First Kill as the DM

[Rakmakallan]

Zero kills in a decade or so of GMing. I believe that for consensus reasons (as in freeform), character death should be decided by the players themselves, if and when they feel it would benefit the story, the group or themselves. Then the death is incorporated in the story in some way so as to serve its purpose. So far no one has ever wished their character dead, so I roll with that.

[havocfett]

My first kill, as a DM, was entirely accidental.

I'd designed a puzzle wherein the sword that was the prize for the puzzle (Meant for the parties warforged fighter) was very clearly labelled, via hieroglyphics, 'hilt kills organics on touch'. The pedestal it was on had these hieroglyphics. The floor and wall had them. It was, in fact, told to them by an NPC due to some successful social roleplaying.

Naturally, the human wizard decides to grab it, and rages for about three minutes when they die.

[lerg2]

Oh, nothing gives you a better feeling than a critical hit on a PC. After the party was blindsided by an unforeseen betrayal, they chased him down and proceeded to get pummeled. The 2 dead players are to return as mini-boss 1 and 2, leading up to the Traitor as the BBEG. I see more death in the future.

[DontEatRawHagis]

Had my first kill outside of Paranoia a long time ago now. An as of yet(probably forever) nameless NPC sniped a character that he had a vendette against. He was the only Elf in a forest full of Halfling Mercenaries. Which was an interesting fight in an of itself. They were all level one so I didn't want them to have to reroll new guys just yet.

The player was already to tear up his character sheet when I pulled out a table from my bag. I knew I was going to kill someone eventually so I made a random Death Table in my bag. Mostly it was just a bunch of different events that made characters come back to life. His ended up being that The Grim Reaper would return him if he could bring back someone who was defying him, by staying alive past his time.

[Erik Vale]

My first kill was an accident (players fault, I tried to allow him to save himself, he's lucky that character isn't statuerary) on my first session.

The dumby deccided to jump over a small horde of p**s weak demons to attack the Devil Priestess who I told was immensly powerful, while they where all were busy.
The Devil Preistess got nocked out, but not killed (Heroes rules, shes insanely toughagainst non-silver/non-magic). He proceded to have 25 demons known to actually be transformed (Temporary, easy to undo) townsfolk, grab and slam him against the floor. Cue uncociousness as the rest of the demon horde chases away the party.

He was dumb, but he set up a lucky stalemate and the wizard was able to untransform a good majority of them.

[Cealocanth]

I admit it, my first kill was at the very least partially my fault. The players were being introduced to the true threat coming from the black dragon they ticked off, so I decided to throw together an encounter that the DM's guide said would be challenging, but not impossible. The town was being attacked from two sides, from within the walls of the town in the form of a horde of various kinds of minion undead spewing from a portal, and from the sea in the form of a pirate ship filled with trained attack dogs. Each combat was constructed of minions and possibly one standard monster, and they would only end when the source of the attack was destroyed, i.e. the ship or the portal.

Sure enough, they finish the zombies and fight the pirates, but in the midst of it all, our tank/healer is mauled to death by minion attack dogs and their feral beastmaster. The party only barely survived when the thief figured out to use the oil soaked ropes on the dock and his arrows in order to attach a fuse to the ship, which only needed to have some explosives provided set on it, and blown up.

Long story short, as DMs, we always make mistakes. Sometimes it's entirely your fault, and sometimes the players do it themselves. Don't beat yourself up over it. I didn't, and my players didn't. The player who played the tank/healer is now having a blast with his new Warden. Deaths happen, they're part of the game.

[Gnomish Wanderer]

-Goblin Story-

Brilliant.

I've only ever tried to kill PC's for bad decisions, and never in any D&D campaign because no player has given me a reason to. I have in some one-shots but the players knew what they were getting into. As for my first...

The players were on orders to arrive at a place about 10 minutes before they received the orders to be there. Friend Computer warned of serious consequences if they were late, so the players booked it. They took a private transport shuttle and decided to hack it to make it faster. Sadly none of them really had rolled the ability to do anything like that. *facepalm*

So they start fumbling around with the wiring and the car starts getting faster and faster. They're kinda freaking out, but by the time they think to jump out it's going at like 80mph and they decide against it. So they fiddle with the wiring some more and they learn the steering controls were disengaged, complete with the steering wheel breaking free of the console. This causes the vehicle to lurch through a group of infrared citizens, staining the windows so they burst that out.

They're freaking out at this point, and rightly so. So of course they mess with the console again and manage to get control over the brakes at last! So their brilliant decision is to slam the brakes.

