Befriend dragons rather than slay them with Draconis, a peaceful new way to play 5e. Coming to Kickstarter www.kickstarter.com/projects/1176616619/draconis-feel-good-ttrpg-5e/
Draconis seems like a challenge. 5E is a combat-based game. To focus on non-combat resolutions seems pretty niche. Best of luck to all involved, though. I hope it pleasantly suirprises us all.
@@ScottishstormYeah. It does seem like a really nice game, and echoing you good luck to them… But whenever I see something like this I wonder why they don’t just play a non-D&D game that already exists. This sounds very similar to Ryutama, and there’s plenty of non-combat games already out there, from a multitude of PtbA ones to Storybrewer’s ‘Good Society’ and ‘Castles in the Air’ which are almost 100% roleplaying.
Just wanted to say, I've enjoyed the ads you yourself have been incorporating into the vids. I know there's an art to it some RU-vidrs adapt to with varying degrees of success. I've to date liked yours but really thought this one was particularly well done.
My experience has been less character death but more introducing a new player into a campaign. Most suggestions still apply. The line I like to use is "Well you seem like an oddly trustworthy fellow and I will now implicitly and completely believe whatever you say and trust you with my life."
The original "The Gamers" short fan film hits this point *perfectly*. GM: "Now remember, this person is a complete and total stranger, you're in the middle of an evil haunted castle, and the last people you met tried to kill you. What do you do?" PCs: "You seem trustworthy. Will you join us?" New PC: "Yes, yes I will."
@@notentirelyanon6902 God, those movies were master pieces. I love the second one, "Dorkness Rising." My friends and I still quote "as if killing the bard impresses us" whenever a DM kills off an NPC to hype up a bad guy.
Back on Star Wars Day (May 4th), I threw my Pathfinder group against some yetis in an ice cave (an obvious nod to Empire Strikes Back). Well, my wife's character sadly met their end to some brutal dice rolls! The yeti double-crit & rended her poor archer, and she was down for the count. So, naturally, at the start of the next session, the party found her new character hanging upside down in the ice at the back of the cave!
In a dungeon, we were on a spiral staircase, and encountered another party. My lead character and theirs recognized each other. "What are you doing here?" "Breaking in. What are you doing here?" "Breaking out." Then it was followed by an exchange of information, some maneuvers to get around each other without falling off. Later, the two groups got together and exchanged members. Fun.😜
For space settings, you can give your players a colony ship with a bunch of people in stasis, but the ship can only support (player count) number of awake crew members at a time. So if a PC dies, you can wake up another colony member. This builds in back story, motivation, and inter party connections.
This is great. Also, what if the PCs are not part of the original crew, but rather have taken on its ancient mission. Between main adventures on passing planets, they could have smaller adventures in which they explore odd pockets of the ship, and discover random cultures of accidentally revived colonists (I'm heavily influenced here by an old TV show called The Starlost).
It’s funny you mention Horror on the Orient Express. When I ran it, I had everyone make 4 characters and we did a little prediction on how many characters each player would have left at the end. One of my players started as a professor from Arkham who was in the UK with some students on an extended study trip. His backups were the students who came along with the professor after they accepted the quest to go to Istanbul. Every one of his characters died and he made 2 more past the initial 4 that also died. Conversely I had one players first character survive till the finale after taking photographs of their journey, only to die right at the very end,. HIs photo album became a legendary source of mythos evidence and some leaked and out of context pictures became very popular album covers with alternative musicians 😂.
@@ultralight9625 Everyone’s favorite picture was actually of two PCs punching a third (brand new) PC as they had a nervous breakdown in the car after losing an eye on their first day in the group.
Im starting to think that Seth, Dweebles, and the rest of the gang are all the same person. Sure, we see them talking some times, but never in the same frame. Very much a Clark Kent situation.
The surfer dude is Todd and the guy with the southern (Texas?) accent is Mike. Dweebles is actually a nickname. His true name is unknown, even to himself. See Seth's NPC vids for when this was revealed.
It was a while before Seth named them on screen, and some commenter offered suggestions. Among them, Dweebles for Player 3. Seth liked it better than the name he had in mind.
