Average Life Expectancy of your Players Characters?

[tetsuoh]

I just realized before quitting our current game that my character had technically died every session. I was often brought back either through Transfer Force or GM intervention of Uber Force NPCs - but I had had enough.

But I got to wondering, what is the average life expectancy normally for the characters in your campaigns?

I know combat is often deadly in star wars and I was wondering how most characters and gms work with that issue.

[ZzaphodD]

I have to say that mortality has dropped in my campaigns lately. Perhaps Im going soft at old age. I have never had one character die every session though, perhaps a one or two each campaign. However, if the PCs are stupid Im remorseless.
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[Critias]

With character points and Force points at your disposal, and given how your average PC stacks up to your average NPC...I have to ask...what kept happening?

[Raven Redstar]

[garhkal]

Every gm i have playe under, who did as you do Raven, has made me want to stop gaming. the 3 main reasons for that are
A) it was easy to tell they were not going to kill/let us die, so there was never any challenge
B) it felt like we were parts in HIS book. Rather than characters writing our own.
C) As 2 others besides myself caught him doing this and he lied, it made me wonder what else he was lying about... no trust in an impartial gm, then that gm has lost his gamers...

WELL to me.
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[mdlake]

Death in our campaigns is a rare event. We go for dense narratives and villains with hidden agenda, and keep the door open for interplayer suspicion, so survival often seems less implausible than agreeing to let some stranger who "just happened" to wander up after a teammate dies to take his place.

I suspect age plays some part in attitudes toward PC death. I'm the oldest player in our group, though empathy plays a bigger part. When I started, adventures as an extended gamble of life against loot was the ONLY way to play any RPG. I'm the cruelest of GMs in our group, and the most willing of players to see my own PC die--in large part, I think, because death was for so long the sole measure of risk in the risk-reward calculation of RPGs.

(Garkhal seems still to subscribe to this approach of treating the RPG as a game to be won or lost, rather than narrative art: death as the measure of challenge, death as proof of free will. ZzaphodD seems to, as well, though I would suggest he isn't "going soft" so much as drifting from game-as-game to game-as-story.)

Even so, I try to avoid PC death. Replacement can be such a hassle. My current campaign, a low fantasy conspiracy game, is coming to a close. I asked my players to create 2-4 PCs apiece and rotate the characters in and out of play. (They each made two.) I did this for many reasons, but the biggest was to permit the Evil Conspiracy to kill PCs, demonstrate its power and ruthlessness, and so maintain a greater sense of risk. I killed three PCs in a year and a half: one dimwit who decided pointlessly to join a riot, and two explorers who pushed their luck too far in a taboo ruin. It did the job: the players fear death, even though the Evil Conspiracy didn't deliver any. But in the final two months of the campaign, the PCs have developed plot immunity, apart from a deliberate and dramatic sacrifice. (I don't know how many of my players realize this, but at least one does: I told her so flat-out as part of ongoing advice for running her first campaign.) Half the PCs are trapped far from the action, and I have no desire to stitch together a conclusion after accident or folly wipes out the remainder. I killed no PCs in my previous two campaigns, a light-hearted Mage campaign featuring teenagers stranded in the corn belt and a steampunk/horror campaign wherein I was the primary GM but we rotated the GM seat as the PCs visited several different worlds. Well, I killed my own character in the last session, but that doesn't count.

You can take PC immunity too far, even for narrative convenience. None of my fellow gamers has ever killed a PC since we started, though this may largely be the result of staging few combats. Only once did I feel cheated by this. Dave, our resident softie, refused to tell me how much damage I'd taken from a hunting rifle in the steampunk/horror campaign until he knew how many hit points I had left. I refused--"It shouldn't matter!"--and he clearly fudged the result. Very dissatisfying, when Janos's abrupt and bloody death could have heightened everyone's emotional involvement, and given that I was clearly prepared to see it happen.

[Ankhanu]

I have a nasty tendency with the dice; as a player, I roll really low... as a GM I roll really high.

This results in my characters messing up a lot and occasionally dying... this has also resulted in TPK due to 3-5 stormtroopers.

When I'm running a game, I will do as Raven does to some degree; I'll roll back my damage rolls so that players don't die... though I'm also not afraid to kill a player if they get to that point via stupidity, especially if they've been well warned ahead of time. I also have a limit to how often I'll save players from good rolls before they expire... but that's a subjective move.
In an average campaign I'll lose 2-4 characters this way, I suppose. If I just let the dice land as they did I'd lose MANY more. If characters lose too many characters they don't invest any personal energy into the character, they just become stats and not a character; it's a balancing act between allowing players to maintain their characters and maintaining a sense of danger/mortality. It's a fine line to walk.

As a player, it's a little more random as to how often I might die I've had some characters for years (my current Pathfinder character has been going for a year and a half now with 2 near death experiences), and others that were lost within a session or two
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[Kytross]

I generally don't kill PC's unless they tell me they want to die. They don't often use words but I'm pretty slick and I can tell by their actions that they want to die.

For instance, if they sacrifice themselves for the rest of the group. Like by jumping on a grenade

Refusing an opportunity to surrender against an exponentially larger force.

Bad tactics. Like taking on a squad of Stormtroopers by yourself. Or a Squadron of TIE fighters.

I'm not saying you're gauranteed to die, or that I fudge die rolls, but I balance encounters fairly well. If you don't know to retreat in the face of overwhelming odds, well, you'll learn.

[tetsuoh]

[Critias]

Yeah, with some of those examples, it's certainly got more to do with the GM than with the system/setting, in my book. Some of his antics are...well...kind of a stretch, with some of the rolls you mention it sounds like he's willing to ignore the rules when he wants, period.

[Kytross]

42 on a security roll and it failed?

A 42 is godly on a dice roll. Well, demi-godly. That's an 12D average. 12D is one of the best in the galaxy. Or is it a Sector? Either way it's 11 over 31, which is Heroic.

You need to sit down with your GM outside of the game and work this out.

Or find a new GM.

[Critias]

[tetsuoh]

There were no rolls for if I beat the security system really. The security panels and gas just plain happened.

The 42 Security told me after looking through the room and starting on the keypad. "There's no cameras in here, hes sure of his setup. There's no prints on the keypad, the gloves he uses are still sitting on the workbench even. You can more than likely Telekinesis the lock open if your gentle enough." So I Telekinesis the lock and spend character points to make sure it works (50 something total I think - I dropped 5 Character points is all I know.) The lock popped open, then an Alarm sounds and the security panels went to slide down. I Dropped more dice and Telekinesis the Security doors over the two sets I'm after at once. Suddenly I start hearing the gas poor through vents I never noticed on my 42 Security roll. Drop more dice to TK the other armor's case open - brute force this time. Then dropped even more and brute force TK the room door open to see the man leaning on a dresser ready to shoot me.

The con roll, all I remember is he "barely" beat me. I was already to peeved from the 2 hours I spent fighting a drunk old man only to find out the imperials were after us again because he called them in with transceiver beacon codes that were hidden in the both sets of armor.

[Raven Redstar]

[tetsuoh]

The other two players quit his campaign after I left and evidently let him have it for me, telling him what they thought and how they knew that I wasn't having fun for weeks now and that he wasn't being fair to my character especially, in not so nice a choice of words.

And since the person in question is already 27 I wondering as to his growing out of it. According to one of the other two players his games has always been that way, just he never had picked on a character so badly before.

I can't say I hadn't seen it coming, but we have had severe problems finding more players/GMs in our area, so I was trying to make it work.