Yeah, I'm guessing they just weren't thinking about momentum, or seatbelts, or that they had burst out the safety window, or really anything. They were tossed pretty far, all of them but one died and that one took some heavy wounds. I think a snapped leg and arm as well as a concussion. It was great.


Probably my favorite part of that game was the 'healing' gun that player ended up getting. The gun contained a healing dart, a cancer dart, a mutation dart, a stasis dart, and then a euthanasia dart. Pretty much in that order. It kinda went against my normal 'don't punish them for arbitrary decisions' thing, but the way it ended up working out was brilliant.

The players were running from a chain of explosions they had caused, avoiding various traps and obstacles that they had ended up setting up At various points they were given decisions between different options, trying to use clues that had been set up earlier to figure out which was the right choice. The other choices led to gaining some damage.

By the end of the chain, two players were alive on a platform when one broke her legs and went down. The other was standing on the platform getting into the vehicle right before the last explosion goes off, knows he has enough time to save her, and goes 'Nope.' He closes the doors and leaves her to die.

And then, badly wounded, the only survivor of the mission, he decided to use the last charge of the 'healing' gun on himself.

[Friv]

Maybe I'm too nice but I would have just had the dragon laugh, pet the warlock on the head and then carry on as if nothing had been said.

I would probably have gone with,
Dragon: (casts Suggestion): "I am much larger than you, and stronger. I suggest that you kneel in my presence."

And then the warlock is forced to kneel for the rest of the conversation. If he tries to press the issue via violence, he pretty much gets what he deserves. And if the player is still seething, point out that now he has something to work towards - becoming powerful enough to spite that dragon.

Anyway, on-topic.

My early games didn't really kill players if they weren't working with me on the subject. I entered the hobby through White Wolf, and my group was big on long, elaborate stories tying everyone together, so fights where death was a possibility were rare. More commonly, people lost friends, family, possessions and homes, and generally had to deal with that. The first character I actually killed, the player had worked quietly with me about creating a scene where she could have a heroic sacrifice; she was tired of the character and thought it would be a suitable end to her story.

When I moved into Exalted and D&D, death tolls popped up a bit more often. One player lost a ranger after trying to throw various explosive scenery into a fire to cause a distraction. A Solar Exalt died after deliberately picking a fight with an ally of the party, confident that they would back him over the enemy (they did not). But it's still been pretty rare for me. A few months back, we came within a single die roll of losing a character - he actually took enough damage to die, but one of the other players could force a reroll on someone else's damage roll once per session, which luckily rolled the damage down to "almost dead".

And in about two weeks I expect most of my players' PCs to murder one another in a quest for ultimate power.

[GideonRiddle]

My first player death was when the party was in a huge library and the area they stopped in was filled with many stacks of books. The description was that when they looked up they saw no ceiling as if the stacks went up forever. The monk promptly climbed one ten feet and "knocked the books off of three stacks so she could sleep on them." The result was that the party took an uncountable number of books to the face. We stopped for an hour before we gave up and said it was non-lethal damage. Had I not we would have had to wait for ten people to make level 6 characters.

[The_Jackal]

I've always maintained a 'never fudge' policy. IMO, fudging rolls takes the 'game' out of roleplaying game, and you're just indulging an amateur theatre. If your players are in danger, sometimes bad luck will kill them, and if they're never in danger, they will get bored FAST.

I vividly remember my first GM kill. I was running Champions, and my scenario was a bunch of paramilitary agents who had taken a bunch of hostages, which the Heroes were meant to foil. One of my players, a flying energy projector, decided to try and negotiate with them, declaring that he was dropping his defenses and going to DCV zero. For you non-Hero players, that means he's totally defensless. The negotiations did not go well, the terrorist leader drew a bead on his face and held the trigger of his M-14 down. 5 rounds of 7.62x51mm later, the headless corpse of our hero fell to the floor.

[ORione]

Mine was rather unpleasant, mainly because the character's player was absent.

The party's fighter's player couldn't come to one session, so another player took over. Under that player's influence, the fighter killed a cat. What he didn't realize was that the cat was a sorcerer's familiar. I decided that this made the sorcerer mad, and he fired spells at the fighter faster than the party's cleric could heal him.

The fighter's player was less than pleased when he found out.

[Knaight]

I've always maintained a 'never fudge' policy. IMO, fudging rolls takes the 'game' out of roleplaying game, and you're just indulging an amateur theatre. If your players are in danger, sometimes bad luck will kill them, and if they're never in danger, they will get bored FAST.