I've mentioned this in prior videos, but my main character in Traveller always referred to his invisible friend who was a Droyne no one else heard or saw. Who lived in the vents of the ship. If my character would die, she would be available almost immediately for the group to join. I also referenced her all the time when I wanted to talk about things he heard her talk about. Or would mention he heard from 'Xim's experience. So all characters knew their name and with she was good at. Even the game Master has basically made her into an actual NPC kind of like a living aspect of the ship.
One of my favorite methods to introduce a new PC works only in Paranoia: The PC is strapped to a rocket sled that careens into the party, taking out at least 2 other people.
As mostly a GM, whenever I do play I often have a backup character ready to go. I think I've gotten jaded about characters I control dying; I once had to console another player who started sobbing after MY character died.
It's a pretty epic compliment though, if your character meant so much to them that they were devastated to lose them (unless they cried every time a character died, which is a bit different). I'd feel incredibly vindicated as a roleplayer if that happened to me.
@@BlueTressym I guess I took it as a compliment, but in the moment I just felt strange. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the reason it hit them harder was because I had used the last charge of an ability I had to save their character earlier in the session, so I didn't have it later to save mine, and they blamed themselves for that (Which was obviously not their fault).
Same, I used to feel strongly about my characters until I moved to being mainly a GM. Nowadays when I happen to be a player I ride them like a stolen car 😂
“Player charactor life insurance isnt a thing” Me to the bank of neverwinter: right so in the event of my death i want all my funds to go to my daughter.
Don't forget the massive Inheritance Tax! Was even a mention of it way back in the old Isle Of Dread module in the section on how to get the players into the campaign. 😄 Make 'em pay!!
One of the adventuring parties we hired had this in their contract. They all died... along with the other 3 parties we hired... Don't try to ambush vampire knights at night without magical light sources. (in our defense we didn't know we were up against vampires)
I Will sometimes say “hey, we have a player or two out this week so let’s run a b-squad mission” and we can run our backup characters through a short mission for that night which can tie in to the main campaign or simply be an unconnected line
I truly miss those 8 to 10 hour game weekend game days, where you'd start around noon and play until dinner, take a break for dinner than resume and play until midnight often. Good times.
That is the current plan. Right now, we just finished Chapter 6 of 10, so hopefully not too much longer before I start a Review/Campaign Diary series on it
Ive got a group of 5 for an OSE campaign and had them all make 2 PCs to start. Then if only 2-3 can make a session, they use both of their characters. If everyone can make it, then they each use their primary character. Really works well instead of only having an emergency backup.
I first "learned" about back-up characters when Dark Sun was introduced. I loved that setting and the idea of the back-up character because of how brutal the setting was.
Funny little detail about PCs' life insurance. According to some sources, piratesband sailors used to wear golden earrings to pay for their own funerals. One of my D&D party had a similar idea: each character had a diamond jewel worth enough to get them resurrected once.
When I graduated high school in the early 80’s and I told people I was going to Buffalo to go to college the most memorable response was “I hope you like crime”. So…yeah.
One other resource that's a bit tricky but rewarding to tap is the enemy forces. A member of the gang, cult, city guard, etc may have strong misgivings and be looking for a way out, and here walk up the player characters. It's a good option to offer your player for how to introduce their character to the team: "Don't shoot, I wanna join yous guys! I can help guide you around and get past some of the guards too." Followed quickly by: "Uhhh... hey do you have food? They don't feed us nothing good here, it's been awful!". Establish motive to join and stick with the team in whatever way the player likes, or doesn't like if they're not offering anything. Maybe the mind control wore off, or they've been thinking about getting out for a while, or they're just opportunistic.
We did that in a soft reboot of our d&d campaign (half the old players were gone, replaced by new ones.) By fiat the old characters got captured by the slavers we'd been tangling with, and we talked two guards into helping us escape, who were the new PCs.
Me: The demon has you in its jaws. Player: I attack it. Me: You can attempt to escape, the demon automatically hits you next turn if you stay there. Player: I hit the demon. Me: Okay, damage? Alright, demon's turn, and... you die. Player: I can't believe you killed me.
Best backup I ever had was never used. It was a shape changing druid who followed the party unnoticed. The plan was to jump it in when the main went down almost immediately. It became a major NPC in my own campaign in the end and saw a whole lot of game time.
