Real heroes never die?

[WilyQuixote]

Hello guys and gals,

 

Well this is my first official topic starter for these boards and after looking through the past topics I have not seen anything concerning this subject...How do heroes die in your games? I'm not talking about the gritty Fantasy type stuff where it should be more common but in the super hero world. I recently took up the mantle of gamemastering for our group and having never GMed this kinda campaign before I wondered how often deaths happen in other GM's games.

 

I've read comics as a kid and know that somtimes heroes do indeed die but in a RPG things are different, lets face it, if things arent scripted like in the comics then a death could occur through no fault of the GM or the players. Also in second question related to this, if a hero does die do you ever do the classic return from death story arc after the hero has been dead for a while? For a while it seemed like marvel was doing it on a regular basis and even DC has pulled this stunt from time to time. I'm just curious if GMs do it too.

 

I mean thats about as comic-book-iness as it gets IMO. I'd like to know what other GMs do with these situations when or if they occur. Thanks in advance for your input folks.

[Killer Shrike]

Hey bro....you thinking of killing some of us off

[WilyQuixote]

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeell I'm not saying it WILL happen but it COULD happen. I just want some ideas for how to handle it if it does happen.

[Hermit]

Hmmm

 

I tend towards Silver Age, well, tarnished silver. I've had some PCs come very close, but no. A few NPCs have bit the big ones, as plot hooks or to show the PCs what MIGHT happen.

I think super heroes in games should not normally die, but if they do, it's best to make it some thing dramatic... sacrificing your life for the team, your city, or your world.

 

For some, I suppose Dying would merely be another variation of the "Radiation Accident" where you revamp a sheet entirely, but again, it's not come up much for me and mine.

 

I'm a softy I guess.

[WilyQuixote]

I agree that in a superhero universe it should not happen all that often and if it does it should be as you said...a dramatic event of some sort. I was also just curious if anyone ever ran those return from the grave sorta quests for heroes. I figure its a given with villains that even if your "sure" their dead that the GM will be bringing them back at a later time as soon as it suits his or her needs.

[SkyKnight]

This is the SkyKnight creed with respect to superhero deaths:

 

"Champions characters never die, they just show up again in three sessions mind controlled and sporting cybernetic parts."

 

I would not kill a character against the player's will. If the character is "dead" via the rules, I will bring him back into the plot as long as the player still wants to keep the character. It's not a free and clear return though. He'll have to work for it.

[Trebuchet]

I run (and play in) a 4-color game. Although set in the early 21st Century in feel it is deliberately more Silver Age in tone. Nobody on our team even wears leather, and our only "teen" character (She's 20 now after 3 years of superheroing.) has never suffered from angst. Killing off a character would be a major event, and would only happen to accomplish a critical goal such as saving a city or perhaps the entire world. I would never kill a hero just because some VIPER-type goon gets a lucky hit with a Killing Attack (VIPER doesn't exist in my campaign universe, but you get the idea. As a substitute we've got high-tech Neo-Nazis, because everyone likes stomping Nazis.).

 

Our campaign is a comic-book simulation, therefore deaths would be very rare and most likely would occur only if the player wished to retire the character in a dramatic manner. If it did occur without the player's knowledge it would only be after I warned them of the probable result of their action. Even DNPCs and Followers seldom die in the comics of the Silver Age; the only one I can think of is Captain America's sidekick Bucky.

 

Under the right circumstances I would be more than willing to allow even my own character to die. In a game I played in many years ago a nuclear device in New York was 30 seconds away from detonation. My flying PA brick Ranger picked it up and began flying out to sea to get it as far from the city as he could. The GM began a countdown to detonation, but when the countdown reached 5 and Ranger still hadn't dumped the nuke the GM finally realized that Ranger had no intention of saving himself by dropping the bomb in New York Harbor. The further from Manhattan Ranger carried the bomb the more innocent lives he would save. Although Ranger's defenses were quite formidable (62 PD/58 ED, 90% of it Hardened and Resistant) he still would not have survived being at Ground Zero of a multi-megaton nuclear blast.

