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Old 08-12-2014, 07:11 PM   #1
Agemegos
 
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Default #RPGaday Topic 13: Most Memorable Character Death

I'm doing RPG-a-day in August, as promoted by Dave Chapman (Autocratik). This is Day 13 of 31.


Most Memorable Character Death

Well, a few of my own characters died deaths that I will remember forever because the memories are tinged with resentment. But I opine that to be well described as "memorable" the death of a character in RPG ought to memorable to everyone there — not just the player who lost or culminated a favourite character. On that criterion I think the most memorable of my experience was the second death of Andrew Smith's character Otis Grond in my first FLAT BLACK campaign.

It had been a long campaign, and Andrew felt that his character was played out. He gave me notice of an intention to have the character retire, and I asked whether he would consent to having Grond written out with a bang. Having secured his assent, I wove a piece of perhaps the most fiendish cunning I ever pulled off.

You see, Grond was from a planet (called "Thanatos", and designed by Andrew for my setting) where (a) there was folk-religious belief that whomever one killed would be forced to be his killer's slave in the afterlife, which enough people pursuing the incentives implied that it was a serious safety issue, and (b) in which there was a social feature involving elaborate machinations for social and career advancement, particularly in tearing down, disgracing, and destroying the incumbents of positions one desired. The society was steeped in scheming, dissimulations, and betrayals. Grond was correspondingly suspicious and hypervigilant when he first joined the Imperial Justice Department. But there had been a lot of water under many bridges since then; Grond had been a couple of decades marinating in the Imperial-Service culture of dedication, selflessness, and solidarity. He had been spaceship-wrecked on a sort-of-uinhabited planet for twelve years. He had laid down his life for The Mission and had a Spartan Cross to show it. He had developed. So before he left, it was needful to show how much he had changed, and as he was an admirable character that had to be done tragically.

Now, Grond's immediate supervisor was another PC, Chief Superintendant Kobaysahi Sir Koichi. Kobayashi was an Imperial fanatic born and raised, who specialised in carrying the party's severe streak. He was an artist both with the heavy reliable DEXAX needle pistol and in hand-to hand combat, and he had killed in his time more than his share of interesting and powerful people. Notably, in the first adventure in the campaign he had killed a mass-murderer who had encompassed the slaughter of wealthy tourists whose numbers were most conveniently expressed in scientific notation. And he was famous for it. Not that anyone was still thinking in such terms, this made Kobayashi a super-prime target for a Thanatosian religious fanatic.

So Kitchener Hawk-Moon, the Chief Public Executioner from Thanatos, the man responsible for killing the people who had killed people because they would make desirable minions in the afterlife, retired. And since he would naturally be hunted by serial killers all his life if he stayed on Thanatos, he emigrated and was granted asylum at the highly-secure Imperial Capital. Unbeknownst to anyone he had secretly converted to belief in the Thanatosian religion, and his plan was to kill Kobayshi and then suicide, making himself sovereign in the afterlife and the commander of a truly vast feudal hierarchy of homicide victims. But being a Thanatosian and having a typically colonial complete misunderstanding of the nature of Imperial society, he thought that he could never penetrate the defensive walls of intrigue and paranoia that someone like Kobayashi must have had to have survived. So he set in motion an elaborate plan that involved luring Grond off his own ground by using a custom-built damsel in adventitious distress, then using Grond as bait for a trap in which Kobayashi would be killed. Not that that was what it looked like to the players, of course.

So, a bit of mystery-and-intrigue business in which Grond is hooked but hasn't any reason to make it an official investigation. He falls into the trap, and the villain explains what he is doing. (Tension for the other players, whose characters are rushing into the second trap and do not hear the villain's exegesis.) Violence. It turns out that, in twenty years carrying the can for Kobayashi, Grond has gotten a lot tougher and more dangerous than Hawk-Moon reckoned upon. Grond killed Hawk-Moon with his bare hands, rescuing the girl. Beat. The girl points Grond's DEXAX pistol at him and says wonderingly "You killed Kitchener Hawk-Moon!" Long beat. She shoots him dead. Kobayashi bursts in and shoots her dead.
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Last edited by Agemegos; 08-13-2014 at 02:05 AM.
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Old 08-12-2014, 08:15 PM   #2
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Default Re: #RPGaday Topic 13: Most Memorable Character Death

Wow. All that is utterly foreign to me. I don't script player character deaths, not without the consent of the player, but equally not with it. I don't plan big dramatic scenes for player characters of any kind; I create situations and the drama emerges from how they react.

