The Great Finality

[Asperion]

Here is a question that came up reciently. In your campaign what happens when a character dies? In traditional comics, that is nothing more than a state of mind and body. A character tends to return from death with little more effort than what is required to fly around the world. In other more realistic campaigns, death is actually something that will bring an end to the existance of some character, they will never return. Then again several campaigns tend to put death somewhere between these two extremes. If the character can return, it will be with some trouble and effort, possibly involving making some deal with some "Death God". This could involve defeating the god in some contest, convincing the god that you have more that needs to be done and you are the only one who can do it, finding some hole in "Death Realm" and slipping back to living , whatever. I would like for you to state your campaign's view of death and (if possible) how one would manage to return to living after being declared dead.

[Guzalot]

Re: The Great Finality

 

For the most part dead characters stay dead in my campaign. It's an extremely rare occurence in my games and is almost always due to player stupidity anyway.

[Onyxclaw]

Re: The Great Finality

 

In the campain I'm running in the fall, the permanency of death depends on the character. If the player's tired with the character than he's gone. If the chracter has no one to help him come back, he's gone. But there are creatures, spells, and people that can reverse the effects of death or even bring him back as a ghost. A lot of the time it's also circumstances based.

 

A beloved character who didn't come back might even make a return as a plot device after his original creator has made himslef a new character, but only for a little while...

[MitchellS]

Re: The Great Finality

 

I think in my upcoming Miami Nights campaign death will be final. I will be playing the game so that gods and demons do exist but in reality they are nothing more than dimensional aliens and have no real sway over death and returning from the dead.

[input.jack]

Re: The Great Finality

 

The campaign Im running has the living Avatar of Anubis running around as a superhero. (Kind of like how a God of Thunder runs around in a big-name comic companys campaign). So its -possible- that she might be able to bring a character back from the dead....but youd have to be pretty darned convincing to be able to persuade her to do so because shes all about the natural order of things.

 

My campaigns have a sort of "you get what you pray for" kind of philosophy. A persons afterlife resembles what their mythology says it will be, although souls eventually reincarnate regardless of their destination. But time spent in the afterlife does not pass at the same rate it does on Earth, so a damned soul could be in Hell for 10,000 years subjectively, and then reincarnate in the mortal world only a century after the original person died. (Reincarnation has come up twice in the campaign already).

 

The characters have fought Demons, the Fallen, and Incarnated fears, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Angels, Avatars, and even Gods themselves. The Higher Powers are limited in how they can interact with the mortal world, so they empower their trusted disciples who are able to act more freely.

[eternius]

Re: The Great Finality

 

i've recently begun running an all mutant campaign and this afternoon we had a character get killed. since the tone of the game is fairly dark, she's going to stay dead. the player will have to make a new character, and the old one will serve as the "Cypher/Thunderbird" of our team. in the event ANY character returns from the dead there needs to be a foolproof reason for this; ie:deal with a demon, cloning. but its doubtful i'll allow any returns, because i'm going for reality, and in real life you only get one chance.

[Red Knight]

Re: The Great Finality

 

In my campaign, death is final... Unless th eplayer can come up with a really cool idea as to why the character should be able to return.

 

So far, reincarnation has been suggested and so has possession.

 

I have to say that I am rather impressed with the way DC has handled the return of Hal Jordan. It actually doesn't max out my cheese-o-meter.

[pinecone]

Re: The Great Finality

 

I've always played that dead is dead...but I like grim and gritty...I've always joked though that in a silver or golden game anyone can be brought back by invoking the incantation "Nobody could have survived that!"....

[Super Squirrel]

Re: The Great Finality

 

I'm not going to kill superheroes in my game unless they want it and approach me asking for it, or they do something really, really, really dumb.

[Superskrull]

Re: The Great Finality

 

I'd have to say there's a big difference in how I'd like to run the whole dead character deal and how my players tend to operate. Let me give you a few examples as to how it tends to go down.