 

Fortunately for Ranger, the nuke had been damaged during the fight around it and the bomb malfunctioned and failed to detonate. But even if Ranger had died, he would still have won - He would have saved New York. Isn't that what being a hero is all about?

[Doug McCrae]

Originally posted by Trebuchet

Although Ranger's defenses were quite formidable (62 PD/58 ED, 90% of it Hardened and Resistant) he still would not have survived being at Ground Zero of a multi-megaton nuclear blast.

Quite formidable!? 62 PD!? I thought nukes were a 20D6KA. That would be 70 BODY on average which would actually give him a chance of survival, depending on his BODY and whether a (presumably heavily heat and radiation protected) medic could get to him in time.

[Doug McCrae]

There are really two separate questions here:

1) Can random death occur?

2) Assuming it can't and only heroic death is possible, can a hero come back from it?

 

1) Death thru lucky shot is possible by the Champions rules of course, with Batman/Daredevil type characters that lack resistant PD. A thug with a gun could take em out. This couldn't happen in the comics. If you want to play a more 'realistic' type game with the lethality and more-to-the -point the sheer random pointlessness of real life then that's fine. It depends whether you're trying to simulate comics and if so, what genre/period.

 

2) If you want a real-life feel I would avoid having people come back from the dead. Alternatively to preserve karma you could have horrendous repercussions for 'tampering with the natural order' or people could perhaps come back only as horrible decaying zombies or 'twisted' in some other way. We seem to have an in-built aesthetic idea about such things - that coming back from the dead shouldn't be painless and should probably go horribly wrong.

 

OTOH I regard coming back from the dead as a comic book staple. The other posters are right I think that heroes almost never died in the SA except as what-ifs, imaginary stories, dreams or hoaxes but death and returning from it have occurred so much from the 70s onwards that it's become an almost indispensable part of the genre. But coming back from the dead isn't very grim n' gritty.

 

So in answer to the question: It depends on the genre/feel you're trying to create. If you want more of a comic book feel I would introduce some sort of rule to avoid random death. 10rPD (only to avoid pointless death -1)? And if anyone dies a meaningful death they can come back from it.

 

If you want a real-life feel, let the PCs die pointlessly and don't bring them back except as drooling brain dead walking corpses.

[Lord Liaden]

In my experience there are three potential possibilities for character death:

 

The first is the character doing something blatantly stupid, like standing in front of the mega-villain and mouthing off in some way guaranteed to tick him off, or completely miscalculating the danger factor of some stunt that they want to look cool doing. I will usually cut the PC some slack to allow for survival once, maybe twice, while pointing out the potential consequences. One player continued to think I would let him get away with this stuff, though, so I eventually had to let him kick the bucket.

 

The second possibility for death is from extremely unfavorable rolls in the midst of a battle or accident. If such would result in a character dying to no real purpose or point, even if it's just motivating the other heroes to press on to honor his memory, I'll generally fudge the result to let the PC live. Sometimes, though, a player has become bored with a character or wants a new challenge, and if I think that the player would welcome a "heroic death" for his character as a way to send him off before moving on, I'll take an appropriate opportunity and allow such a result to stand.

 

That leads to the third kind of character death: deliberate sacrifice on the part of the PC to serve a noble purpose. Unlike deaths in comics that characters routinely seem to recover from , these are the ones that people remember, and tend to last (as much as anything does in comics): Menthor, Ferro Lad, Barry Allen/Flash, Jean Grey/Phoenix (that one should have been permanent, darn it!)

 

IMHO when a player chooses to take such an action, it's a sign that they are looking for just that kind of memorable, reverberating end to their hero. In Trebuchet's example of Ranger, I would have let the nuclear device take him out, but allowed plenty of opportunities to roleplay the consequences of that action - the effect on his teammates, a major memorial service, a public monument to Ranger, etc. Players can get a lot of satisfaction from that kind of recognition and legacy in the campaign world.

