Character Death

Well I'm reading Mote in Gods Eye again and it made me think about a very important bit of storytelling. Killing characters. You see in many RPG's there's a unwritten rule, ok sometimes it's even written, that you shouldn't kill characters off. It's not fair or something. Ok this is not true for every game but many of them. The problem with this is that if the players think their characters can't die they can get a bit cocky. Bad plan.

Now I'm all for not killing characters most of the time. Dead characters can't be tortured, find out the villian is their father, lose everything or be arrested. Dead characters are generally boring. But character death can be important to a story, bear with me here I've got a thread.

One of the best Drama series made recently was Spooks, one of the reasons it was so good was the way the production team completely messed with the viewers heads via their preconceptions. There is a rule of TV series, if someone is named in the title credits then they don't die. If a major character is going to leave you get a huge amount of run up to it, often you get adverts about it. So when the Spooks team killed off a character who was named and pictured in the credits you could hear jaws dropping across the country. Up until her head was shoved in the deep fat fryer (which despite the complaints you really don't see) the viewers were convinced our heroes would save the day. They didn't, she died, the story went on with everyone no aware of the ground rules. Yes they can die.

Compare this to classic Star Trek, yep people died all the time, but you had no idea who they were. They were the unamed red shirt who you had never saw before. Yawn. Or Revenge of the Sith. Sure lots of jedi died, but you knew they they were going to die. Now if they'd killed Obi Wan Kenobi that would have been cool.... Well shocking anyway.

My point. Running in from the idea of creating the characters during the first few sessions. Think about killing one of them in a heroic fashion, dying during character generation has a long history. Once the game gets going be a bit more lenient, temper your homicide with simple generic pain. But still leave the option of the two classic causes of death, heroic sacrifice and stupidity. Sometimes a character will sacrifice his life to save his friends, the GM may be tempted to reward this by not having them die... don't. Kill them, get them to start a new character, possibly with some bonus points. Maybe later they find out he or she didn't die, depending on your level of cliche but promise nothing.

And stupidity? Warn them their actions are stupid by all means. Most people have trained common sense that tells them not to play on the motorway but if they choose to continue with their idociy. Kill them. Maybe they will learn something, if they don't their friends will.