Game Wish 89: All Good Things Must Come To An End

Game WISH will be coming to an end after number 100. In keeping with this theme, Game WISH 89 asks:

How do you handle character death, as a player and/or GM? What makes a good death or a bad death? Have you ever had a character die? What happened?

I'm not counting all those DnD 'Deaths' followed by resurrections; when death is nothing more than a temporary inconvenience, it's not really death, at least in my book. I only remember a single PC death in any long-term face-to-face games, which happened very early on, and I don't even remember my dead PC's name. The gaming group has a general philosophy that once PCs had survived the first few sessions, they never died.

It's a different story in convention-style one-shots. I've played quite a few horror games (a genre more suited to one-shots, in my opinion) with a high PC body count. One PC death that sticks in my mind was the finale of an Unknown Armies game, where two of the last three survivors thought they were being rescued by the third. Another PC had already died in the attempt, eaten alive by horrible grey dust. But instead of saving us, our would-be rescuer proceeded to shoot both of us, in order to save our souls.

PC deaths in online games tend to be the result of players dropping out of the game; I've had to GM several of these; sometimes with little warning. The best one was the death of Cylene in my Kalyr game. The city authorities had press-ganged another PC, Reylorna, to perform telepathic scans of everyone trying to leave the city in order to catch an assassin. On identifying a suspect who tried to make a run for it, she attempted to throw a dagger at him, only to roll a critical failure. Just at that moment Cylene appeared as an innocent bystander who got in the way of the mis-thrown weapon. That was the only time I had a retiring player write their own death scene. This had severe repercussions on the plotline of the game; Cylene was a noble from a powerful family of the ruling kandar race, while the hapless Reylorna was (and indeed still is) one of the downtrodden human underclass. She had the be smuggled out of town in a hurry just ahead of the lynch mob. The rest of the PCs caught up with her a few moves later, in an extended quest plot that's kept the whole party out of town.

More recently we've had the death of Jaldaric in the same game; his was a more straightforward death in combat. At least one other PC insisted that he had a proper burial and carried his body back to civilisation. We're just about to run his funeral scene.