[astralfrontier]

Heroic Death and Cosmic Chance

 

For a "cinematic" feel, here's the house rule that I tend to use for such situations:

 

If the dice say you die, and it doesn't feel right, you don't - you're knocked unconscious, or you shrug off the damage, or whatever. However, your number is up. Your character is basically fated to die, and soon. You have an indefinite, but very short, amount of time to wrap up your character's remaining plot threads, after which your character will die in some fashion. Usually the exact manner of their death will be appropriate to the character's personality and history, and sometimes you can hit up players for suggestions.

[Trebuchet]

Originally posted by Lord Liaden

In Trebuchet's example of Ranger, I would have let the nuclear device take him out, but allowed plenty of opportunities to roleplay the consequences of that action - the effect on his teammates, a major memorial service, a public monument to Ranger, etc. Players can get a lot of satisfaction from that kind of recognition and legacy in the campaign world.

I would not have been upset if Ranger had died nobly. The GM assures me (and I may even believe him. I still think the GM expected me to drop it; I saw his face when he realized Ranger wasn't going to let it go.) that if the nuclear device had not already been damaged due to the intense battle raging around it the nuke would have gone off and Ranger would have died. That Ranger (nor I) had no way of knowing it wouldn't detonate when he picked it up to carry it out of New York didn't reduce Ranger's heroism in my eyes. Since he has "Protect Innocents" as a 20 point Disad he really couldn't have done any less. Ranger would have become a legend for such a noble demise, which would have been pretty cool.

 

As for actually surviving the blast, our Champions group has never accepted the 20d6K as anything bigger than a small tactical nuke; we hold multi-megaton blasts to be in the 35-60d6K range. Ranger would not have survived being at ground zero.

[Blue]

If a hero died in the course of a truly heroic sacrifice, I would do nothing to bring him back. That would cheapen the event.

 

One of my players begged for resurrection, so I let him buy it (with restrictions). But then I have all kinds of evil and sadistic GM ways of turning a resurrection into a moral dillemma.

 

Traditionally, hero deaths in my campaign have only been as a result of plot device. And I don't think a hero PC has ever died on my watch. Not that they haven't come close.

[Trebuchet]

Originally posted by Doug McCrae

Quite formidable!? 62 PD!? I thought nukes were a 20D6KA. That would be 70 BODY on average which would actually give him a chance of survival, depending on his BODY and whether a (presumably heavily heat and radiation protected) medic could get to him in time.

The 5th Edition version of Ranger I built for 475 points (350 + 125 XP) has somewhat scaled-down defenses of 52 PD/52 ED, 47 of it Hardened. He also has 15 MD, 15 Power Defense, and 15 points of Lack of Weakness plus Full Life Support. He's still a guy in a battlesuit, so his Stun is only 36 and his CON is only 20. He can be con-Stunned with an average 21d6 attack. His attack is either a 16d6 Punch (80 STR) or 16d6 EB, with a +8d6 one-time addition to the EB.

 

I now use him in my campaign as a solo NPC hero based in San Francisco.

[death tribble]

We had several deaths in the course of the campaign, some scripted and some not. Problems came up when it was done with malice as happened on one occasion.

One character died off screen when his player left the regular group;

another died when failing diving for cover and got hit by a disintegrating beam;

during a revenge attack to avenge the above another of the characters was stabbed and died;

one character was killed by a poisonous cloud unleashed by a guy who the character had previously killed;

another one died despite the protections we threw up in front of them as a vast energy attack launched by a dying villain was set at them and they could not evade. That was the most comic book of the deaths.

 

The malice one was a disintegrator cannon fired at one of the characters when the original player was not with us anymore. However an agreement had been reached between me and the other GM to knock off my character instead. The main GM thought this was too twee and deliberately bumped off this other character. He then allowed his girlfriend to carry the scenario and had my character vanish suddenly at the end. Which was a poor finish as well. The GM actually acknowledged that they did it this way so it is not a case of interpretation. Although the gloating was really unnecessary.

[Killer Shrike]

While Im usually pretty gritty when I run other genres, I grew up on Marvel comics in the late 80s and early 90s as a kid and that really permeates my view of the superhero genre. Few characters really died during that period, though a few did get hosed now and then with unfortunate outcomes.

