Loss of Innocence, A new GM's question Options

[DocMortand]

My group lost it's first member today, so technically it's my first kill. Of course, I've lost a lot of chars in return, so it's only fair...but I still feel a sense of regret.

My question to all is - how did you feel as a GM when you killed your first PC? I know this may be reaching way back into antiquity, and may not be an original thread, but I'm still curious.

Doc Mortand

[RedmondLarry]

It hurt. I felt sad.

[sidartha]

I giggled.

[Joe Outside]

I was annoyed. I was trying to keep these idiots alive and they kept insisting on doing things the by the book were suicide (The cyberzombie has a LMG? Cool! I want it! I'll knife him and loot the corpse...)

[Sahandrian]

I like announcing who's not surviving the next storyline. I mostly kill NPCs or my former PCs who I'm running as NPCs, though...

Can't remember ever actually killing a PC, though. I need to fix that now. Had a rigger who deserved at least three deaths one game. Didn't get any of them cause I knew he'd whine for the next week or two.

[ES_Riddle]

[Kremlin KOA]

I looked for more PCs

[Azrael]

Handed the bloke a slice of pizza, fresh glass of coke and said:

"Did you really think it was a good idea to fire an panther assault cannon into an LPG storage faciliity?"

[spotlite]

Mainly all I could think was 'Oh Gawd, I've killed Spanners. He's really dead. Really really. I can't beleive I pulled off a TN#15 test for that go-ganger with the SMG on four dice. I can't beleive Spanners botched his save with eight body dice. I can't beleive he wasn't wearing his vest. Oh Gawd, I hope he doesn't get up and beat the snot out of me...'

He didn't. He just said 'damn, that's a shame. I suppose the truck we're in had better make a crash test, huh?' Then he looked round at the other players and grinned evilly: 'Shame I was doing a hundred in this crate, isn't it?'

Fortunately the rest of them survived with minor and serious injuries...

[paul_HArkonen]

now I haven't actually killed off any members of the team, yet, but they've done it for me so I haven't felt I had to.

Team's Street Sam goes running at the building they were trying to sneak towards, accross about 30 meters of open terrain, I might add, team's magician goes, "no one else is around him right?" GM "no, why?" Magician "because I'm going to hit him with a stunball, base damage deadly." He dropped, had a little dificulty countering all the Mage's extra successes. After the rest of the team picked up his unconcius body, shot it twice just to teach him a lesson, and dumped it out in the barrens both I and the Player decided it was time to make a new character, and we chalked the character up as dead.

[Tai-Pan]

[akarenti]

The first character I had die in a SR campaign was an ork decker. He was prone to doing stupid things, and then refusing to seek medical attention. He got shot in the leg, and didn't get medical care until the leg needed to be amputated. Then he died of some disease from a paracritter because he didn't go to a hospital. And those are just the highlights! All in all, I feel no remorse: I think the player did all in his power to get himself killed, and then made sure it stuck.

The players next character (a human decker) was a bit smarter.

[Sabosect]

I still remember my first PC kill. The idiot was standing there, insulting Lofwyr, and I hit hit with a force 6 Manabolt with Deadly damage. He promptly failed to get a success. Strangely, Lofwyr decided to let us go without incident after that...

Wait, I'm not a GM.

[nezumi]

I laughed for days. Killing off PCs is what makes it all worth it in the end. Just remember the one rule of GMing: You can kill off all the PCs you want, you just have to make sure they think its their fault.

[Trashman]

Anyone remember that most gamemaster-friendly of all RPGs: Paranoia? Where your PCs have six clones each (or was it five?) of their character and gamemastering consist mainly of coming up with the most outrageous, incongruous and whacky ways of killing them off inside 15 minutes. If you feel nice, like.
I once managed 24 clones in three minutes... ah, those were the days...

Sadly, I admit to trying to keep the buggers alive in my SR group. So much in fact, that I let them do descriptive firefights instead of throwing dice. At least with us it seems to work better the way that a gamer tells me he's getting tired of the char or doesn't feel he's playing the char 'right'. Next session the character gets a suitably dramatic end of which only the concerned gamer and me know. The others stand (or rather sit) in shock.
But haven't had them mourn their comrade's loss as yet. Probably since they know it's 'Hollywood'... ;)

[Wounded Ronin]

The last time I killed off a PC....

Well, the most recent incident involved a bunch of PCs taking D wounds and their players simply switching to other characters subsequently. Does that count?

One guy got sniped, and two others got directly hit by a mortar.