 

Player One, we'll call him Champsguy since that's what he went by here in bygone days, had a character who was a "Green Lantern" right down to the power ring, the costume and the vulnerability to yellow. In the campaign, there had been an accumulation of PCs from prior games now lumped together into what they called "The Champions" but was more like the Justice League of Fratboys. Yeah, they fought the good fight, but they were a crude and boorish lot given to fart jokes and drinking games involving personal embarassment in the downtime. I wound up killing the GL clone during a battle where they were fighting what was essentially their opposite numbers, including an evil power ring user with Variable FX on his own VPP allowing him to make the attacks yellow. Said ringwielder blew GL to vapors with a humongous yellow EB he had effectively 3 ED vs. Result: Indestructible GL ring sitting in trophy room 'cause no one but the Lantern was the designated user. Champsguy's reaction: "Damn, Pat, what'd I do to you?" and the campaign rolled along afterwards

 

Player Two, call him Robbie, had a beloved cheesy character he played constantly in my campaign called Con-El. This bizarrely militaristic Daxamite was the master of the cheap shot and the spewed insult but to his credit, he would go the extra mile to help an innocent and woe be to those who harmed his teammates. Now Con-El had a long run and had accumulated enough XP to be a very troublesome PC to challenge. He'd bought down his vulnerability to magic and lead and his Str and Defenses were truly mighty. His heat vision was pretty wimpy, though. Now, in his adventures across time and space, he'd been to such places as the DC and Marvel universes and had accumulated a nice store of other-dimensional knowledge and contacts. Anyway, Robbie was about to active duty in the Navy and we wanted to end the game with a bang. Enter the Celestial Imperium, my (so I had hoped) final challenge for the players. In keeping with the style of this game, these guys could be viewed as a hybrid of the Almeracian Empire and the Eternals. Their rulers were one of the few Kryptonians to have survied the Daxamite military bombardment (very long story) of Krypton, Maxima and Lord Varan Dox, a clone of Vartox who as the Emperor of this cosmic race held much of the lost fragments of power that the Infinite Man had wielded before his transformation. These near-gods would travel from system in a Unimind-like gestalt and transform promising star systems into Dyson spheres via a GM's fiat of cumulative megascaled transform. The players caught wind of this when Pluto vanished and the Malvan refugee colony on Mars called them in alarm. The players threw everything but the kitchen sink at the slowly forming sphere from telepathic probes to a few thousand tons of neutronium they made from asteroids and accelerated to lightpseed but nothing worked. Determining this was the same as the power of the Infinite Man, he was convinced to try stopping it but was absorbed himself and his power added to that of the Imperium. In desperation, they jumped dimensions to avoid absorption and then transferred back to behold the newest Dyson Spere in the Imperium's collection. Assaulting the Celestial Palace with all their local allies and enhancements they could find, they fought through the souped-up homages of the Female Furies and engaged the now obscenely overpowered Dox. Dox beat them handily and wasted many a phase sneering and posturing afterwards. Then Con-El played his trump card, the Ultimate Nullifier. He'd grabbed it just in case and now was the time to use it. Dox had cosmic senses and knew what it could do but had a case of massive overconfidence and felt Con-El wouldn't have the stones to use it. calling Con-El's bluff, Dox sneered once more and found out Con-El had never bluffed in his life. Concentrating, he pictured every aspect of the Celestial Imperium they'd learned via telepathy and such, retroactively making them never having existed. Naturally, he too, was nullified. The Earth and it's entire system was now restored, and for some reason, ('cause I thought it was a nice touch) they recalled Con-El's sacrifice and erected a tasteful monument in his honor. His final words before death, "Oh yeah? Eat this!" were not included.

