That PC was a quitter. Would never have made it as an adventurer of worth anyhow. Good riddance.

I tried once.  I was a big 250 lb barbarian who fell off a bridge (or was it a castle wall?  I don't remember).  The party halfling caught my hand at the last second, but fearing I would pull him over since I was so much bigger than him, I decided to let go and sacrifice myself so that I wouldn't take him with me.

Nope, didn't happen.  My GM ruled that no one would ever willingly allow themselves to be killed, and said I wasn't allowed to let go.  I quit that game not long after.

I have seriously considered it for one of my PCs. It was in an increasingly bleak conspiracy game and it had turned out that my PC's wife was part of the extradimensional conspiracy keeping humanity imprisoned in what we perceive as the real world (or rather, she represented a more humane strand of the conspiracy which wanted to improve local conditions for us, as opposed to the bad guys who just wanted to keep us locked up and kind of hoped we'd just kill each other in confinement). She'd been kidnapped by a member of this cabal of psychotic criminals from the same alien civilisation as her who'd been banished to our world due to dire infractions on his part, and we'd finally tracked down his lair and broke in to rescue her. We were aware that she was an alien and her true form might not be human, so when we kick down the door to the room she was imprisoned in we should have probably expected to find, not a humanoid, but an enormous slug.

Then one of the other PCs panicked and shot her.

I was this close - this close - to having my PC blow out his own brains on the spot, simply because the prospect of rescuing his wife was the one thing keeping him focused and stopping him from despairing at the nightmarish situation he'd become mired in, and now she was dead - dead not despite of the PCs' best efforts but precisely because of the actions of one of the party members.

Honestly, I should have done it. The end of the campaign, which came very shortly after that, was enormously anticlimactic and in retrospect I think having my PC kill himself then would have been both a more satisfying conclusion to his story and also far truer to his personality.

Ironically, the reason I didn't do it was precisely because the end of the game was so close - and because I wanted to see what I could claw back from the jaws of this horrible defeat. (As it went: very little.) On top of that, this was back in the day when if I wasn't enjoying a campaign I'd suffer in silence rather than speaking out or quitting, and committing character suicide would have felt like quitting.

(Actually, the other thing I regret about that campaign - aside from not offing myself at the end - was not being more proactive to maintain my enjoyment. The game started off in a Call of Cthulhu-esque investigatory sort of mode, so I statted my character up with lots of research skills - so when it ended up becoming a globe-trotting slog through constant peril in which stealth and combat skills ruled and everything else drooled, my character really didn't have much to do and spent the last half of the campaign essentially as a passenger, thanks in part to the absolutely glacial experience system. I wasn't even the only participant who had this problem - basically, half the players statted up hyper-competent super-spies, and the other half statted up bumbling average folks, because the GM hadn't really given us much guidance on which direction we should go in, and as a result several of us ended up shafted.)

I think I've only ever had characters commit suicide as a way to "win" against unbeatable odds.  Like one PC who drank poisoned wine as a way to get the warlord who had conquered his lands to die as well; or a guy who rammed his starship into an alien mothership in a kamikaze attack... that sort of thing.

RPGPundit

I created a terrible weapon, a blade which drank the blood of those it killed, granting tremendous prowess in battle in exchange, with overtones of Elric and Druss. The difference was that it needed more and more blood to feed it or it would begin emotionally feeding on the wielder who was bound to it, driving them more insane with each passing day.

The character who picked it up committed suicide alone on a wild and windswept plain after learning the truth about their weapon. I was a bit surprised to be honest, I had imagined they would search for a way to break the curse first, but no.

Spectacular roleplaying.

We've had heroic sacrifices and kamikaze  aplenty, but I've don't recall seeing a genuine, suicide out of desperation in a game. I can respect it as a valid character choice in a darker sort game but to be honest I don't tend to run or even play games that take themselves quite that seriously. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Warehouse 13, Avengers EHM... I like my escapist thrills to have a light touch and fast pace and I see personally really little value to try and explore the human condition in setting filled wizards, space aliens and vampires. YMMV of course.

I had one character do it out of sheer boredom.  The DM was so inattentive, he didn't even register that I had stated such an action for half of the session.  That was young me; now I would just get up and leave.

The wall-to-wall is calling, it lingers, then you forget
Oh oh oh oh, you're an RPG suicide...

Quote from: Dana;634971I know of someone who likes to drive other PCs to suicide. Brags about it, even.

And people game with this person why?

Quote from: Technomancer;635175I tried once.  I was a big 250 lb barbarian who fell off a bridge (or was it a castle wall?  I don't remember).  The party halfling caught my hand at the last second, but fearing I would pull him over since I was so much bigger than him, I decided to let go and sacrifice myself so that I wouldn't take him with me.

Nope, didn't happen.  My GM ruled that no one would ever willingly allow themselves to be killed, and said I wasn't allowed to let go.  I quit that game not long after.

That was a really crappy GM.

Quote from: Tetsubo;635791And people game with this person why?

Geek social fallacies, mostly. And he can be smarmily, creepily nice to people he doesn't see as a threat or whose influence he wants to use. Once he latches on to a gaming group, he can be difficult to dislodge. He's not in ours anymore because everyone finally realized what a psycho he was, but he's still busily making people miserable in other groups he hasn't been thrown out of yet.

I wanted to thank everyone that's shared a story. It's been an interesting thread (along with the one over rpg.net). PC suicide (in the character driven sense) doesn't seem to be a common occurrence but its not as rare as I though though and after the discussion I feel better about how it came up in that game. Thanks again

I had a PC commit suicide once as an exit from a very doomed, very boring play by email game. We'd been going for months and accomplished less than a day's action in-game, and there was so much bickering OOC that I was kinda over it.

Quote from: Dana;635828I had a PC commit suicide once as an exit from a very doomed, very boring play by email game. We'd been going for months and accomplished less than a day's action in-game, and there was so much bickering OOC that I was kinda over it.

IME, that usually why PC suicide comes up: an escape hatch from a boring or bad game.

Quote from: Dana;635823Geek social fallacies, mostly. And he can be smarmily, creepily nice to people he doesn't see as a threat or whose influence he wants to use. Once he latches on to a gaming group, he can be difficult to dislodge. He's not in ours anymore because everyone finally realized what a psycho he was, but he's still busily making people miserable in other groups he hasn't been thrown out of yet.

I know a guy a bit like that - his forte is being creepy and inappropriate around women, from unwanted touching to inviting himself to sleep in people's front rooms without anyone in the house in question actually giving him permission to so (in our defence, we all assumed that one of the other housemates had given permission - he was quite good at playing people off against each other like that) to making disturbingly explicit sexual propositions to women when their boyfriends are standing right there next to them.

He LARPs in Belgium these days. The reason why he LARPs in Belgium has a lot to do with the fact that more or less every substantial LARP group in the UK has blackballed him over the years - he literally got ostracised by group after group progressively further and further away from his home town until it got to the point where he has to pop over the Channel to find groups who'll let him play with them. I suspect this pattern will continue - few people can play with him for long before wanting him gone.