"Alternately, for shock value, have a player secretly agree to get killed off in the first session, with his real long-term character already statted up and ready to go."

This was done when I and another player joined a pre-existing campaign. At the climax of the first session in which we participated, the character played by the other player turned out to have been a flesh-eating skin-changer all along.

His real character was subsequently discovered unconscious inside a saliva womb in the basement of the creepy roadhouse, and rescued.

Worked pretty well as I recall ...

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I've seen something very similar done in a D&D game where one of the players was taken aside and told his character had been replaced by a doppelganger. The GM and player stringed us along for several sessions and when an NPC paladin finally whacked the doppelganger, it was a huge shock.

Then we had to go back and rescue the original character and deal with the fallout ...

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Here's what I did when I wanted to have a Dramatic Character Death in my Orpheus campaign.

1. I informed all the players that I would like to kill one of them off in a dramatic scene that would happen *at some point* in the next 8-10 sessions. I didn't tell them when exactly it would be.

2. Those players who wished their characters to be considered for a dramatic death scene would tell me *in secret*. This was referred to as being "on the line." You were not allowed to tell anyone else whether your character was on the line. You could change your mind about whether your character was on the line, but only between sessions; once a session started, you were "locked in" until the session ended.

3. When the time came, I picked one character who was "on the line" and I killed him off.

So: everyone knew that *someone* was going to die, but no one knew when, and no one knew who. If you chose not to put your character on the line, you at least knew it wouldn't be you, but it could be anyone else. Those who did put themselves on the line were ready to play along with their dramatic death, so no one felt targetted unfairly. Plenty of suspense without the arbitrariness of random combat death.

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What if GM and player collude to introduce a character, unbeknownst to other participants, with a predetermined lifespan?

Play Dirty, Episode 1.

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I've seen that done in a campaign I played in on webcomic's forum. The PCs were all prisoners being processed into a prison/laboratory where the Evil Overlords were examining the formation of resistance groups to their benevolent rule. In the usual fashion of PC's, the characters tended to completely ignore what the guards were ordering them to do, until the head guard caught the attention of the worst offender and shot the PC standing next to him (who was one of the few actually paying attention to orders) in the head It was enough of a shock to get the PCs to shuffle along to the next scene, where they met the PC the other player had in reserve.

I also briefly ran a PBEM campaign where one PC was actually a soceror in disguise, slowly transforming in a demon (hidden by multiple layers of illusion spells). Had it conitnued, she would have eventually been revealed and turned into a major NPC villian.

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I've never set it up from the start, but I did have one player approach me to ask for a character death at an appropriate moment. Revelations had splintered the team and he felt this would unify it once again - he turned out to be right; it also triggered some of the best character development seen at my table and a spinoff game.

From that point on, I was building quietly to the next epic storyline, at which point he died while the others couldn't help, at the hands of someone they trusted.

That gave the game something like a year's worth of further direction.

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One kind of PC death you don't see too much of in RPGs is from old age. I'm thinking of characters like Kess in Star Trek: Voyager, who age quickly. Old age doesn't have to be a boring death, either ... Kess went out with a bang, after all. There are lots of fast-aging species out there for all kinds of RPGs, which inherently have the kind of built-in time limit you're talking about from the very start.

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We had a great scene where we'd agreed with a player that he would be leaving the game, but we wanted to have a big send off. We worked out a scene where he got to die for his beliefs. It was the happiest we've ever had anyone leave the game.

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Related to that, I came up with an idea for the long-lost Shards of the Stone that I've carried with me since. I've always believed that the "death scene" has rarely been properly dealt with in the RPG medium, so I advocate a "Going Out With Style" clause.

(It was called "Final Moments" in SOTS, by the way).

Basically, when the dice and the math say a character is dead, he's dead. However, at that time, you can give him his dying monologue at the bare minimum. This means that he will "hang on to life" for at least long enough for someone to reach him and hear his final words.

This is, as I said, a bare minimum.

In truly cinematic/epic games, you can give him a few extra rounds (for example, using Savage Worlds, I give the character at least as many rounds as equal to his Spirit rating) to do some last-moment heroics. This might include a final strike against a major bad guy, passing something of power or value to a teammate, or expending all of his power/magical essence in some grand last "explosive" act.

(Think Borimir in LOTR as a good example).

In these moments, many things become possible - free re-rolls, automatic successes, or similar "gimmes" should be awarded to enhance the dramatic potential and remove or reduce the dice influence on the results.

The one thing that cannot happen is the saving of the dead character's life; he will die at the end, no matter what.

He just gets to go out in style and with drama, and that's the way it should be.

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In Houses, it's called "The Death Monologue."

Great minds. ;)

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Indeed, or as the more elaborate phrasing goes -

"Great minds think alike. Soft minds run together."

You and I have always agreed on the matter of the importance of player experiences superseding raw game play.

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I had that at the climax of our recent All Flesh Must be Eaten campaign. Just as my character got gutted by the Big Bad during a showdown in the helicopter over a zombie-infested New York City, I had my guy grab the dude, bury my own kinfe in his guts, make a terse remark, and hurl us both out the open door of the chopper to our deaths. The GM had the bad guy scream all the way down. It was great. :)

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I did a similar thing once - a group started a game but one player decided to pull out almost immediately.

During the big fight scene in the first session his telekinetic character lost his forcefield protection and was executed by the head villian in front of all the other characters.

Made the rest of that session particularly fun to play, I must say. :)

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Both of Ben Lehman's games, Polaris and Bliss Stage: Ignition Stage have character arcs that culminate in death. The game design is...atypical, I'll say, but I love both the games -- they're gorgeous games, in my opinion, but friends of mine can't stand 'em. Both games feature ongoing character struggles against a relentless enemy that cannot, per the definitions of the setting, be overcome with any finality; hence, the characters are in the long run doomed. The player controlling the character gets a final scene in the case of the character's death, with large amounts of creative control over how it plays out. I find that arrangement pretty darned intriguing.

