Been running my Freebooters 2e campaign for a couple months now and we just had our first player character death that stuck. It wasn’t epic, he didn’t sacrifice himself, it wasn’t particularly climactic, but it was still powerful. The other PCs took a (very) brief moment to grieve, looted his corpse, and moved on. The player immediately started rolling up a new character. I really appreciate that the char gen process itself is so engaging, because the player was able to work on that in the background while the others carried on, and he didn’t feel like he missed out at all. He was still having fun.
Been running my Freebooters 2e campaign for a couple months now and we just had our first player character death…
Been running my Freebooters 2e campaign for a couple months now and we just had our first player character death…
That’s perfect
Jeb E, would you mind briefly sharing who the character was and how they met their end? I’m always interested hearing about in freebooters who die in mundane or less-than-dramatic circumstances.
Jason Lutes level 1 magic user named Thulgrim (met requirements for level 2 but the group didn’t have downtime to level up yet) who had previously been knocked to 0 HP for failing a dex save when stepping into a room with “wrong gravity” (they were exploring what turned out to be an ancient spacecraft built by “the precursors,” gods who basically created elves kind of like the inhumans in marvel comics) but managed to get revived with a mangled arm to show for it. everyone was walking down a hallway and drew the attention of the guards, 5 HP mechanical beetles about the size of a medium sized dog. he successfully swatted one away but while the other group members were fighting off their own attackers, he made a series of bad decisions (and bad rolls) and the bug he smashed earlier, which only had 1 HP remaining, hit him for 1 HP, which is all Thulgrim had remaining after the earlier fall, and since he only had robes and no armor, that was it for him. So it wasn’t a mundane end, but it also wasn’t particularly exciting. I kind of thought about giving him something more cinematic or heroic, but somehow an unsatisfying death felt right and was in its own way satisfying. It fit his character too, as he was an arrogant know-it-all who thought facing one of these things–even in a weakened state–in hand-to-hand combat was somehow something he was capable of. And the players loved it, which I found most surprising of all. I don’t relish killing PCs, I’ve never been one of those DMs, but the squishiness of low level PCs plus the random generation of traits and alignments mean the players are engaging with their characters in a different way than they would when they create a character from scratch with a rich backstory and all that. They may grow to like and care for their characters, but there’s also a sort of inherent disposability at low levels that’s really fun for them to play with. And empowers me to make more interesting encounters and situations since I don’t need to be afraid of killing off the characters the way I sometimes am with Dungeon World and D&D 5E.
It’s funny, one of my players who is an old school D&D guy said he felt like a first level character who wandered into a high level campaign and he loved it, and that was kind of the best compliment possible.
sorry that was a lot of words!
I didn’t want you to have to write a lengthy description, but in all honesty I wanted a lengthy description. That was awesome. I love that your player chose to go mano-a-mano as a level-1 magic-user versus a giant mechanical beetle. You’re describing exactly the kind of experience I’m hoping people will get out of the game, so it’s really great to hear. In my home games, the ignominious death is just as entertaining as the heroic death.