I find that in most systems that use levels, as opposed to skill ranks and what else have you. Bringing in a character with a lower level than the rest of the party, even if thematically appropriate, tends to begin a spiral. Especially if health is in any way tied to level. Note that I don't have anything against anyone doing it, but it's just something I have observed.
Yeah you do end up with player whose characters tend to die over and over again, though usually I find the new character hides a lot for quite a while, which isn't fun ether.
I suppose that depends on player attitude and overall challenge level of the game. In highly dangerous campaigns where the GM is running encounters that are a level or two above the average of the party, yes, more frequent PC death is going to quickly take the party level down, and more consistently. That is a GM problem, I think. In parties where one of the players is more, let's say, rowdy than the rest, he is going to experience more frequent death on the individual level, which can be disruptive, and is a player issue. However, each time his character dies, the new character comes in consistently at the prescribed lower level (usually one level lower), compared with the party level, not with his newly dead character's level. Aside from the player likely being disruptive, I don't see that as an issue, really. He can always be evened-up with the rest of the party through use of a one-on-one side game. I speak entirely from experience here, by the way. This was typical of our 3.5 campaigns.
Definitely agree, we used to bring them in a level lower in 3.5 dnd (the idea was they'd be in the same position as if we'd used Raise Dead on the old character), the xp mechanics meant they'd catch up after a while, but if you ran into a hard fight before then, it could be trouble, and the more it happened the further you eneded up behind the other characters. We just let people come in at full level regardless of system these days, more fun and it makes balancing combat easier if there's not one lower level PC who can't keep up.
I've had to use an emergency backup character in Call of Cthulhu when my character ran screaming into the night after a really bad Sanity failure. He may look familiar. He was a private investigator named Jack. He started off as an NPC who hired us to look into a house his client had bought in Boston. Turned out, there was some weird cult activity and the place was haunted by the former owner. Jack showed up just as my Investigator was running into the night after seeing his dead friend rise up out of the upstairs bath.
My favorite backup character was in starfinder. My backup was... the character. Character was very devoted to cybernetics. So my backup was an AI construct based off the character I was playing. Character was killed, which then triggered this DROS construct to activate. Yeah, was a copout, but I was also burned out on that campaign. Was having long grind of combat in the module being ran. We were right at end then suddenly a save or die spell. So was effectively Thanos snapped out of the game literally at the end of the campaign with a boss before a boss.
No, I’m not Landfill, I’m his twin brother Gil. I taught Landfill everything he knew about drinking beer, I wanna fulfill his legacy by taking his place on your drinking team. You must be Fink, Landfill told me everything about you. I feel like I know you guys, so we won’t have that awkward get to know you stage. And,if I could just ask one favor, if it wouldn’t be too uncomfortable I was hoping maybe you guys could call me Landfill, in honor of him.
TL/DR: "who would notice if you went missing?" is a crucial question in a PC's backstory. We run mostly modern horror (location-based campaigns in the vein of Silent Hill, the Phantasm movies, etc.), so what I am about to describe here might work best in atmospheric, investigatory games, but... I typically have a couple of rando NPCs, on friendly terms with the party, running around in the background of the campaign, occasionally showing up for an assist, or needing an assist, but otherwise with their own goals that are aligned with the party's goals. These NPCs are experiencing more or less the same events when they are "offscreen," so they are also good for providing clues, info, etc., in cases where that info is crucial but has been missed by the party. Since the party is used to these NPCs occasionally showing up, they don't question it when one of them appears at the scene of a PC death. The player whose character just died has the option to take that NPC until we can work up a replacement PC. Usually, my NPCs are well-liked by the players, which eases the transition. I do this because my players tend to want to concentrate on one PC at a time, and typically shy away from backup characters, per se. Running an NPC keeps them involved until they get the downtime to create a new character. In terms of creating the new character, I give each player a background survey prior to the campaign which includes questions like, "who would notice if you went missing?" They usually can name a couple of family members or friends who would come looking for the original PC. Pretty handy for helping create the replacement character.
