I had my first real blush with character death in 4e Dungeons & Dragons last night.

The Party:

• Mitzelplix- gnome artificer (me)
• Stomar- dwarf fighter
• Corwinnar- dwarf wizard (NPC)
• Marty- halfling ranger
• Gorog- apeman (NPC)

The Setting:

• This is the GM home brew setting.
• The party owns a one-of-kind airship, built by Corwinnar and Mitzelplix's father.
• The ship is sanctioned by the Azure King of Sumai to explore the rumors of another, lost and mysterious continent.
• We arrive on lost continent to find it inhabited by primitive and waring tribes (20 or so) of anthropomorphic races.  
• We hook up with the apemen tribe and make progress in communication and explain that we come from elsewhere to establish trade.
• Did I mention that this continent has titanic dinosaur-like creatures that roam about and eat anything that moves?
• The group returned the airship and discovered that it was attacked by the snakemen tribe, Corwinnar's charts were stolen, and three crewmen were taken captive- Caleb, a gnome, and Rufus and Torf, both dwarves.
• The snakemen took a boat and were going to go around this swampy peninsula to get back to their territory.
• Gorog knew we could try to cut them off if we traveled across the swampy marshlands.

The Ambush:
It happens in the swamp by snakemen.
We were on a narrow strip of normal ground, surrounded by difficult swampy terrain.
There were two groups of ambushers, one in front of us and one behind us.
There were some snakemen minions, fighters, and archers.  

The Event:
As you can see, our party has no healer.  The artificer class gives Mitzelplix some very limited healing abilities, but nothing that a whole party can really count on in a crunch.

The fight starts and we are peppered with arrows.  These snakemen are no fucking joke, these are some hard pipe-hitting, pliers and blowtorch, type of dudes.  The archers hit for like a d10+7.  The fighters have a tail attack that knocks you prone if you're hit.  They all have a poisonous bite.

The fight kind of breaks off into two fights: Mitzelplix and Stomar at the north, and the rest at the south.

Plix and Stomar are holding their own against the dudes at the north, although Stomar is taking a rough ride.  He a turtle tank (plate & heavy shield) with Battlerager Vigor.

Corwinnar was pumped up by some arrows, and I told him to retreat to me.  He pulled away from the south and kind of stayed in the middle of both groups for the rest of the fight, although Plix was able to get a surge his way.

The fight started going bad for the southern group.  Gorog, the apemen tribal warrior, was blowing chunks.  He couldn't hit the broadside of barn with a scattergun.  He went down like a bitch fairly quickly.

At the northern end, Plix and Stomar finished the snakemen fighters, and there were only two snakemen archers left up north.  Stomar decides to pull stakes and leave Plix to deal with two snakemen archers by himself.  The had 45 HP and 22 AC.  Yikes!  No way Plix can take these two dudes toe-to-toe.  I know Stomar was going to assist Marty and the fallen Gorog, but crap, he left Plix hanging in the wind with his dick in his hand.

Now, Plix is alone to the north.  He gets hit with an arrow and goes invisible and hides in a bush.  Those mutha fooking archers started looking for Plix!  Plix tries to make a mad dash to his comrades, but they both hit him with arrows and knock him to zero HP.

Meantime, Corwinnar has been controlling a poisonous cloud, killing some snakemen that were in the difficult terrain.  He just keep up moving the cloud appropriately.

At this point, the fight is looking real bad for our guys.  The party leader, Mitzelplix is down and the big gorillaman warrior is down too.  All other party members are bloodied, and used Second Winds.  

But, our standing boys don't give in and fight it out to the bitter end over Mitzelplix's and Gorog's unconscious bodies.  They were in the fight of their lives, and they couldn't spare a moment to help stabilize us.  

Gorog stabilized himself on the first saving throw.  Plix's first saving throw was a '9.'  Okay, no problem, I got two other saving throws.  He'll stabilize next round, no problem, right?  Wrong, I rolled a '4.'  Third and final saving throw comes around, and he finally rolls a '14' and stabilizes himself.  

Whew!  That was the closest that I've had a character come to death in 4e D&D thus far.  I've been playing 4e D&D since its release, and that closest that I've come to character death.

Now, the GM also admitted that the encountered was scaled for another PC to be in the group, the halfing rogue Doobie.  The player didn't show up for the session, and wasn't there for the fight.

Oh, the fight wrapped up and only one snakeman archer escaped into the swamp.  All the others were killed in the fight.

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So, my questions to my fellow members are:

Have you had a character die in 4e D&D?  
What were the circumstances?
Have you had a character come real close to dying like Plix?

I killed a character when I was the DM. It was a fairly tough fight up the side of a gorge, with skeletal ancestral guardians at the top pushing boulders down onto the PCs while Hill Elf warriors fought them. A PC ranger went up to finish off an elf, and ended up taking a hit himself that dropped him into the negs. He bled out for a round or two, then the skeletons hit him with a boulder. He took enough damage to die instantly. It was, IIRC, a ~700XP fight vs. 4 level 2-3 PCs, but it was the only fight they had that day.

One observation from 4e is that you do need to pick on / gang up on PCs a bit to actually kill them, instead of just knocking them down until the leader can get to them. I actually got quite close to killing the PCs several times, but unless I had a second attack to finish them off, they would usually get back up with a round or two as someone stormed over with a healing potion, or the cleric used one of his healing powers.

