Topic: Avoiding Death

[Holdner]

Last friday one the most charismathic character in  my campaign died in an encounter with a Giant-spider. Unfortunately the first atack become in an openended roll an then in a D critical roll of 91: Strike comes down on the shield shoulder of foe. Arm shatters. Foe dies
from shock and blood loss in 9 rounds.

It seems not so serious that it cannot be healed, besides they have a Healer in the team .

Of course death is part of the game but I'm wondering if in that case there can be a chance to save this character.

[Ecthelion]

I would suggest to use the Fate Points system introduced with Channeling Companion. It allows a character to avert such unlucky rolls by using a Fate Point. Yes, death should be part of the system but it is always very sad if a character does not die because he acted foolishly but from an unlucky dice roll.

[markc]

 You can use magic to hold/tie a persons soul to their body after they pass, then once you get them to a healer they can fix the damage and restore the person to life.
 As for general stuff the happens in combat here are a few things I do, herbs (but remember that they can lose potency after a time), fate points (used to adjust the roll or make a roll over) and as a GM I roll my dice behind screens as I tend to roll very well when I am a GM and poorly as a player(but this has been known to reverse it self as well as I once rolled 10+ natural 20's in a roll for treasure and received an artifact in D&D way back when).
 In my game fate points are very important as I said above but I try and not make them too over powering and try and not let the players take advantage of them too much.


 Another factor is that at times PC's must die to preserve the in game illusion of balance and so it is not just an video game where people just respon after a period of time. That is unless that is your campaign theme or players special power, etc.


 Death and loss suck and it can be troubling for players and GM's to deal with. Some players take it better than others and some GM's handle it better than others. But at the same time it can be a source of an interesting adventure/session for the group in that it can bring about the main question you asked, "Is there a way to save the PC?". As I said above there are some spells but as a GM it is also up to how their world works and as a GM I have to see if it makes sense for the PC to get to the life saving herb/spell/person/deity/location in time.
 Also having said that having a PC die in specific sots or at a specific time can kill the whole group.


Hope that helps.
MDC     


BTW, the spells I am thinking of are cleric based.

[jdale]

You have 9 rounds to prevent death. According to the critical death is due to blood loss and shock (and there is also a shattered arm). The blood loss must be greater than what is typically dealt by a critical. It's a judgment call, but you could treat it as equivalent to 10-15 hits/round for treatment purposes. On the Healer lists, I might require Major Vessel Repair III or three castings of Major Vessel Repair I.

There's no explicit way to deal with "shock", but the loss of blood pressure at least should be mitigated by not losing all that blood. You could also require some kind of skill check for dealing with that.

Even after death, if the wounds are treated before the soul leaves the body, they can recover. You might also need to restart the heart in that case. If you cast Lifekeeping before the soul departs, you get an extension on that. If the soul leaves the body, the body can still be repaired, but now you also need Lifegiving to bring the soul back. But, being dead is unhealthy, and you will accumulate stat damage while the body is dead, unless Preservation is cast on the body.

All that said...  players do need to believe that their characters can die. If the result is that the character should be dead (i.e. they are not able to save the character according to the rules), and you let the character live, then they may not believe that anymore. I know I've reached the point in a game as a player where I've had enough deus ex machina and my character should be dead, just let him die already.

But at the same time, if rules are in place with known limits, I also think fate points are ok. With a known rule, it's not that you the GM are cheating on behalf of the character, it's simply a rule with its own constraints. My current rule (not yet tested) is 2 fate points per PC, can be used only to mitigate fatal/disabling criticals, the NPC who dealt the blow receives the fate point and can use it.

[intothatdarkness]

I've had to deal with the Shock consideration in my non-magic games, and tend to use First Aid (or Second Aid/Combat Medic) skill to deal with it. Basically it's a Maneuver roll, with the difficulty based on the severity of the crit. In short, success allows the character to keep the wounded individual from going into shock for a number of rounds (depending on the success of the roll and the level of the crit), with another roll made as soon as combat is over and the character can focus totally on healing activities.

Normally a successful roll keeps the wounded character from falling deeper into shock for double the original duration (so in the 9 round example the wounded character would be stabilized for 18 rounds). I also cap the number of times first aid can be used on a specific character, so getting the wounded person to a hospital or other treatment facility is very important.