I love Pulp Cthulhu's "survive certain death" mechanic because it has the player opt in to dying. All of our character deaths have been very satisfying as the player usually already has a plan for their second character before going out in an intentional blaze of glory.
I was introduced at the tail end of a Curse of Strahd campaign as a Reborn Fighter-- I was kept in a crypt and awoke when the party was searching. Luckily they didn't kill me when I proved to be an intelligent Undead with memories of my former home.
Your description of the deep space roleplaying game where the group responds to a distress signal in order to introduce a new PC was spot-on for one of my previous campaigns...with a twist. The party responded to a distress signal, finding an escape pod from a ship reported as being lost a few months earlier. On board, they find the last remaining survivor of the ship in suspended animation. They revive him and bring him back on board. They, of course, take him to their sickbay for a complete work up. As he begins to revive and awaken, they ask him his name, where he's from. In a halting, scratchy voice, he responds "Dall...Dallas..." "Dallas?" responds one of the PCs, "Texas? Cool! I'm from Texas, too!" "No...I meant my name is Dall..." He's interrupted by convulsions seizing his body, arching his back in outrageous pain, as something starts pushing up from INSIDE his chest... You see, the new PC wasn't Dallas. It was the chest burster... ;)
Many years ago, I had a new player join a group. The party happened to be in a catacomb at the time. I planned out the perfect moment to introduce the new character... and then watched as the party meandered through the catacomb, never reaching that point. And my inexperienced ass didn't do anything about it - just let the poor guy sit there waiting for his chance to play. Yeah, he didn't come back. Remains one of my biggest regrets as a DM...
It's certainly interesting, though you need an excuse for them to be competent and motivated enough to replace a PC, yet to still have left most of the fun stuff to the original PCs.
I mainly play 5e and hasnt really lost a character to character death but I prefer making back ups regardless and that is because it works as a anti anxiety tool for me. I can get very antsy in very intense combats due to having a very hardcore borderline unfair dm in the past and having back ups so i know what i can do next if something bad happens makes me calmer and prevents the anxiety from flaring up to highly and ruining the game for me and everybody. Very helpful.
In our current Traveller campaign (stringing a bunch of Reach adventures together as a build-up to taking on Pirates of Drinax) we had a second collective character generation session, in which a new player rolled her first character and everyone else joined in and helped her along by rolling up backups. Fun was had, and ice was broken in a most satisfactory manner.
It's kind of surprising Seth how some fake facial hair or a wig can really change your appearance. Truly you are a man of a thousand faces, or at least four.
Never thought about making a backup character from the start, mostly because it always seemed to me a bit drastic. But I can see the point in using an NPC as an emergency backup character and to integrate such a thing with some brief notes and concepts about the "real" backup character ("My wizard comes from a family with a long tradition of soldiers. He has a bigger brother in the cavalry and a sister in the scouts").
I have actually had players act surprised when I tell them that if their PC dies they can create a new one will the same accumulated XP as their dead PC. Because starting a new PC at 1st level while everyone else is 3rd plus sucks for everyone.
I always have a few emergency backup characters ready for my players to use. They’re usually characters with interesting gimmicks and relatively shallow personalities so it’s easy to take over and have fun making the character your own. Emergency backups almost never become full time party members but anything is better than making a player sit out a session because a battle went south.
Before pandemic, i was running Out of the Abyss ...the rogue died in a battle against some monsters, luckily next encounter they found some Drow slavers... after a small easy battle, the rogue player took the same character sheet, just changed the name, and we introduce it the "new Character" as one of the prisoners... "oh well, our old rogue died, wanna get out of the underdark?, maybe you can take and use some of her gear"... after a small funeral ceremony... we moved on and game continued. Great advice and video as usual Seth!!
I like how Eldritch Tales handles character death. If a character dies during a session, then they are replaced by one of the dead characters personal contacts.
I've given new players (including whole new parties) semi-cooked characters for them to choose between and then complete cooking themselves. It saves on time, is helpful for newer gamers, and ensures the characters fit each other and the intended campaign.
I have to admit, some of my characters have some truly interesting deaths, including petrification and beheading, but those are stories for another time. I think character death should always be a possibility, however remote, and the advice you give in this video is great. I've done some of this in my own games already, but it's always great to hear a refresher and maybe pick up some tips. Thanks for the hard work, Seth!