Player character deaths have been quite rare in my campaigns. The one I remember best had a no longer entirely sane Galadriel using the heightened power of Nenya to occupy Dol Guldur, forcing Sauron himself to come to dispossess her. During the resulting combat Radagast's player struck Sauron with his staff, in the manner of Gandalf in Moria—and the release of power left Radagast dead and forced Sauron out of his body, allowing the other PCs to seize the One Ring and take it away to be destroyed before Sauron could revive.

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Old 08-12-2014, 08:21 PM   #3
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Default Re: #RPGaday Topic 13: Most Memorable Character Death

The most memorable character death I think I witnessed was in a space-based supers campaign run by the couple who ran our CHAMPIONS group when I lived in Darkest Iowa.

Our GM had introduced a stupidly-powerful threat into the game called a Quasar Dragon. It hatched out of a supernova and immediately started devouring stars, quickly growing to the size where it threatened whole galaxies. He read in in an issue of DRAGON Magazine, I think he said, and thought it was ridiculous. (His brother-in-law thought it was cool, which confirmed his opinion).

Since he thought the Quasar Dragon was stupid, I have no idea why he thought it would be a good idea to introduce one into our CHAMPIONS campaign. But he did; and almost instantly realized how big a mistake this was. The sucker grew so fast that it had already eaten one entire galaxy before our party really knew what was going on, and it was continuing to grow. The GM realized in horror that he had no idea how we could stop it.

My friend Russ became very serious and said. "I think the only thing that will stop it is a heroic sacrifice." He played a rock-based alien with gravity powers. His idea was to push his gravity powers to the utmost to create a black hole.

Creating a black hole massive enough to take out the dragon (which now had a wingspan wide enough to reach past the Magellenic Clouds) would be a feat that would transcend mundane game mechnanics and could only be done as a ginormous plot device; or as Russ put it, "A heroic sacrifice."

"I'll do this on one condition," Russ said. "In order for this to work, I'm going to have to give my life. You're not going to rescue me; you're not going to bring me back. If you do, it will cheapen the sacrifice."

The GM didn't particularly like this, but he could see no way out of the situation he had created. So he agreed. And Russ's character went out in a blaze of glory, saving several galaxies and perhaps the whole universe in the process.

About a year or so later, the GM and his wife were starting a new campaign featuring clones of characters from previous ones. They offered to let Russ play a new version of his rock creature. Russ refused. "He's dead. He's staying dead."
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Old 08-12-2014, 08:25 PM   #4
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Default Re: #RPGaday Topic 13: Most Memorable Character Death

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Originally Posted by quarkstomper View Post
About a year or so later, the GM and his wife were starting a new campaign featuring clones of characters from previous ones. They offered to let Russ play a new version of his rock creature. Russ refused. "He's dead. He's staying dead."
Can we get him hired to edit Marvel Comics?

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Old 08-12-2014, 08:30 PM   #5
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Default Re: #RPGaday Topic 13: Most Memorable Character Death

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
Wow. All that is utterly foreign to me. I don't script player character deaths, not without the consent of the player, but equally not with it. I don't plan big dramatic scenes for player characters of any kind; I create situations and the drama emerges from how they react.
So do I usually. Also, this was in 1990 and my GMing has developed since then. Furthermore, it wasn't quite scripted: I have related the way it came out, not the only way it could have come out out. Grond's background and development were long established. When Andrew decided to stop playing Grond and suggested an anticlimactic retirement, my counteroffer was to re-introduce elements from his background relating to his theme, then screw the conflict to the point where it produced a dramatic climax and resolution. I scripted this only as far as luring Grond into a one-on-one confrontation with a Hawk-Moon with the level of conflict high enough to produce the use of lethal force: I didn't determine what would happen in that confrontation. Grond might have lost his fight with Hawk-Moon and died (though there is practically no chance that Hawk-Moon could have taken out Kobayashi). If he had been more suspicious of the girl and not lost control of his sidearm the resolution would have been different — he might have survived but suffered a recrudescence of his native-cultural attitudes.

