Despite what one of my players will you, the Dungeon Master (DM) is not always your brother-in-law nor the incarnation of the evil on earth (aka the devil). Ok, in retrospect perhaps I shouldn’t have chosen a devil as my avatar online. In any case, rule number one to remember is that the DM is NOT your enemy. You are not playing against me, nor am I playing against you. But here is why players sometimes get confused….
….sometimes…just sometimes….I might actually smile upon a player character’s death and be proud.
You see, I believe it is my job as a DM to provide you a balanced but fair challenge. If every challenge you encounter is far too easy and you know you are always virtually assured of surviving everything I throw at you, the game will quickly get boring.
“Oh, we just walked around the corner to face a massive 10-headed dragon??? No problem, I whip out my pad of one hundred fairly loose-leaf papers and a bottle of rubbing alcohol and attack! This should be over in no time!”
On the other hand, if said dragon is 100 levels higher than your entire player group combined and destroys the whole party with a single attack thus erasing hours and hours of character creation and playtime in under thirty seconds, well, that’s not fun for anyone either!
So…..it is my job to create adventures that are both entertaining and have a balanced number of encounters that are either possible to win or possible to run away from and live to fight another day. It is your job to figure out which is which.
But sometimes….again, just sometimes… the death of a player can be one of the most memorable moments of an entire campaign.
A hoard of angry orcs swarms towards the party choking off any chance of escaping through the exit that is only mere feet in front of you. Behind the party, you are reminded, is a small but nasty group of scurrying critters that has been chasing you toward the exit. They’ve now flanked you on two sides, cutting off the party’s safe retreat. There is no time! If the players engage the creatures behind them they will surely be overrun by the orc horde!
Suddenly one of the party members leaps to the front, placing herself strategically between the advancing orcs and her friends and shouts, “Retreat! I’ll hold them off! JUST RUN!!!!”
At this point, as the DM, I dutifully point out the reality of the situation. “While noble of you, you must realize of course this plan of action has virtually no chance of success. The odds of you surviving the orcish onslaught are slim to none and it still may not buy your friends enough time.”
The player nods, “I understand, but it’s our only hope. I stand my ground and ready for my defense!”
In this case I cannot help but smile, even as the brave warrior assuredly falls to the onslaught of the orc horde in order to save her friends.
Fortunately, if the surviving characters have no way of getting to and reviving their fallen friend, I have ways of rewarding the fallen player for their brave deeds when it comes time for them to create a replacement character before the next adventure. However, I also want to point out that players can, and do, still die in not so dramatic or heroic circumstances.
Sometimes shit just happens. Sometimes even the bravest heroes fall to a perfectly place dagger under the plate mail. Sometimes a critical slip on a steep ascent leads to a critical fall and death. Hell, sometimes a player’s death can actually be quite comical and give the entire gaming group something to laugh about for years to come.
So, if I smile at your character death (which hopefully doesn’t have to happen any time soon), just know that it is never personal and is always because in some small way your death made the entire adventure more memorable for all of us.