If the system has level adjusted xp like 3.5 d&d or quadratic xp scaling where lower level pcs catch up faster, I don't have an issue bringing in a new pc 1 level lower. For games like pathfinder 2 with linear leveling, the game expects you to bring in fallen PCs at the exact same level.
I read where one guy liked his character a lot and when the character died the player put Junior on his character sheet. Another liked his character but didn't like his class so the DM wrote that the character was having a mental crisis so he left to meditate, train and rediscover his life and changed class to a cleric. Another guy wrote that he had five twin brothers who possessed the same training and adventures together so when one of his players died he just brought in a brother.
Dark Sun (still my favorite D&D campaign world) directed players to create a "tree" with, if I recall correctly, 4 characters created at the same time.
I have a million backup characters for each system I play. I usually keep their backstories clear and the rest are malleable so I can fit them into most campaigns at any point. I really don't mind when my character dies, compared to the rest of my group who are usually devastated when theirs go. In fact I'm usually disappointed when my DM retcons TPKs lol. My friends disagree with me on that usually. I really feel that if you have a TPK and you want to continue the campaign, you should drum up another party with the goal of stopping whatever killed the first party, or at the very least puts them on that path. IMO It makes you feel like the world is vast and alive and that your first set of characters aren't the only ones that were out there who were trying to make a difference.
I think my favorite way that a DM has introduced my new character to the group (this came with a long discussion between him and I on how to bring in the new guy and certainly can't work for every situation) is that he had a god interfere and put my new character into my old character's body, a miraculous resurrection as far as the other characters are concerned, but actually a completely different character with a completely different personality and a different (although similar) class. It was D&D 3.5 and I went from playing a traditional wizard to a divine class that casts from a spellbook kind of like a wizard which is what sparked the idea.
Thanks so much Seth. So timely since I'm about to run a Delta Green game for the first time and the advice about holding back some skill points on the backup is pure gold. Oh, and I loved seeing the Willow tv show reference. Gutted that they cancelled that. Even more than the recent DnD movie that show captured the feeling of playing a fantasy TTRPG with friends.
Ah yes, I remember my first character death, it was my second time playing D&D second edition and our DM (one of my coworker's friends, Brice) was excited to run us through Planescape. A few sessions in he had the Lady of Pain pass by, I rolled a one on my stealth check followed by a one for acrobatics since I was on a roof at the time as we were trying to get away as fast and quietly as possible, and promptly fell off the roof directly in front of her.Then there was a roll to see what the Lady of Pain would do, a public roll for everyone at the table to see... it was also a one. Brice reached into his binder, took out a really nice black envelope, and then proceeded to pull a piece of actual parchment out of it to read the messy and incredibly graphic and demise of our entire party for the next five to ten minutes. Fun times, after we all made new characters, it remains the best and longest campaign I've ever been in.
Ah yes, the time honored tradition of looting your dead friend's corpes and splitting up his belongings. "No way, we can bury him with that +4 chainmail. Hed want us to avenge his death with it." DM"But he fell off a cliff" Players "Mmmaaa....its finelifegoesonletsgoguys"
I think it would funnier if you just drag the corpse to your new friend pc and just be like "He said you should get his belt, real good for what we do" And you got to take it off the dead body. 😂
In both of my sci-fi games (Traveller and WEG Star Wars), the players have a ship with a crew that's larger than the gaming group; plenty of backup npcs. It's also useful if someone gets hurt and is going to require a week of healing in the medbay, but the adventure is ongoing. The player can commandeer one of the NPCs just for that week until their normal character is back on his feet.
I fondly remember that time the GM introduced a new player's character with us saving them from an ambush. My own character was killed in the fight, and couldn't be raised. Oh, how we laughed.
I have many back up characters.. I just make characters in the background of a setting for fun in my free time, and many end up being able to tap in, though I've never needed to do so before. It's kind of a perk of my sub-hobby of character creating I guess.
One thing that has paid off handsomely over the years for me is to have a "reserve" of mostly-complete characters that anyone in the gaming group can draw on for either a PC or NPC. Most every RPG player has a handful or more of character ideas that they never ended up using, and I encourage players to hand over those ideas to the reserve. At worst, they go unused, and at best, a character that one player came up with ends up being the darling of another player.