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I've seen where 'Collusion Kill' was used to good effect in Amber games where the PCs are immortal by genre. It multiplies the effect when the PCs are assumed to survive nearly anything.

I'm also running a game right now where I've told the cast that "season one" cast does not automatically return for "season two".

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I ran a Buffy game with a predetermined collusion that one of the players was the Big Bad, but in secret. I knew he'd be moving away before the end of the campaign, so we set it up such that on his last session he did the Big Nasty Reveal, stuck the players in a predicament, and got himself deaded by their efforts to get out of it. Big fun.

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I've orchestrated both of these as a GM in different campaigns, both times to fine success. The player who got killed was probably the most enthusiastic about the whole project.

Every D&D player, in his heart, wants to be Boromir, you see.

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Faramir all the way. You're the head of Gondor's special forces battalion, you manage to defeat the temptation of the ring, and you get Eowyn at the end (who can bring home the bacon AND fry it up in a pan).

The only downside is that you have to be Steward of Gondor, but since Aragorn's back that really just means you have a desk job and a secure paycheck whenever you want it.

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Okay, dude, it goes like this:

First you play Boromir, and you die at the scheduled time. And when the GM asks you, "What do you want your replacement character to be?" you say: "My dead character's brother."

Put your hands together.

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Sounds good!

Many years back, I did a similar thing with my Champions campaign. Working from the "bones" of a previous campaign, I started off a new game with brand-new players and a collection of NPCs (actually the old PCs) who were essentially the "Avengers" of the setting. After several sessions in which the NPCs and their supporting cast became welcome and fundamental parts of the new campaign, I abruptly blew up the headquarters with most of the NPCs inside. The resulting story arc was titled "Who Killed Paragon?", and it kicked off the campaign where I had wanted it: with a gut-level cause and a complex mystery.

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Fred Yelk and I killed off his first character, by design, in my first Vampire chronicle here at the office. We wanted it to be clear that the rival Kindred in the city were not above dousing their enemies in gasoline and setting them on fire. Worked great.

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I like the ideas here, but I have one concern. How do I, as the GM, or potentially as a game designer, set things up so that the players don't get complacent? It seeems like if the players know that their characters aren't going to die because they have a social contract that says they won't, then they are likely to to go up against bad guys I want them to run from. It may be fine in a SotC campaign, but many other settings, I actually do want the characters to fear for their lives, and act accordingly (within the genre).

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That's mostly a case of actually playing by the rules. Not killing PC's in most games is a matter of fudging rules and rolls by the GM (not counting games where non-lethality is a design feature, such as PDQ). If you play by the rules, and tell the players up front "If your character takes enough damage to die, he will die, and I won't give him an Out>" that should be enough to create the tension you desire.

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I did have a major NPC die of old age once in my Talislanta campaign; the characters had spent nearly a year getting him out of trouble and never really considered how old he was. It made for a moving denouement of that campaign, but boy did I get into trouble because they didn't get the chance to say goodbye to him properly.

As to plants in the party, I've been in games where its been done. The most compelling use was in our live Victorian campaign. One of our friends came along as another character's sister and promptly charactered the next few events. She got involved in the letter writing and social events that went with the game and off we went to Whitby, never thinking anything more about it. She got herself murdered, which was bad enough. It got worse when she came back as a vampire and her brother went a little bit insane and chopped her head off while my character was standing next to her. Nobody knew anything about it being a set-up except the refs and her, but the fall-out in game was immense and the revenge taken against the vampire split the party (mostly because at the time we weren't sure they actually had the right guy).

Yes, it was emotional but it was a bit too near the knuckle at times.

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For what its worth, here's my take on character death, albeit as used in a Hitchhiker's Guide roleplaying game. In my games, death is usually the first step in a new adventure.

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When I am playing a game with an exciting tactical component, I prefer the exciting tactical component unsullied by collusion. I like deaths to be fair and dice to be rolled openly and to fall where they may. Given that, there's still a zillion ways a GM can make his desired outcomes strongly likely and if he or she is good it will be almost impossible to detect.

Character motivation can and should also affect choices even in tactical combat because tactical combat without an emotional component is boring to watch or recount. But out of character manipulations to the emotional states, like collusion, or just a player who had a long day at work and didn't get enough sleep and isn't thinking at the caliber he usually might; these rankle me.

I generally think a single game session is just not enough to get to know your own character much less other characters and so a kill in the beginning session is kind of mentally considered meaningless. "Guess they mean business," becomes similar to, "Guess I should have looked at the Jumping rules a little better before I tried to make it across."

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I'm coalescing a game idea where part of the initial character concept is how the character died. The story begins in a purgatory-like state. Each episode, the group travels to one character's time and place and helps resolve some issue. If the resolution is significant enough, it might even change the time and manner of death.

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Not a bad idea. But I prefer to keep all the players on their toes. I don't kill PC's for fun, but if they do stupid things while in a dangerous situation...

And I find that is more fun for the players. They actually are more careful, and think things through. If they KNOW I'm not going to kill their characters, they just act like idiots. Really psychotic idiots.

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I saw an interesting take on this somewhere (RPGnet?) based on the Serenity movie.

IMPLICIT SPOILERS FOR THE SERENITY MOVIE

The deal is this. If a player makes the declaration "I am a leaf on the wind, watch me soar", then they will automatically succeed at whatever they are trying to do , no matter how challenging or improbable - but their character will definitely die in the attempt.

I've never used this, but it sounds like an interesting variation.

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