 

Heck, the entire active roster of the X-Men 'died' during the Fall of the Mutants, but not "really". They just got a kewl mystic invisibility to Electronic devices out of the deal, and Psylocke got an entirely new chic body with mad leet ninja skillz, in addition to her other abilities (as an aside, I never figured out why Claremont had such a thing for Betsy Braddoc aka Psylocke. He just wouldnt leave it alone, between Capt Britain and X-Men he was determined to trot his tired little been-done telepath (but this one wears lavender!) around the panels.).

 

The only real losers of that deal were the members of the group that were inactive due to injuries sustained fighting the Maruaders during the Morlock purge. I mean, they were forced to join Excalibur and suffer through really silly overwriting and the travesty that is Captain Britain (and all the trailing story elements attached to him).

 

 

In the supers games Ive run over the years only a couple of characters have ever biffed it, and that was thru sheer suicidal tactics on the part of the players.

 

 

Since WilyQ is currently taking up the GM reins for our group, I hope this doesnt indicate incipient death for one of the characters (particularly mine).

[WilyQuixote]

Wow guys and gals thanks for all your input.

 

I agree with everything you guys said about heroic deaths and all. When and if it happens I'll probably make sure it is something memorable. I was more interested in knowing if anyone ever bothered to run those return from the grave storylines that always pop up in comics. I figure hero deaths have to occur sometime in a campaign if it runs long enough, I was just curious as to whether any GMs brought the hero back sooner or later.

 

Its such a commonplace thing in comics nowadays that it really bugs me but it is a staple of the genre now as someone posted earlier. It would certainly make for some excellent role playing to if handled well.

 

As far as surviving nukes and what not I didn't know they had a rule for that. I loved how they statted out surviving on the surface or in the core of a star and the two different ways a hero could do it in StarHERO. Makes me wonder just how many points Superman really is:D . Of course he doesn't do that sorta thing much nowadays, just back in 50's, 60's, and 70's. The only other thing I want to comment on right now is Ranger having Lack of Weakness at -15?! Holy moley!!! Think that was enough?! I thought it was a bit much for good ol Grond to have -10. I think he could spent some of those points better but hey what do I know? I'm sure you had your reasons for it. Ok thanks again folks.

[Tom McCarthy]

I'm facing this question right now. A team spokesman and sometimes leader is a brick, but not an indestructible one. In fact, he only has 12 rED (non-hardened) and 10 BODY. In a run-in with Blowtorch, he got hit twice with the 3D6 RKA AP, and both times rolled 14 BODY. With the villains holding the field after the battle, would they save him ? If so, why ?

 

I can easily say they want to interrogate this team leader, but the player (who doesn't know the Silver Age) finds it a weak excuse.

[Blue]

There's always a good excuse. Some of the classic reasons for leaving a hero alive...

• Revenge - If the would-be killer is the hero's hunted, he might be more interest in taking everything away from the hero before he kills him
• Divine Intervention - Okay, not so much in superheroic games. There it's more a matter of the cavalry showing up. Another local hero, an agency, etc. Heroes hate being saved this way, but sometimes it's all you've got.
• Spectacle - It's more important to the villain that he has an audience for the event. He would capture the hero so he can kill him at a time when more eyes are on them. Hopefully the heroes get to him before then.
• Ransom - He plans to use the hero as collateral to get something from other heroes, the city, or other sources.
• Megalomania - While the hero is nothing but an ant in the aftermath of his greatness, the villain still needs to show the hero just how insignificant his heroics are by keeping him alive until his plan is fulfilled. In short, he needs a witness to his greatness. This works great if the hero spends a lot of time badmouthing the villain first.
• Orders - Sometimes the "killer" is not the one in charge. His boss could easily radio him away from the scene and give the villain no oportunity to explain. "But Sir--"... "None of your excuses. Return immediately!"... "Yes sir."
• Escalating Charges - Same reason normal criminals generally don't kill if they don't have to: Beause murder is a bigger penalty than robbery, kidnapping, or whatever else he was doing when the hero showed.
• Luck and Unluck - More a justificaton for all of the above than a means. Villain unluck and Hero luck are great ways to justify saving the hero.
• Bleeding - The villain knocks him down to 0 BODY and leaves him to bleed to death. That's plenty of time, generally, for a hero to show up and stop the bleeding after the villains leave.