That depends on the game - in particular, there is a lot more room for in danger but not with a risk of dying in some games than others. If all the players value in the game is the life of their characters, then the two are identical, but if there are other things of importance that can be lost, or things that they are building that can be prevented failure still has an edge to it. Plus, whether or not fudging rolls is necessary at all to prevent character death is hugely system dependent.

[Ulysses WkAmil]

Dragonborn Warlord is forgotten by his party after he fell unconscious and hey left him with the powder-laced coke-like drug. Players burnt down the warehouse, only realizing their mistake after my extra-fun explosion flavor text.

[Doorhandle]

First Blood. Niiiiiice.

Let's seeeee. My first PC kill (I like how we are referring to it as a "kill") was a Warlock. See, during this campaign the PC's would get their quests (mostly harmless and benign in nature) from an NPC Blue Dragon who I told them was a.) Colossal and b.) had PC class levels. The idea of course being that no level 3 party (no matter how freaking good) would challenge a Colossal Dragon (especially because most of his quests involved stabilizing the surrounding country side. Too many bandits and chaotic evil sorts wrecking the stability of things).

The warlock, however, was Chaotic Stupid, and told the Dragon that he (the warlock) was the 'Prince of Darkness, and as such, you should bow to me.' The Dragon's reply? Om nom nom.

So technically it was the PC's fault, yes. But I still made the decision.

Funny story, but you must remember/learn rule one of player belligerence: they are afraid of nothing. NOTHING.

[Gravitron5000]

On the old Gunsmoke TV show, Marshal Dillon once said, "I don't hang people. The law does."

Similarly, I don't kill people; the game does.

I avoid DMs who enjoy killing people as much as I avoid DMs that will warp the game to prevent it. The DM's job is to rule honestly and fairly.

... and to provide the PCs enough rope to hang themselves.

... or tie up their adversaries, or construct a rope bridge, or to hatch a plot to corner the market on rope, or ...

[TheWombatOfDoom]

I've had many kills over the years. However, there are those times you don't expect a player to die. Somewhere around my first was when I was still new to some of the creatures in the MM. I had a group of higher level players go through a marsh with Ghosts. 2 players ended up getting possessed by some of the ghosts, and the party decided to kill the characters to stop them from attacking. T-T That was almost half the party, and one of the players got pretty demoralized by it. Luckily later they were able to resurect him, and the other one took the opportunity to make a new character. But it just goes to show - encounters never go as planned. If you expect it to be a tough encounter, players might talk their way out of it, run, or plow through. Another easy fight could end in the death of everyone. Example - 5 Level 5's against Vargouilles. 1 Round, all of them failed their saves and got infected. Best part? When they died and came back as Vargouilles, we decided to go Savage Species with the group, and they continued playing that for a few sessions. I CERTAINLY was not counting on that one.

[some guy]

My first kill ever was when the halfling rogue player tried to apply guerilla-tactics on an enlarged gnoll fighter/barbarian with her pack of gnolls and hyena's. My second kill was when the druid tried to save that rogue. The rest of the group retrieved their bodies 3-4 rounds later.

In my current campaign my first kills happened when the group walked merrily along with the ogre shepherd. They couldn't understand his language and only when they saw he wanted to put them in a cage they started to rebel. This was after I told them ogres were maneaters and capable of killing people with one blow. They were level 1, they could've ignored the ogre, they could've ran away, they could've taken him on with ranged weapons. Only 2 of them died.

[Dread Angel]

I've been doing this for a while, and I've killed a great many PCs over the years. My homebrew games are tough, really tough, but rewarding. I've no compunction about having the enemies go all-out against the PCs because they too are fighting for their lives.

I don't recall my first kill. But a pretty decent recent one was in CotCT, I scored a max damage critical hit with a spear through the fighter's chest. That was the first death in that campaign and it kinda shocked the players into not rushing in.

I do give my players a freebie though. Everyone gets one character death. As in, one DM-fiat-resurrection without penalties. Precisely because I start my games at 1st level, and I'm not stingy about having them fight stuff that's quite able to drop them rapidly if they're not smart about it.

For my upcoming game, my girlfriend has rolled up an archery ranger...she rolled high for starting gold and purchased herself a decent composite bow with strength bonus, and didn't buy any armor at all (!) so her AC isn't high as it should be. She'll be relying heavily on the others to keep her alive until she finds some armor or can afford some. Should be fun.