I was shooting for a dramatic climax that would culminate Grond's development. I disposed antagonists, a conflict, and a crucible to bring it on, then turned up the heat until something dramatic happened. This was what I got.
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Old 08-12-2014, 08:50 PM   #6
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Default Re: #RPGaday Topic 13: Most Memorable Character Death

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Originally Posted by quarkstomper View Post
About a year or so later, the GM and his wife were starting a new campaign featuring clones of characters from previous ones. They offered to let Russ play a new version of his rock creature. Russ refused. "He's dead. He's staying dead."
A few times (about three or four I think, though I can only call two to mind in detail) I have had a character killed and then resurrected. (Once a GM declared that the entire party had been killed by an explosion in the spaceship they were in, but that under Osiris contracts that an NPC had taken out in our names brain backups had been used to impress our personalities and memories onto android (bioroid) copies of our bodies.) Even in cases when the means of resurrection had been well established in the background, I could never play the resurrected characters and always wrote them out. Sometimes I replaced them.
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Old 08-12-2014, 09:08 PM   #7
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Default Re: #RPGaday Topic 13: Most Memorable Character Death

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Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
I was shooting for a dramatic climax that would culminate Grond's development. I disposed antagonists, a conflict, and a crucible to bring it on, then turned up the heat until something dramatic happened. This was what I got.
That sounds much more like the way such a thing might happen in one of my campaigns.

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Old 08-12-2014, 09:13 PM   #8
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Default Re: #RPGaday Topic 13: Most Memorable Character Death

It was d20 fantasy dungeon adventure. I was playing a Paladin (wolfman) and a Ranger (GM's custom cat-man race with +5 or +7 in each of the six core stats and no real downsides), and each of the other players also had two characters but I don't remember exactly what those were. GM threw a dungeon at us where literally everything was a dragon, but most encounters died off in less than one hit prompting me to say "Slaying dragons is easier than swatting flies."

When we got to the boss dragon my paladin and ranger were the front line in the fight. We wailed on it for a few turns, but it also wounded us once in a while. On a turn where I could have had my paladin heal the ranger (who was at less than 10 HP) I decided to have him attack again; the dragon boss attacked the weakened ranger fatally and was killed in the round that followed immediately afterwards.

From then on I decided that if I was playing a character with healing abilities I would make certain not to ignore them in favor of attack-attack-attack.
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Old 08-13-2014, 02:23 AM   #9
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Default Re: #RPGaday Topic 13: Most Memorable Character Death

Oh, that's an easy one. I'd been playing in a series of games involving a covert alien invasion of Earth in the near future. These had started at Games Fairs in Reading, and gradually migrated to the players' homes, but we still only got in two or three sessions in a year; we'd probably been playing for about five years in all. In this particular session, we'd located a sunken ballistic missile submarine and turned it over to the rest of the Resistance; we then went on an infiltration mission, and got captured by the aliens. We got loose (though violent and disturbing means), and were on the run in their hidden main base. As I remember (and this is a few years ago, so I may have the details wrong) we had the options of looking for a way out straight away or pausing to try to get a message out through the alien comms gear. We did the latter, and locked ourselves in when the aliens arrived. So as they gradually burned away at the armoured door of their own radio room, we called the Resistance: "Full strike on this position".

And then we waited. And the rest was white.

(And, since I'd had a sound effects CD going with various battle noises, I switched to the Last Post.)
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Old 08-13-2014, 02:33 AM   #10
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Default Re: #RPGaday Topic 13: Most Memorable Character Death

Quote:
Originally Posted by quarkstomper View Post
Our GM had introduced a stupidly-powerful threat into the game called a Quasar Dragon. It hatched out of a supernova and immediately started devouring stars, quickly growing to the size where it threatened whole galaxies. He read in in an issue of DRAGON Magazine, I think he said, and thought it was ridiculous. (His brother-in-law thought it was cool, which confirmed his opinion).
Quazar [sic] Dragon, Dragon #96 p. 53, where it was designed to de-power overpowered games:

Quote:
The first clue that a Monty Haul world is about to be eaten comes when the characters walk outside their gold-plated +8 castle walls, wearing their +22 plate-mail of prismatic invulnerability, and see the sun disappear. This is a sure indicator that the Quazar Dragon has opened its 28,260 km wide mouth and is about to swallow the planet whole. The only possible way to save oneself in such a situation is to immediately throw all the magical items one can get hold of into a sphere of annihilation. The Quazar Dragon will take about 12-48 hours to close its mouth, so the characters do have a little lead time. ALL magic, every scrap of it, every teensy weensy itty bitty bit of it, must be destroyed. If this is done, there is a 5% chance the Quazar Dragon will change its mind and not gulp the planet down.
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