No actual deaths yet, but it's come close twice in the last couple of sessions.

I had one fight where two of the party collapsed to 0 hp and one of them started to die (fail death saves) before the ranger ran around trying to stabilize everyone.

And in the last session, three different members of the party (half the group at the time) got down to 4 hp or less, and only a couple of bad rolls by the bad guys and a quick-acting cleric managed to keep them going.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;292997One observation from 4e is that you do need to pick on / gang up on PCs a bit to actually kill them, instead of just knocking them down until the leader can get to them.

That's one of the things that you pick up fairly quickly as DM of 4e D&D- if you gang up on the PCs like they gang up on the NPCs, you're probably going to kill a PC.  

It's was frustrating for me at first as a DM, because there were some fights where the party would take out the BBEG in the first round or two due to concentrated fire, leaving only minions or minor combatants to be subsequently mopped up easily by the party.  Now, I have since let that frustration go, and have developed strategies as a DM to combat the party effectively while not making it too overwhelming.

Quote from: jgants;292999And in the last session, three different members of the party (half the group at the time) got down to 4 hp or less, and only a couple of bad rolls by the bad guys and a quick-acting cleric managed to keep them going.

Well, we knew going into this campaign that our party was going to be light on the healing abilities.  The artificer class has limited healing abilities, but fairly good.  I can hand out two healing surges.  I can hand 5 temporary hit points twice.  I can hand out 20 temporary hit points once (daily).  I think that's about it.  Stomar, the dwarf Battlerager, can generate some temporary hit points himself, and trigger one or two surges himself, IIRC.  4e D&D does kind scratch that 'gritty' itch for me if you don't have a cleric or paladin in the party.  So, this campaign is pretty gritty so far.  We're only 5th level.  I'm digging it.

I had my entire party get gastroenteritis from drinking unclean spring water. We used the disease rules. It was a blast.

But yeah, you can very easily change the difficulty of the fight by varying how concentrated NPC attacks are. It's one of the parts of encounters most difficult to quantify (along with the effectiveness of forced movement powers).

My first 4e character, a tiefling cleric of St. Cuthbert named Sister Charity (think killer nun) died at the hands of filthy goblins.  The DM told us not to go into the cave, but the Dragonborn warlord, in what I later realized was perhaps a bid to derail the game, charged in, followed by our eladrin paladin/mage.  I followed, because I couldn't just let them die.  We took down a number of goblins, but after a few bad rolls and a number of spent healing surges, we all perished.  I died first, I think.

I liked that character

I haven't had any of my own characters die yet, although I've had Ionos (one of my favorites) fail two death saves-- she was actually knocked unconscious by an Otyugh and then dragged underwater. But she got rescued right at the last second.  

I have personally been responsible for 4 PC deaths. It happens!

My first Character died, the Dragonborn Palladin in the Keep on the Shadowfell in that crazy ass battle that killed everyone. Although It was kind of a snafu (the GM rolled three attacks against me at once, from three different enemies and their total damage was enough to put me under) it was in my first ever session of D&D 4e.

I've never had a character die after that.

This reminds me of a house rule kinda thing we do:

Anytime you get fail your first death save, you get some kind of disfiguring scar. Ionos, for example (is a minotaur) and has a broken horn dating from the otyugh encounter when she was first level.

I've killed off only 3 so far, but that's pretty common for me.

In my 1e game, OTOH, I think we've lost like 8 in 3 sessions, along with a few henchmen.  It's Temple of Elemental Evil, though, so it's not surprising it's a meatgrinder.

-O

So the million dollar question: is it  harder to Kill PC's in 4e  compared to previous editions or is it the same?

Quote from: mrk;293045So the million dollar question: is it  harder to Kill PC's in 4e  compared to previous editions or is it the same?

It's way tougher to kill them in a single round.  You can call that a feature or a bug, depending on your perspective.

It's very possible that PCs will die over the course of difficult encounters, though, just like always.  It generally won't be in Round 1, although it can happen if the enemies focus-fire.

Also, I have to say, the Death Save mechanic creates a lot of tension.  Once you hit 0, it's quite possible to die in 3 rounds without medical or magical attention.  And if that stretches to 4 or 5 rounds, the odds get higher and higher.

-O

Quote from: mrk;293045So the million dollar question: is it  harder to Kill PC's in 4e  compared to previous editions or is it the same?

It's about the same, but for different reasons.

In 3.5, you'd have tons of hit points and awesome saves, and everything would come down to who could nova first and throw so much stuff at the other guy that eventually some of it got through. In 4e, it's all about force concentration. You've got to kill them before the leader gets to them and heals them back up.

Quote from: mrk;293045So the million dollar question: is it  harder to Kill PC's in 4e  compared to previous editions or is it the same?

It's much much harder, at least to do it "fair" in 4e. They only way I've seen it done is for DM's to metagame and concentrate artillery fire on a single PC.

So has anyone else experienced the phenomena where the players don't necessarily mind if they get killed because there's at least two or three alternate characters they want to try out (because there are so many new things)?

I literally had a player start out wanting a warlock, then playing a ranger for a little bit, then changed to a swordmage, and is already planning the next character - a shifter shaman - after seeing my PHB II.