When running D&D, my rule is replacement characters come it at the average party level, minus one. I started it with a large group, averaging 7 to 8 players a week. By the campaign's end, PCs ranged from 6th level to one lucky power-gamed 9th level combat beast. The players really enjoyed that rule; it let them feel like their new characters were in genuine danger at first, but got them comparable to the other PCs quickly.
As someone who lived to Buffalo over 30 years ago all I’ll say is that Buffalo’s crime rate is 30/1k while Austin is 31.29/1k. That is incidents of crime per 1,000 residents.
Buffalo smells like Captain Crunch Cereal. Gospel truth. I am not disparaging Austin but I can ask people I know who have moved to Round Rock and Cedar Park. I hope to visit them someday.
One time had a player's new character (a dwarf miner) literally bust through a wall with his pickaxe into the dungeon. He was digging, got lost, had a cave in behind him so he decided to keep moving forward and ended up in the dungeon 😂
14:30 - I remember one game I joined partway thru. The DM gave the party a stone-to-flesh scroll or potion and left my character in a dungeon as a petrified victim of a long-dead Medusa. He kinda just attached himself to the group for the next couple sessions, until a dragon fell on him and he took enough damage to take him from max HP to negative max HP in a single strike. I wasn't even mad, it was funny as heck.
We had our first session playing The Two-Headed Serpent (Pulp Cthulhu), and I joked that I "already had my backup character". Then had to do a luck purge to survive one attack, but I was marked for doom. I had the backup set up as my original character's fiancé, so she would have some knowledge of what was going on. Both were academic types (archeologist and then anthropologist), so no issues filling the party role either. She survived the rest of the campaign.....
Please be aware that PC life insurance is void if the player has split the party, ignored the DM saying "are you sure" or has told the DM "that's not how Matt Mercer does it" Cool video. I think I'm going to have to try running a game where folks have a few characters ready that grow at the same rate, but death is a much bigger risk.
"I've been here the whole time!" Helpful to include nameless NPCs in the group so that you can plausibly replace someone in an isolated zone like an island or dungeon
Idk why but i am picturing some kind of containment vessel that contains a person in it. On death of the character it releases that person in a state so you can modify them and bam, puts your dead friend in the vessel for later. Or a favorite from a magic being you saved.
I made a homebrew class for D&D whose premise is that they're a military commander who leads a small army of relatively weak NPCs. I'm currently playing such a character. My idea for a backup character if they die is that one of their (previously anonymous) redshirts will decide to step up their game in order to avenge their old boss, becoming a full-blown adventurer in his own right.
Best character death I GMed was in L5R. I had two players that were mostly going for the buddy cop mood. One was over confident, the other was pushing him to do the overconfident stuff. Until, the overconfident one was shredded by a Oni. The surviving character had some good character arc progression here, becoming a lot more serious (and the player was also a bit shocked that he sent another character to his death). The dead one got an important NPC, I gave him a character sheet and some notes to plot point that he should aim for. The campaign was like 2 sessions from the end anyway so it worked well.
Personally, the most fun I have with RPGs are the dynamics that are built between the player characters so I feel like a player character death tends to upset that momentum and have people less invested due to the fear of it being erased. So the games I run usually have sort of reason for PCs to be immortal or always resurrect without needing to perform some sort of spell or ritual. As a fan of media that has supernatural abilities be linked with a sort of cursed existence I end up liking coming up with bad things that happen when you come back. That way there still is a threat, but it's not a total loss of your player character and the months of fleshing out they've had. Some ways I've done or thought up just now are having your character be replaced with a nearly identical clone, cybernetic or robotic characters coming back with a new body, resurrection taking a human instinct or emotion every time it happens, the character being sent to hell and punished for eons whilst for everyone else it's only been a few hours, or a magic being has an interest in the players but every time they come back they fall more under its influence and start mutating away from their human form.
Me who has at least 10 backup characters for every character I make, each with fleshed out backstories gills a unique role in the group and has a unique personslity and goal: "video on backup characters? I need to watch this to improve on my backup characters."