[Deathwatch]

there is no way to plan for the accidental or unplanned actions of the players. yes you can fudge the dice or allow for a miraculous luck roll, but it is not so much in the hands of the judge as it is in the hands of the player as to when they die and how. all heroes hope for the honored death that in turn defeats the enemy, but depending on the flavor of the game sometimes they just die.

 

 

Heroes inspire the common man to do the uncommon task. You have seen it yourself this night at the hand of the child who killed your brother and scarred you for life; he acted from vengeance but will be seen as a hero by the people of the street. The whispers of weakness have started; soon the roar of their power will defeat you. You may kill me but through my actions the people of Hong Kong have defeated you.

 

The Final Words of Deathwatch to Yao Ping before his death.

 

the real thing to try for is to leave a memorable tag line as your slain, or at least one that will haunt the villain in the night.

[Cap'n D]

Originally posted by Blue

There's always a good excuse. Some of the classic reasons for leaving a hero alive...

 

An unconscious hero, defeated by villians, could wake up to find themselves tied to a power pole, on display, with their secret identity revealed!!

That could lead to some great role playing as the local media has a field day!

 

Creative things like that... well... make a GM evil.

[Cap'n D]

Originally posted by Doug McCrae

If you want a real-life feel, let the PCs die pointlessly and don't bring them back except as drooling brain dead walking corpses.

 

Thank goodness that isn't "real" real-life!

Otherwise I live WAY too close to a cemetary!

(still chuckling to myself...)

[JSenecal]

I was more interested in knowing if anyone ever bothered to run those return from the grave storylines that always pop up in comics.

 

I did once. It was a published adventure in the Adventure's Club.

 

Character's rarely take leathal damage in my games. When they do through no fault of their own, I'll fudge the dice roll so that they barely survive. If they do something really deserving of death, I'll let the death stand.

 

The one case I can remember (from decades ago) was when the heroes were confronting a villian in is lair. While the villian was explaining his doomsday switch, one of the heroes went up and grabed the villian out of his chair, setting off the doomsday switch (release monster on nearby village), and provoking a retaliation from the villians guards. This left the hero bleeding to death, but not yet dead. He died when all the other heroes along with the villian left to deal with the monster that had just been released before it harmed anyone.

[Trebuchet]

Originally posted by WilyQuixote

The only other thing I want to comment on right now is Ranger having Lack of Weakness at -15?! Holy moley!!! Think that was enough?! I thought it was a bit much for good ol Grond to have -10. I think he could spent some of those points better but hey what do I know?

The Lack of Weakness -15 is linked to Ranger's Force Field, so if his FF drops then the LoW drops proportionally. The FF also supports Mental Defense and Power Defense, all of which use END. Defensive overkill is Ranger's trademark.

 

Once, many years ago, a ninja successfully made a Find Weakness on Ranger and hit him with a 10d6 normal attack versus 1/2 of Ranger's PD. Ranger never even noticed the attack.

 

If you're interested I'd be happy to post Ranger here or send you a copy for Hero Designer.

[WilyQuixote]

As it so happens Trebuchet my current hero(Rook) that I play when I'm not GMing sounds as if he's built around nearly identical concepts. I wanted him to have some defense against everything in the book even if its marginal so that nothing ever affects him fully. Its exspensive as all heck and of course I don't have a defense for everything yet but I'm slowly working on it. Too many gaps to fill and not enough points to do it.

 

I have all his powers bought through the force field concept as well. He doesn't have as many tricks up his sleeve as my past characters but the ones he does have are good ones. He is a mainstay in our group and even if he does go down he doesn't stay there for long.

 

I'd like to see Ranger's character sheet if you don't mind. Shrike was telling me he wished other people on this board posted up characters for review and discussion. He posted my hero Rook on here somewhere a few months ago if your interested in comparisons or just wanna see how we built my guy. Use the keywords Rook or possibly Fortress to search for him, Fortress was his original name and he might be posted under that instead of Rook.