It was a tactical mission where the PCs and 30 soldiers in a fortress had to fight off 100 ninjas with AKs, sniper support, and mortars.

They really really botched it in terms of having terrible strategy.

[Wounded Ronin]

[Kremlin KOA]

I just got paranoia XP!!!!!

[Luke Hardison]

I distinctly remember my first PC death ... he was shot in the back by another player. Pumped him with gel rounds on FA until he died, then smashed in his head with his rifle butt, just to make sure. Nasty night.

I gave up sheltering my players after that incident. During our next session, 3 characters died. Ironically, they were all played by the same player.

When his main character bit the dust by running a Lone Star roadblock at top speed, then getting out and trying to reach for a gun while staring down about 40 barrels ...

I told him he could go into the other room and make a new character with one of the other char's fixers as a contact, and he made a dwarven rigger. He didn't understand why flying around stuffed inside a rotocraft drone with a LMG mounted underneath would attract attention, and wound up in a Lone Star interrogation room. Then he tried to buy himself freedom ratting out his runner friends ... the whole room went silent, as he was about to try destroying EVERYONE's hard - built first characters. I told him he could try negotiating -- he didn't have the skill. The TN was 8 after situational mods, so he could default. He chose to default to his munched CHA of 1, and rolled ... a 1. His karma pool was spent from trying to not get killed while being taken into custody, so his attempts at negotiation had a catastrophic result -- he accidentally confessed on tape to several crimes. Went down for 7 charges and a combined sentence of 102 years.

He started with the oppositional defiant behavior, and made a munched speed demon elf sammy, who, upon creation, walked outside his front door and started mowing down pedestrians. I avoided dignifying his actions with roleplaying and just told him the HRT managed to respond within 5 minutes and offed him with one well placed sniper shot.

At that point, I told him to try again next session. His immature behavior had managed to take attention away from the rest of the group for 3/4 of the day, and everyone else wanted to play for a little while ...

[DocMortand]

[Ombre]

My first PC death...let me see...
It was back in 1990 when we started playing SR. We started with "Mercurial" because it was the only published adventure. They all died in the Taetzel Building except the team shaman who barely escaped alive. Needless to say the run was botched...
Since then, several characters have gone beyond the pale: a decker eviscerated by a True Form Soldier in the Universal Brotherhood hive in "Missing Blood", a Rigger shot down with a SAM while trying to pass the Salish-Seattle border with a stolen Salish helicopter at the end of the "Harlequin" campaign, the surviving shaman from the first adventure in a firefight during the gang war in "Elven Fire", another group turned to ash by a dragon in a second shot at "Mercurial", a whole group decimated by the dragon Naheka in Hawaii because they prefered blasting to negotiating (I know, I know "never deal with a dragon" and all that drek...), a Racoon shaman, an adept and two chromed-to-the-max samurai in the Project Hope debacle in "Double Exposure". Recently, three magicians got busted by the cops in LA during a run in Studio City and ended up getting between 15 to 30 years in jail...

And yet, I take no pleasure in killing PCs. If I can avoid doing it, I do unless the player does something really stupid. In my opinion, PC are like heroes in a movie. Things should be scary, bloody but they should "win" (as far as winning is possible in a cyberpunk game) at the end...
I hate GMs who seem to consider their worth as a GM to depend on their bodycount...Gming should not be an ego trip...
The death of a PC should always be a sad moment....

[Stumps]

[Blaze]

In three years of near-constant GMing, I've only ever killed one PC, and that was with the player's consent and foreknowledge (the game had originally been a backup to run while getting the main plotline organised- due to another player dropping out I made it the primary game and the player wanted to keep her other character). The character in question- a blind rigger- had his garage bombed by the CIA. A 150kg R6 FAE at point blank converted him into both history and geography.
That's not to say the characters get an easy time- they've been close to dying on several occasions (including getting their legs blown apart at the knee by explosive sniper-fire, shot in the gut by buckshot from a sawn-off Remington and mauled by Gabriel Hounds). I wouldn't kill a character without a good reason, but this doesn't mean I'm not going to make them think I would.

-JH.

[Arz]

...but how do most of you deal with the death when the PC is not being stupid?

Say the team leader cashes in on a bad roll while trying to save some people from a blast after exhausting his Karma Pool?

Personally I think this is a good opportunity to use some dying words, but often times GM's save the guy.

Does luck or lack thereof influence your decision?

[Kremlin KOA]

I personally allow the hand of god rule... but apart from that they die