RPPR Episode 09: -10 and counting or PC Death and Dying

Hosted by Ross Payton and Tom Church
Music by Sabrepulse

Synopsis: Death is a fact of life in gaming. A thread I started on rpg.net about PC death generated a bit of discussion about how people handle player characters dying in a game. So, Tom and I discuss how to best plan and deal with characters getting shot, stabbed, poisoned, mangled, maimed, disemboweled, defenestrated, disintegrated and otherwise expiring. Plus, a special Valentine’s Day letter from Tom, anecdotes and more.

Also, we have a new Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green PC mortuary. Please immortalize your dead investigator by entering it in here and view the other fallen investigators.

Shout Outs
Half Life: Full Life Consequences. A hilarious and absurd cartoon based on a horrible Half Life 2 fan fiction.
Idiots of Gary’s Mod: Another Half Life 2 inspired bit of insanity.
Armageddon Empire: An addicting computer strategy game. If you’ve ever wanted to rule a post apocalyptic empire, this is for you.
Pantheon: Narrative Cage Match. A great tabletop storytelling game, where each player tries to control the outcome of the narrative.
Ironclaw RPG: A fantasy tabletop rpg with talking animal people.
Henry Rollins: Rock star and stand up comedian. He gets angry. Also, he is a liar.
Ryan McKain runs a gaming group called the Free Knights.

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8 Comments

  1. Good show guys!

    Tom, I think my shooting the sliding glass door story showed far more stupidity than your beating the tea shop owner and customer story. However, your’s was much funnier.

  2. Hey guys, I heard of your podcast from The Tome. ep. 9 was the first one I listened to – I’m very pleased, y’all did a great job. Please, what’s the music you play? Is that your own creation or from a video game, or video game inspired techno artist?
    again, awesome show
    -frake

  3. Author

    The music for this episode is done by Sabrepulse. There’s a link in the episode description or you can look at myspace.com/sabrepulse for more info on him.

  4. oh, thanks Rpayton, I didn’t see it at the top the first time. It was hiding in my blind spot.

  5. I used to have very serious issues when I was younger with my PCs dying, I used to get VERY attatched, these days though I tend to get more upset by games that are highly charged with negitive emotions.

    Personally I’m okay as long as it’s not a very emotionally charged situation…that tends to get me crying. I think my favorite PC death was my Cleric of Weejas a few yers ago that got killed by a giant quissanart of death construct….OOPS….::giggles::

  6. Hey, great to hear my comments made it to the show.

    Personally, I have problems killing players. I find myself writing them into plots that if I want to see in action, I can’t kill them before they play out. My last Midnight game was ended early because we were loosing a player and my entire game revolved around the four main characters. Without one, the story crumbled.

    Henry Rollins is awesome, he’s one of my role-models.

    Oh, and that one guy you talked about running into at Meta… he’s still around. We shudder every time he shows up but thats just because he’s so damn loud. We’ve managed to secure a table in the back of the gaming area and are somewhat removed from the Yu-Gi-Oh players and they don’t have any problems with us playing music for our games. Just throwing that out there.

  7. Another great job. I have the same problem killing PCs, but I have a question for you. Have you ever not killed a PC and then wished you had for plot reasons?

  8. Author

    I have avoided killing a PC a few times and then regretted it. In a zombie apocalypse game, I let one player live because it was the end of the campaign and I thought there might be a sequel so I only removed his leg instead of killing him. He had done many stupid things in the game so I wished I had. Usually though, If I avoid killing a PC, I tend to be harder on him or her later on. For example, in the Delta Green game A night on Owlshead Mountain, I only crushed the hand of a PC in a deadly fight. By all rights, he should have been dead, but I didn’t want him to sit out the rest of the session and there was no way to get him a new PC. So, when the end came around, I had the Mi-Go abduct him. I’ve never had any plot issues arising from PC death that I can think of though.

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