All good, right? Wrong? Robbie calls me several months later, as he's got medical leave for a while, having broken his leg playing soccer. "Pat! Run a game! I wanna play Con-El!" "He's dead, Robbie. Remember? He's in Limbo stepping on the grovelling heads of the Imperium. Dead is dead." "Aw man, I wanna play Con-El!" This goes on for a few days and I cave in to get him to shut the hell up. A cheesy handwave involving timetravel later and he's back, having chosen to feed the Celstial Imperium to Galactus instead since they're all full of tasty Power Cosmic. Yeah, there were obvious repercussions, like the fact that Earth was part of a Dyson Sphere and Galactus was loose in my campaign world but, occasionally, I still get calls from Robbie and as always, the first thing he'll say is "Run a game!"

[BigJackBrass]

Re: The Great Finality

 

With so many Champions characters hidden behind assumed identities death takes a different tack for me. Barring something unprecedented, if a character is dead then he's gone, completely. Of course, it might be part of the plot to have someone appear to die (especially handy for your Dr Strange types who might find themselves fighting their way back from mystic dimensions, only to discover that the team buried them months ago and recruited a new member), but actual death is final. Champions is a pretty forgiving game and I don't like to stomp on my players too much anyway.

 

However, just because Captain Oblivious has been fried, diced and pureed there's no need to lose that brand identity. If the player wants to keep playing the Captain then they can, but it's someone else behind the mask and it might take a lot of time out, perhaps a change of powers even, to effect the changeover. Just look at the way Altar Boy took over the role of The Confessor in Astro City.

 

Easy returns from the dead are pure laziness. If your character actually beats death then it ought to be a pretty momentous, world-changing thing, I think. Generally I'll settle for getting the tights taken in at the back and hemming an inch off the supercape for the new guy.

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: The Great Finality

 

Well in my games, death is just a story element. In the 18 years or so I've been GMing champions the only time a character has died was when the player asked me to kill him for a story, or that the player had left the game permanently and the death of the leftover character was dramatically approriate.

 

So coming back fromt the dead doesn't really come up, but if it did, then it would take a great deal of work - ie a major adventure - to bring them back.

[Vanguard00]

Re: The Great Finality

 

The only time I've seen a character die and come back was in an FtF game about a decade ago. A friend's PC was killed during a fight with Fiacho and Durak. He didn't do anything particularly dumb, and it was some serious bad rolling on his part, coupled with excellent rolling on the GM's part that landed him in morguesville. IIRC, it was a coordinated attack by Fiacho and Durak with both blows doing HEAVY damage, plus a failed dodge roll on the part of the hero, plus a failed activation roll for his extra armor (both costume and shield). He was paste, pure and simple.

 

The reasoning behind his return many months later was that a previously-unknown meta was in the crowd helping to heal those innocents caught in the crossfire. He wasn't a traditional hero, and was afraid of using his abilities in public, but after seeing the PC go down he stepped forward and continued to keep the body "fresh". No deterioration or rigor mortis, and even stimulation to the brain. The EMTs staunched still-bleeding wounds and they rushed him off to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. Government officials stepped in, took the "fresh" body away and essentially revived it using experimental chemicals and hi-tech machinery. The healing NPC became a recurring character, too, and was in fact played by the original PC for a while (while the 'dead' hero was recovering).

 

At the end of six months (game time), the hero made a comeback just in time to save the healer and begin a new storyline. There were some minor tweaks to his disads for being watched by the gov't agency and for new/changed personality. The GM pulled it off masterfully and we all applauded his ability to maintain believability within the genre.

 

Everyone else has pretty much stayed dead. Except the zombie/clone thingy another GM tried, but that was so silly we ret-conned it out later.

[Blue]

Re: The Great Finality

 

My players tend to think that a character who dies a heroic death should stay dead, and I agree.

 

I'm not above ressurrecting a villain, particularly an arch-nemesis. And I had some characters raise who were, in the storyline, actually dead before the campaign started. But there's only been one notable death in the campaign during play, and he was a plot device. I don't think he'll be coming back, but I've been considering a vengeful relative who resents the heroes for his death.