Day 6: First character death. How did you handle it?
You know, maybe I'm just too old for this blog hop. Because I'm having a hard time remembering some of this stuff. Or maybe I just "had too much college" in my late teens and early 20's, if you know what I mean. Sadly, I remember the traumatic events of my childhood more clearly than the good stuff. Post-traumatic stress and all that.
Anyway...first character death? Okay, first of all, I have to admit that my original D&D group, when I was a kid, was entirely composed of guys averse to character death. That includes your humble servant. I guess there goes the last of whatever little "OSR cred" I had, if I ever had any to begin with.
Yeah, unlike a lot of gamers of the old-school mentality, the kids in my teenaged gaming group rarely let the dice "fall where they may." Yes, there was damage dice fudging. Basically, characters who got dropped to zero hit points or less were knocked out, and usually nursed back to full health faster than you could say "healing potion."
So our TPKs back in the day were "total party knock-outs." I guess we decided that monsters would just wander away after they put us to sleepy-time.
Whatever, don't judge. We were kids, and furthermore we were kids that wanted to be heroes, if only in our imaginations. And the heroes we saw in comic books, TV shows, movies, and novels didn't die. They just had "setbacks." That's what getting chopped down to 0 HP was: a setback. Sometimes a major one, as often you would awaken to find some of your cool stuff gone.
Anyway, I'm rambling. So, yeah, PC death was rather rare for me as a kid. I vaguely remember a paladin dying (as I've written about before, I have a soft spot for paladins). He might have been killed by another player character, actually. Other than that...it's all foggy!
One thing's for sure, I definitely handled it better than old Marcie:
I figured Marcie would make an appearance today.
ReplyDeleteBack in the day we used the "Hovering On Death's Door" rule from the 2e DMG. But usually the other PCs would save the downed character just in time. As in--they would wait until -8 hp before the would even think about saving the character.
So yeah, unless you took massive damage or got separated from the group, death was (almost) a rare thing.