for questioning and one of their friends jumped out and shot the cops; there would likely be a massive manhunt and the book would be thrown at him if he was taken alive at all.

Its really odd that you have a DM who would insert a Mary Sue NPC into the game and then let her be killed so casually. In most RPGs a single hit is extremely unlikely to kill anyone no matter how well you roll, and most immature DMs would throw in all sorts of plot armor to protect their beloved NPC.

If the description is accurate I expect the DM is both extremely immature and extremely inexperienced and they never saw this coming. If the campaign resumes I imagine you will be taken to task either in or out of character. Your character will probably be hunted down and killed by the forces of law and order (who may or may not cheat to do so) and then you will be told to either make a less sociopathic character or leave the game.

[The Glyphstone]

This is an odd story, and I think we are missing a lot of vital contextual information.

Whose house was this at?

If the DM stomped out and left his stuff, why are you then going through his game notes?

I would honestly be surprised if you have the chance to "do" anything, the DM is probably not going to resume the game, or at least not without some significant demands.

Also, what alignment are your characters? Because that sort of behavior requires one to be seriously chaotic and or evil, and if the DM was expecting a standard "heroic" game this is probably a bigger problem then killing NPCs.

I mean, imagine in real life if the police came in to take an innocent suspect in for questioning and one of their friends jumped out and shot the cops; there would likely be a massive manhunt and the book would be thrown at him if he was taken alive at all.

Its really odd that you have a DM who would insert a Mary Sue NPC into the game and then let her be killed so casually. In most RPGs a single hit is extremely unlikely to kill anyone no matter how well you roll, and most immature DMs would throw in all sorts of plot armor to protect their beloved NPC.

If the description is accurate I expect the DM is both extremely immature and extremely inexperienced and they never saw this coming. If the campaign resumes I imagine you will be taken to task either in or out of character. Your character will probably be hunted down and killed by the forces of law and order (who may or may not cheat to do so) and then you will be told to either make a less sociopathic character or leave the game.

Aaaaaaaaand how well has this worked out for you in Bizarro Gaming World, where the PCs do things far crazier than this all the time?

"Sneak attack in surprise round" is neither Chaotic nor Evil, when it's clear from the OP that diplomacy of the 'lets not you and him fight' was tried and failed. There was going to be a fight regardless, and when that is inevitable, getting the first hit in against the enemies (who are going to commit lethal violence against you) is just smart.

[kamikasei]

What do

You know those dances players in American Football do to celebrate a touchdown?

Google them. Find clips on YouTube. Find the most obnoxious, elaborate, in-your-face one out there.

Re-enact it.

[RazorChain]

Yeah, pretty much. A DM should never stat out an NPC he isn't prepared to lose.

Having said that, what level were you guys at where a single shot from a hand crossbow, even a crit, was enough to kill someone outright?

The GM should never have a NPC that he can't abide to lose. Never love your creations because the PC's will always find a way to destroy them


Question to the OP, why did your character kill her?

[Talakeal]

Aaaaaaaaand how well has this worked out for you in Bizarro Gaming World, where the PCs do things far crazier than this all the time?

"Sneak attack in surprise round" is neither Chaotic nor Evil, when it's clear from the OP that diplomacy of the 'lets not you and him fight' was tried and failed. There was going to be a fight regardless, and when that is inevitable, getting the first hit in against the enemies (who are going to commit lethal violence against you) is just smart.

I didn't see anything saying there was a fight. The impression I got was that the guards wanted to take the PCs in for questioning*, and the players refused to come peacefully. If the guard attacked the PCs, AND the "waifu" was weak enough to be killed in a single hit, then she was going to die regardless of "sneaky tactics" on the part of the OP.


As for my "bizarre world" experiences, do you mean as a PC or a DM? As a DM a lot of my horror stories involved a PC doing something stupid / evil and then dying as a natural consequence of their actions and then them calling me a "killer DM". I have also gotten at least two irredeemable murder hobos to leave the game and not come back afterward to our mutual satisfaction.

If you mean as a player with my last crazy DM, I don't know. He was constantly threatening to kick people out or take away / kill people's characters for violating his "rules" but I never actually got into a situation where I wanted to test his limits.


