Quote from: Voros;997511To be clear: I was surprised to see anyone advocating off screen character death. Terrible idea even with a dice roll  

Uh... the Player NPCed their own character and effectivively killed their own character off by having a hissy fit and stomping off (well the character did) alone into a very dangerous location.

Then later comes back after doing this a second time with a second character and asks if they can bring back the presumed DOA paladin.

The OP is asking if they should let the players actions have their logical conclusion, or should they as the DM allow for a chance to have survived against all odds - topped off by the players behavior?

To me killing off the character is about the least imaginative thing you could do with the situation. And was it a hissy fit or the player actually playing a Paladin honestly? We don't know the full story.

And regardless, let them play their character's 'certain' death.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;997995"I will not kill your character, I will sit here and laugh hysterically as your own stupidity kills your character."

Funny - I said almost that exact thing Monday night:


(As group debated/bickered about choices)

Friend (to the group): "He's smiling. He's going to kill us."

Me: "No, I'm not. I'm going to let you kill yourselves."

Friend: "That's pretty much what I expected."

He didn't throw a hissy fit. It's just that he was playing a Paladin, and the party had no problem cavorting around with all the blatantly Evil magic items they had found. So rather than force a showdown over it, the Paladin left.

The trouble is, the place the party was, was basically Mordor. So he was alone in there.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;998397He didn't throw a hissy fit. It's just that he was playing a Paladin, and the party had no problem cavorting around with all the blatantly Evil magic items they had found. So rather than force a showdown over it, the Paladin left.

The trouble is, the place the party was, was basically Mordor. So he was alone in there.

So the Paladin thought they were all there to throw the One Ring into Mt Doom, but the rest of the group were there on a combination shopping trip and job interview.

* Orson Welles slow clap *

Moral of the story is. "Dont have your PC depart the group and game in the middle of hostile territory. Wait till its someplace relatively safe."

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;998397He didn't throw a hissy fit. It's just that he was playing a Paladin, and the party had no problem cavorting around with all the blatantly Evil magic items they had found. So rather than force a showdown over it, the Paladin left.

The trouble is, the place the party was, was basically Mordor. So he was alone in there.

Right so it sounds to me like the player was RPing his character in a good way, I wouldn't punish him for that. Get him captured (I know lots of players hate it but better than dead), have him dying of thirst and hunger and rescued by some hermit or neutral creature, have the evil or some bizarre disease infect his flesh and mind, have him experience a mystical vision of his God, either real or a hallucination, or have him die in a glorious bloodbath that you play out. Something more than 'roll...okay you're dead.'

I ended up playing it out. Here's what happened:

Within the first Navigation roll, he got lost, and ended up at the Dragon's lair. He got captured by the Dragon, and given an ultimatum to work for the Dragon or die. He agrees to follow the Dragon's minions to take care of a hostile village the dragon says allegedly are aggressing against him.

When the Paladin gets there he sees its a Trail of Tears style extermination. He turns on the cultists and wipes them out, frees the refugees. But they're in a cursed magical forest that wants to kill them.

He spends the next 23 days wandering the wilderness, as starvation and encounters grind away at him (I did this abstractly as a day per roll), until he finally escaped and reached his church at Helm's Hold with 4 Ranks of Exhaustion thanks to no food, 10 hp left, and 3 out of 21 refugees still alive. So now the character is on standby for if the player ever wants to use him again.

Yea! And now there are 3 NPCs whose attitudes towards the Paladin fall somewhere on the scale from "All hail our heroic savior who led us through death, doom, and starvation to eventual safety" to "If only that meddling, self-righteous bastard had left us alone my wife and children might still be alive. Instead I had to watch them slowly starve to death for days until they were horribly killed by a spine shooting poison mushroom."

Spine shooting poison mushrooms now exist on my world.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;998628Spine shooting poison mushrooms now exist on my world.

That reminds me of The Jester at Scar .

Nice result! Sounds (to me) like a rather fun and interesting outcome that could lead to more fun & interesting stuff in future.

Meanwhile, I would also try not to tell the other players what the result was, so they can wonder what became of him until their PCs find out in-game. I've had some pretty interesting conjectures from players about what various old PCs and NPCs got up to after they left their company.

Quote from: Skarg;998788Nice result! Sounds (to me) like a rather fun and interesting outcome that could lead to more fun & interesting stuff in future.

Meanwhile, I would also try not to tell the other players what the result was, so they can wonder what became of him until their PCs find out in-game. I've had some pretty interesting conjectures from players about what various old PCs and NPCs got up to after they left their company.

Agreed.

And this is exactly what I mean by "one group joined at the hip;" for at least some of the posters here, "run the Paladin separately" was a shocking revelation, not the default way of doing things.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;998628Spine shooting poison mushrooms now exist on my world.

This is just cruel.  You are gonna get a kill with that, and then say it wasn't your idea, but once it was out there, you had no choice, sorry.