How do you deal with player death? By this is mean not having

>>53690393

Let him take a break, roll up his new character, then introduce a convenient captive who is totally waiting for a chance to take revenge on his captors.

That's what I do, anyway.

I never do it unless they want to. In my own experience at least, it's always more interesting to have something happen instead of them dying, like they get captured or wind up someplace else.

Of course I don't like, plaster it across the wall and tell the players "You can't die." It's just a detail.

In our games each player usually has plenty of henchmen or outright more than one character at once, so when one dies - which is common - it's never a big deal and they can just keep going with the action like nothing had happened.

>>53690393
He gets to RP the NPC allies or pets, unless I need a NPC for a particular purpose. He can also play monsters, some players are really fucking good at that.

I also have plans to introduce some magic lamp that let the PCs talk to their dead friends until their spirit moves on (read: session ends). That way the player can still participate in conversation and get a bit of closure for his character.

You're meant to talk about this with the players before you start the campaign

>this will be a lethal campaign, have spare characters ready
or
>characters won't die unless you kill them yourselves
It's usually pretty obvious when a player is building up to a grand finale.

>>53690458

This.

Plus, death is kind of an easy way out. It lets you avoid dealing with the consequences of failure, instead you just get a fresh start. As long as you have players on the same wavelength, it's a lot more fun in my experience to put things they care about at risk.

Although 'at risk' does not mean 'The GM cheap kills all their family for drama'. That's a wasteful expenditure of resources that you could use for so many future plot hooks, burned in an instant to build up a villain who probably won't last long anyway.

Things your players care about and are invested in are valuable. Threaten them, put them in danger, play with them, and if things do get really bad eliminate them, but not without a lot of thought. You don't want to end up creating yet another murderhobo who doesn't care about anything because it'll all inevitably die or be destroyed.

>>53690393
I usually kick them out of the game.

Their character's dead, they don't exist anymore.

>>53690393
hand him off npc or monster roles to play, gming is always more fun with a helper.

If he's not into it then he can sit the rest of the game out or go home. I'm pretty casual about killing characters and shuffling in new ones, but I feel like if you get your guy killed you have to take a timeout on being the hero, at least until the end of the current adventure.

>>53690393
Generally players in my campaigns don't die unless they do something stupid, like rushing 4 mindflayers solo instead of staying behind cover and retreating to a bottleneck. If you die when I'm GMing, you either did something stupid to deserve it, or just tried something obviously risky knowing full well that it could kill you. Or the dice just straight fucking hate you, but there's so many safeguards against that in our system of choice that you can fucking deal.

>>53690393
Well, my games are normally pretty lethal, so when someone dies, the players begin the normal "bugging out" process, where they abort the mission as quickly as humanely possible. Normally this means the player isn't left waiting too long, and can hop onto one of their back up characters they picked up on the way.

If that's not an option, I let the dead player control one of the NPC's, it usually makes the fights easier (though not because they're not trying, let me tell you), but its fun

>How do you deal with player death?
Man that sucks, I guess we would go through typical grieving stages and prob retire their character.

>>53690573
What if dying gives you a weaker character?

>>53691109

I hate uneven XP as a thing, so I avoid anything that would create a disparity like that like the plague.

>>53691151
It's cool in games where even successful characters will weaken and retire at some point, so you have a built in expectation of parties with characters at different stages of development as the campaign progresses.

Granted in a traditional climb-to-level-20 D&D campaign experience disparity is the worst.

>>53690393
>How do you deal with player death?
Funerals.

My players used to have at least 2 extra characters in case of death. Usually introduced earlier. Thing is, due to lour games being quite lethal we had a death every third session or so. People started to treat all of their characters as throwaways. We solved that problem by decreasing lethality and introducing crippling wounds, metal or physical, to situations that would normally kill them. They are way more cautious now and we don't have to introduce side characters all the time.

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>>53690427
In a Cyberpunk 2020 game we had a guy who would insist on making an identical character to his previous one with different stats and tweaks. Mr. Shark was a Cyber Psycho with 4 arms who quad wielded RPGs. He was always shot first because he was always carrying 4 RPGs. He always died because he spent all his money on Cyberware and RPGs. Another Mr. Shark always replaced him.

His legend was so great that I made Mr. Shark bots. Humanoid WADS that had four arms and quadwielded various weapons. I use them as a Gimmick squad to teach new players how even Metal Gear can be cracked with enough bullets, and later to just quad wield RPGs and be targets that you must kill on your first turn, or get RPG'd.

Opposite end of the spectrum, Mr. Cockroach(Other PC from the Same Game) was so lucky and resilient to being killed that a cult was started in his honor that PCs can get into after surviving things that should have killed them. Once an entire party of PCs was inducted into the cult(at separate times for separate incidents)

>Tusk kicked the Chief of Police in the nuts, got shot in the head three times by an Arno, escaped from C-Swat, evaded a city wide manhunt, and smuggled himself into the Combat Zone by stuffing himself inside a lead lined body bag and rolling into a Biotechnica Toxic Waste dump AV

>Knight was jumped and disarmed by a melee specialist, he developed Claymore-fu(the art of using anti-personnel mines in melee) on the spot to defeat said specialist and was shot in the face by a Panzerschreck for his efforts.

>Overkill was bombed in a swamp by the Louisiana National Guard, had a Hospital dropped on him, and was hit in the head with a runaway acetylene tank, the trauma of which causing him to develop a second personality that talked and acted like Urkel from Family Matters

>>53690393
But yeah OP, when a character dies and they're not coming back, just have them make a new character and think of a way you can introduce them fluidly.