[RickInVA]

Regarding Fate Points, the game I ran we had a Fate Point system that worked as follows:

• New PCs received 1d10 Fate Points (Amount unknown to the player and maintained by the GM)
  
• PCs gained one (1) Fate Point per level

A Fate Point could be used to:

• Reduce a Critical received down the table 1 space/box (not the severity, but the result).  It could take several Fate Points to remove the PC from death by critical!
  
• Make any %roll by the PC a "95".  This did include Critical rolls.

As a result every few levels the PC could survive a high crit death blow through Fate.  Players also had to balance the use of "offensive" Fate use vs. saving it for life protection needs.

Dealing with death in general I have found over the years that death can make for some very interesting Quests and events.  Once in a game where I was a player my PC had died.  He was a wealthy merchant and most of the other players were his employees, so they were very interested in restoring him to life (he paid well).  They took my body to a local Priest-King who had the power to bring me back to life.  The Priest-king had heard of me even though we were quite far from my homeland, and offered to do the ritual in exchange for some unspecified future "favors".  At this point one of the other players said, "Favors?  What kind of favors?  Do you mean sexual favors?"  At which the Priest-King became most wroth, and had the PCs right had cut off!  I was eventually brought back to life, and was so concerned about my associate's lost hand that we promptly went on another quest to get him a working prosthetic hand.  Two multi-session quests out of one untimely death!  Quite a bargain I think. 

[Warl]

AS others have indicated, the Crit result is a result of "If no aid is applied".

Shock can be dealt with through the use of first or second aid, by GM call. I personally allow the use of 2nd Aid.

I personally use a "Fate point" type system, But if the player choose to take the result, it would be up to the other players to find/provide aid to save them, which would add to the story.

Though a minute and a Half (9 rounds) isn't a lot of time to save some one :-P

[Holdner]

Thanks for all answers!
I took a look to fate point rules and I like them. It's quite useful.
I will be less feared anytime I make a critical roll

[Cory Magel]

With the Channeling Companion Fate Points in mind specifically:  In my opinion, having the PC's gain Fate Points by making long term running plot foes spend them (which they can only do to prevent death) is an important way to not just provide a means to gain more Fate Points, but is also a way to keep important NPC's alive while not completely negating a good hit on them by the PCs.  We often have players who are happy they made a foe spent a Fate Point rather than outright kill them because they got the Fate Point.

Sometimes it's better to run the Fate Points as a pool that the party shares, but that's really between the GM and the gaming group.

[chukoliang]

Ah avoiding death.

RM is brutal in it's rules for death. If you ever tried to save a character and did stat losses for death you would see you end up with a vegetable for a character.

We have 4 rules to help keep characters with reasonable expectations for avoiding death.

1. Fate points. The fate point rules were a fantastic addition to RMSS. They made it so you could use Fate Points to reroll a fatal crit against you. Which can save your life. Though it is brutal if your just having a bad night rolling  . Earning Fate Points is also a great idea. As it can keep things going for all characters. We started with 3 FP's for dedicated Channeler's.  2 for casually religious characters(I.E. believed in a god, but didn't worship actively). And 1 FP for those who just would make a desperate prayer. Some players made bad choices and even 3 Fate Points sometimes couldn't save them from the crit monster.  We always earned 1 FP per level and it seemed balanced.

2. Have towns/cities with high level clerics. A wise GM's has such cities/towns centrally located so players could always reach them in an emergency.  This is very important for several reasons. 1. If I remember correctly the only class that has a resurrection spell is a cleric. Any non cleric has to buy a cleric's spell list and that is expensive. Also it is channeling so if your healer is not religious and doesn't worship a god. He probably won't be able to have such a spell channeled to him.  IMO some of the best healers are strangely not channelers. The Mentalist healer can cast spells silently, has cheap enough heavy armor/weapons  dev and can't be restricted by heavy handed/anti channeling cleric rules. The Healer class with the right talents is incredible.  NPC clerics are great as they are high enough level to cast the spell. The group probably can't afford a resurrection, but they can always owe the NPC favor's and the GM can use this to further story.  Also healing is WAY to expensive in RM IMHO. As a healer you have to develop 5 list just to heal forget any other spells. And 1 rough fight can bleed all the PP's your cleric has. So even if you have a cleric he probably won't be high enough level to cast resurrection. Or may be depleted of PP's and have to wait to cast the spell. The way RM healing is, I think Healers need 5x the PP development  . A side benefit of such cities is every once in a while a GM can have a high level cleric just happen by and save someone. And it is believable as there are reasons such clerics may be in the area.

