A player character in one of my games committed suicide. Her player felt it was what her character would do. To be fair, the game is pretty bleak and the PC in question had taken allot of emotional hits over the last few weeks of game time.
This is the first time this had happened in a game I've gm'ed and I felt concerned. I talked to her privately and asked if she wasn't having a good time or was there some reason she wanted out of the game (which has usually been the case when its happened in others I was involved in). She explained that she was quite happy with the game, even had another PCs in mind but that suicide felt "right" for the PC in question and good end for her story.
Has this ever happened in a game you've run? And if so what was the story IC and OOC?
No but it happened in a game I played in. In fact, I was the player. It was an AD&D game set in the Kievan Rus during the period of Christianization. We sere all village folk. I was playing a blacksmith, and we ended up on a grand quest. My character felt called to become a paladin of the Old Gods - not that my character had any sign from the Gods at all, nor did I from my GM, it was entirely subjective - and ultimately was captured by the Christians. Rather than have them steal his soul for their foreign god, my character committed suicide, calling on the gods to take him as a willing sacrifice.
God, that sounds so lame! It made sense at the time, I swear!
It's crap like that that makes me a horrible, horrible player!
-clash
I wouldn't let it bother you. What it sounds like is you've created a world with enough depth that your players can immerse themselves into their characters and come to realizations like "my character would end her own life."
As a GM, I've had quite few character suicides in my campaigns. Some of them were of the "forlorn hope" variety - "I'll stay and die so the rest of you can escape" - which *feels* different even though it amounts to the same thing. But some were genuine suicides - about 1/3 of the party committed seppuku in my Oriental Adventures campaign, for example.
I know of someone who likes to drive other PCs to suicide. Brags about it, even.
Quote from: Dana;634971I know of someone who likes to drive other PCs to suicide. Brags about it, even.
I think the technical term for that is "dickwad".
-clash
Quote from: flyingmice;634973I think the technical term for that is "dickwad".
Make that "malevolent, sociopathic dickwad" and we're in 100% agreement. Just truly enjoys making people miserable and uncomfortable.
I was in a game where one of the players had their character kill themselves because they were infected with a plague and they didn't want to contribute to its spread. It was a pretty intense moment in game, and one of those moments that's supposed to make RPGs different from other games.
Quote from: Dana;634974Make that "malevolent, sociopathic dickwad" and we're in 100% agreement. Just truly enjoys making people miserable and uncomfortable.
I have no problem with that assessment. :D
-clash
I had one of my D&D PCs actually kill himself once, waaaay back in the day, when surrounded by dozens of ghouls and no hope of surviving. He did it so he wouldn't become undead.
Another D&D PC had been struck with slow-acting but deadly poison, and the nearest cleric with a neutralize poison spell was several days of travel away. So when a big ol' dragon showed up raining fire on the rest of the party, he, being the fighter, took it on as the others fled and literally went out in a blaze of glory. Less of a suicide and more of a deliberate sacrifice. This was a long-term character in a long-term campaign so it was a pretty awesome moment.
No other episodes that I remember, though.
I had a PC playing 2 characters, and it just worked out that they end up very much at cross purposes, and the one who was somewhat bad (Assassin type) got found out, and it was his other character, the Alchemist/druid that ran into him.
And they fought it out, because it made sense, though we all knew the Druid/alchemist was dead meat. Still one of the best examples of proper roleplay I have seen.
Oh, and the Assassin was the one who ended up being waxed. Craziness.
I have had characters die for what was a good reason to the character.
Such as when my character died in a small boat filled with barrels of explosive powder in desperate attempt to sink a warship invading my country.
I have never seen a character commit suicide from depression however.
I was playing a sheriff in a 30 Days of Night CoC adventure and he ate a shotgun when he learned his wife and kids were killed and the town was overrun. It was an awesome moment because all the survivors were gathered in the town hall and looking to my sheriff, the only guy with combat experience, for guidance...but instead, upon being told the news of his family...
That's the only suicide. Lots of heroic PC sacrifices over the years though.
Once playing nWoD mortals, the entire player group committed mass suicide with a bomb on the surface of the moon.
One of the players was convinced he had become a god, and no one tried to stop him arming the bomb.
Quote from: Bill;635133I have had characters die for what was a good reason to the character.
Such as when my character died in a small boat filled with barrels of explosive powder in desperate attempt to sink a warship invading my country.
I have never seen a character commit suicide from depression however.
Yeah, this.
I once had a favorite character of mine deliberately fall for an 'out-of-game revenge trap' because it would have been in his nature to do so.
Follow up on your friend. Don't be a creep about it, but maybe ask a mutual friend if they think everything is okay. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but when it isn't that shit can be pretty hard to live down.
Quote from: mcbobbo;635161Yeah, this.
I once had a favorite character of mine deliberately fall for an 'out-of-game revenge trap' because it would have been in his nature to do so.
Follow up on your friend. Don't be a creep about it, but maybe ask a mutual friend if they think everything is okay. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but when it isn't that shit can be pretty hard to live down.
I've had characters become suicidally depressed in game, mainly due to the DM deciding that it would make for a good plot complication to kill off major reasons for the character to live, but not actual suicide because of it. Plenty of heroic sacrifice, though.
I'd honestly want to dig a bit deeper in to what is going on with the Player in Real Life. It may be nothing, but it would be prudent to be sure.
That PC was a quitter. Would never have made it as an adventurer of worth anyhow. Good riddance. :p
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.
Quote from: Warthur;635896I 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.
Ugh, no wonder he got banned. I think what happens in some of these cases is the person who's creeped out thinks he or she is the only one, so it takes them a while to speak up. I know that's what happened to me. I was in a phase of my life where I was doubting my first impressions a lot and assuming I was just off-base about things.
Heh. Lesson learned. When someone says, "Jeeze, why is Dana so quick to write people off?" this would be the answer. Having that nutcase in our gaming group was a shitty experience for all of us, and if it takes me being the first to speak up and shoulder the blame for vamoosing someone abusive like that out of the group, so be it.
I actually *tried* to suicide my character in one of the last games I was in with this asshole, but the DM figured out what I was doing and prevented it. Turned out he was creeped out by the dude, too, so comparing notes was enough to get the guy gone.
Heh, I've had plenty of "potential self-sacrifice" moments, but generally none where one of my PC's decided to check out due to emotional issues.
There was a buddy's campaign, where halfway thru I decided to try everything I could think of to kill the character (I thought he was over-powered, compared to the group; so it was becoming "The Yojimbo and Friends" sessions, which I was uncomfortable with).
Damned if I couldn't kill the PC off for over 10 sessions. I pissed and antagonized everything I could think of off in those sessions, but he just kept coming up with lucky rolls.
The GM eventually created a six-armed super giant, when my roll came up a "1". The giant did like 6 times the damage necessary to kill me. The worst part, he made it necessary to defeat the giant to progress the story, and all the others fled when they saw my character become goo...
The above story is part of the reason I think BESM is severely over-rated, by a lot of folks.