*: I assume this is supposed to be a plot hook, with the players going on a quest in exchange for a pardon and / or to clear their names.

[Leon]

Sounds like it was for the best.

[AvatarVecna]

I didn't see anything saying there was a fight. The impression I got was that the guards wanted to take the PCs in for questioning*, and the players refused to come peacefully.

In real life, if the cops came to my house and told me that I was being brought in for questioning, and I knew that Donald Trump had recently been murdered in my area, I would probably go with them instead of trying to kill the cops (especially since I would not have hypothetically murdered Donald Trump). This is for a lot of reasons: firstly, the justice system is vaguely dependable enough that I'm probably not going to go to prison for a murder I didn't commit, so I have no reason to believe resisting arrest is the key to my continued long-term freedom and happiness; beyond that, escaping murder charges by murdering the investigating officers is not likely to lead to getting away with murder in modern-day society, but it turns out that technology is pretty good at catching sloppy would-be murderers like I would be if I tried to kill two cops for investigating me in regards to the murder of Donald Trump. It wouldn't look good to murder the cops for asking questions, is my point, regardless of whether or not I actually killed Trump, which I didn't, because this is all hypothetical.

So there's three really big reasons why I, as a member of modern day first-world society, would not try and kill law enforcement officers for wanting to take me in for questioning regarding another murder: murdering somebody for asking questions about a murder doesn't make me look good, the system is un-corrupt enough that I believe I wouldn't be found guilty of a crime I didn't commit, and the system is too good at tracking down criminals for me to evade if I found myself wishing to evade punishment for the hypothetical multiple murders I haven't committed (and couldn't/wouldn't commit).

These three things are not problems for adventurers: the adventurers might not be able to trust the system to be impartial and actually determined their innocence/guilt (which is evidenced by how it's assumed that the outsiders are to blame for the mayor's murder), adding more bodies to the pile when the town is going to assume they're guilty isn't going to make things worse for them, and high-level characters (especially those with magic) have a surprising number of weird and powerful abilities that make evading the law fairly trivial.

A bit more to the point, while I agree that laying down arms and going with the waifu to your "questioning" is quite Lawful, it's not necessarily a Good deed to follow the railroad like a good little caboose. Similarly, even assuming that obeying the waifu's authority and submitting to "questioning" is a Lawful act, that doesn't make it Chaotic; sure, if you're not going along just because it's the Captain of the Guard "asking" you to come in for "questioning", that's Chaotic, but if you're refusing on the grounds that they don't have enough of a case to actually force you to participate, you're exercising your legal rights (assuming they even have such things). Similarly, killing the captain of the guard for asking you to come in for "questioning" is not a Good act, but that doesn't necessarily make it an Evil one by default. Murder is bad, yes, but murder of evil-doers is the backbone of the entire game system going back to AD&D; murdering a paladin who tries to bring you in for a murder you didn't commit is probably an Evil act, but murdering a blackguard who's trying to bring you in for such a murder is essentially using you as a scapegoat...which means he started it. And unfortunately for the DM, intentions are a large part of alignment; with how the rest of this seems to have been set up, the PCs had no reason to believe the suspicion placed on them was legitimate, or that any trial they received would be anything close to fair. Sure, they had no reason to believe it wouldn't be, but you don't become an adventurer by keeping your head down and doing whatever you're told to do, at least not without aspiring to some greater ordered purpose.

Sure, there's some flaws in this argument (some intentional, some not), but that's the nature of arguing alignment. And this is the biggest point I've got: even if the DM makes every last one of them Chaotic Evil for this act, and it turns out the authorities really were trying to question them (rather than "question" them), and it turns out that the town didn't actually immediately suspect the outsiders, it doesn't really matter, because the choices the players make in-character shape the story too. This could be the start of a whole new arc in their characters lives, as outlaws evading justice for one mistake that's haunting the rest of their lives. It would lead to some interesting stories and character interaction and moral dilemmas...or the DM could just take a mulligan and rewind through time far enough to give his waifu plot armor.