3. Herbs. If you have a kind/reasonable Gm this can be great. If they have an economy that allows herbs to be plentiful enough and your GM let's you earn enough money you can buy them. My GM kept money tight so we could never afford them. Foraging for herbs always seemed tough in RM. As it took a day and it was pretty hard to get the group to wait a day for your 1 guy who had good enough foraging to try to make a successful roll. And it always ended up costing us too much. As they never foraged enough herbs to feed the group as they waited. Worse still is if the forager goes solo and gets attacked by a level 5 bear (classic Maul/Maul/bite death story for our group) . And even if he was great at it, if the needed herbs weren't in the region you currently were in, it was impossible to find them. And if no one spends the points to develop use/prepare herbs skills the herbs are pointless. And not many can afford to develop them properly.

4. God Call. Obviously regular religious characters get a better percentage. But even a non religious character can make an open ended roll to save themselves or others. We had a classic campaign where My warrior died to a brutal crit. I made a god call and failed. The rogue in my group made 3 open ended rolls and saved my character. The GM was so impressed he brought my warrior back with white hair. The rogue had a white streak in his hair. And my warrior became a paladin. Easily the most memorable character I ever had.

5. I also believe there were rules for sacrifices (in the book that had FP's) where you could sacrifice a magical item or make a pledge to a god and these sacrafices would add to the chance for a  god call. The only magical items we got were if we bought them with our talents during player development. So that rule never helped us in our campaign, but it could help those whose GM's actually gave them magical items.

And if things go especially bad you can do like our kinder GM did. He always rolled for us to see. And he is a lucky roller. So sometimes the crits came hard and heavy. On one particularly bad night he sent sturges after us and they A crit the group to blindness (true story). After the whole group was depressed that we had to reroll all of our characters. The GM said you wake up and realize it was all a bad dream 

[Cory Magel]

5. I also believe there were rules for sacrifices (in the book that had FP's) where you could sacrifice a magical item or make a pledge to a god and these sacrafices would add to the chance for a  god call. The only magical items we got were if we bought them with our talents during player development. So that rule never helped us in our campaign, but it could help those whose GM's actually gave them magical items.

Yep, divine intervention. Intended to more effective than a fate point, but much more 'expensive' to be an even halfway reliable fallback.

[yammahoper]

Any nerve repair herb or spell should, even if it cannot fix the damage, should stabilize the pc for Co mod in hours plus ranks in appropriate skill or spell list used. If the mnv/spell cast was absolute success/96-97, stabilization last for days instead of hours. A skill check of 100 or casting of 98-99 duration is weeks. A spell cast of 100 increases duration of  coma to months.

skills can used the same...1st/2nd aid, surgery, etc.

[bpowell]

I use most of the methods above to prevent the loss of a character.  In the following order.

1.  Fate Points to alter the crit roll
2.  Herbs - I have a large economy in herbs, and two of the characters are herbalists.
3.  High Level Clerics - Some of the characters do favors for the temples to be on the good side.
4.  God calls - In case the rolls go terribly wrong on that night.

I had an instance of that critical in a game once.  The characters heard the critical and forgot the evil warrior that had been dropped with it.  Then they left.  I then mentioned a servant of the bad guy and they left him alone.  The servant was able to stop the death of the Evil Warrior and over a year nursed him back to health.  I then reintroduced the bad guy to the campaign, much to the jeers and groans of the players.  But they seemed to enjoy it.

[Cory Magel]

We're fairly strict with our Fate Points.  A lot of GM's allow them to be used in various ways in various situations, but with us it's only crits or failures that will result in sure death.  That is only slightly variable.

For example, if you are fighting something by yourself (or far enough way from others) that you know will kill you given the chance a 'knocked unconscious' crit might get re-rolled.  If you're going down will almost surely be the start of a cascade effect of the whole party going down it might get re-rolled.  But if you are near party members that can help you and it's not at all a tipping point in the fight the GM may not let you or the play may even chose not to and save it for a more important situation.  If you do use one it's simply a re-roll, not a modification.  So there's no guarantee you're safe.  If you receive another 'sure death' one you have to use a second, but it simply negates the crit completely at that point.

In addition, you are now facing a foe who has your Fate Points, because when anyone, PC or NPC, uses a Fate Point, the one directly responsible for that gets it.  Once in a while it's fun to watch the lengths a PC will go to get that Fate Point back. 

Then there's "I jump over that bottomless pit" fumble rolls.  When you use a Fate Point there it's just gone into thin air...