I can't recall it ever happening when I was behind the screen, but as a player I did sacrifice a character once to cover the escape of the rest of the party. I spiked the door behind them, putting my character and the door between the adventurers and some minotaurs.

The other players were a little pissed, actually.

Quote from: boulet;308955I can't help thinking that many players who sacrifice their character are sending the "bored of this game" message. So when players get extremely hot headed in a game I often wonder if it's a polite/passive aggressive way to say they want to play something else.

Yeah, it can also be this.
It should usually be pretty easy to tell the difference, though. There will be other signs.

Quote from: boulet;308955I can't help thinking that many players who sacrifice their character are sending the "bored of this game" message. So when players get extremely hot headed in a game I often wonder if it's a polite/passive aggressive way to say they want to play something else.

Well, there's a difference between self-sacrifice and "suicide".

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;308814How often does it happen in your game that a player will knowingly and voluntarily put his character in a position where the character seems guaranteed to die in order to save someone else or the party?

In my games, at least, its sufficiently rare that it continues to impress when it happens. Players like their characters to be heroic, and most will quite readily take the RISK of death in order to be heroic, but very few seem willing to face CERTAIN death to be heroic. The cost of losing the character seeming to outweigh the benefit of coming out a hero.  And on many of the occasions I have seen it happen, it was when the character already had "Nothing left to lose".

RPGPundit

I have one player that likes martyring his characters so much I have to plan for it. He does it constantly. The last time, the party was actually escaping on their own already, but he still turned around and went to fight by himself.

He dies a lot... though the last time or two the other players wouldn't let hi go alone...

He just has a thing for it.

Last night in a ship combat going horribly wrong, the owner offered himself up as a concession -- sacrificed himself to save the ship (and, in the bargain, his ex-wife the captain). His ex even pushed the PURGE button on the airlock.

He did shoot her hand off that one time.

happens every so often in my games, though one of the frequent perpetrators is more-often-then-not expressing his fickle relationship with his character(s).

I did it today when I distracted a green dragon while he assaulted the deck of our airship. It's was almost guaranteed that he would punt me off but It would give my party members time to reload the cannons and take him out.

Unfortunately I had missed the prior session and came in just after the start of the fight, not realizing the airship was actually at a survivable (by D&D standards) fall distance leading to an undramatic drop in the trees; took me out of the fight, but didn't kill me.