Another rather amusing tale...while not quite character death, they came within inches of their lives. In the same campaign, the party was fighting some rather interesting creatures. Plant-type demi-genies who could fly, had reach, and liked their Large scimitars very much. The party was having issues, as there weren't many ways for them to get up within reach of hitting the things, and the fighter was having serious issues with his crossbow. The rogue/swashbuckler/oracle/whatever managed to get high enough to grab onto one of them, and dealt some decent damage...but while he was hacking away, the thing floated off the edge of the cliff. And tossed him off. He made a spectacular effort to reach the cliff, but missed, and fell....took a decent amount of falling damage, into water, but the real trouble for him came when the monster in the water went "mmmm lunch", the creature itself a couple CR above the party's average level...and he was alone and heavily wounded and encumbered. He BARELY managed to escape with 2 hit points, meanwhile the fighter had been knocked out, the gnome had gone invisible and hidden, the bard was running away. They actually managed to come back from that and beat the things, amazingly, with the cleric managing to find them in time and healing them all. It was a damn good battle. There's nothing cooler than a gnome riding an unconscious fighter across a Greased floor flinging magic missiles.

[Velaryon]

The first PC kill I can remember that was neither a scripted story event, nor the result of the party policing the Chaotic Stupid members, happened early in my current D&D campaign.

The party had just made it back to town after completing a difficult quest. I forget the exact details at the moment, but they're all down some HP, the casters are low on spells, and most of their "per day" abilities are all used up. They find an inn and settle in to rest... except for the party druid.

Looking for something else to do, the druid heads over to the guild house from whom the party has been taking all their quests and asks to see what they have available. I list off the quests they have at the moment (all of which I had in mind for the full party), and he chooses one - a local tavern called the Verdant Spiral was burned to the ground recently and the owner wants someone to track down the culprit and either bring him to justice or at least make him pay for the rebuilding.

The druid makes some inquiries around town, talking to witnesses and finding out who was in the Verdant Spiral the night it burned down. After a chain of inquiries, he learns that the perpetrator was a half-orc barbarian type whom all evidence suggests has left the city and headed for the forest to the north.

At this point it's been several in-game hours, and the rest of the party has completed their resupply shopping and gone to sleep. The druid at this point has roughly a third of his max HP, only a few low-level spells remaining, and no wild shape uses left. About the only thing he has going for him is that his gorilla companion is in pretty good shape. The natural thing to do is head back to the inn, get some rest, and fill in the part on what he's learned the following morning so they can track down the half-orc.

But of course, that's not what he does. The druid instead buys a wagon for himself and his gorilla, and sets off immediately on the trail of the half-orc. He ignores the obvious DM warnings ("Are you SURE?" and so on), and hits the road, as the other players all start to facepalm. At this point my conscience is clear, so I roll for a random encounter an hour or two out of town. The druid gets attacked by a pack of hungry krenshars (those monsters someone mentioned earlier who can peel the skin back from their faces).

Needless to say, they made short work of the druid, although his gorilla companion did survive.

[Exediron]

I couldn't tell you, I've killed... several hundred PCs by now.

Ah, a DM after my own heart - I was wondering if anyone in these parts could compare to my kill record.

I have killed quite literally over a thousand PCs during my career as a DM, and I think pretty darn near to a full thousand going through our most recent dungeon. Of course, there are some factors which make my situation different from that of a normal DM.

Now, back on topic: My first kill as a DM. Ah, but that was a sordid event...

The year was 1998. The party, 10th to 12th level second edition AD&D characters. The group was trapped on a horrid imitation of a 'Lost World' setting - a lone island rising high from the sea, populated by many completely unexplained dinosaurs. After passing through a grove of hideously poisonous plants which looked exactly like harmless mistletoe, the characters found their way to an old and abandoned appearing structure.

As the paladin cautiously approached the building, sword drawn, the party watched from the cover of the jungle. Suddenly, without warning, the foot of a colossal Tyrannosaurus Rex came down from the sky like the hammer of an angry god, smashing the poor paladin flat in an instant. None had seen or heard the enormous brute approach, and they were taken completely by surprise.

... I did warn that it was a sordid tale. I was young, and it was my first campaign ever - pretty close to my first session ever, in fact. Over the years I acquired the nickname 'Dark Angel of Character Death' for my habit of killing PCs by the dozen. Nowadays, I still kill massive numbers of PCs, but I have much better reasons for it, and I do it in a much more dramatically appropriate fashion.

I believe that the characters exist in a world, and that this world operates independently of the characters. The people in it exist - they have power, they scheme, they work their designs. The characters choose how they move through this world, but it is entirely possible for them to find themselves in a situation they cannot win. I won't force it on them, but it needn't have been their conscious decision, either.

Furthermore, I believe that a certain feeling of challenge is important to a game, and that it must not be a false feeling. False challenge is when encounters seem dangerous, the PCs seem at the very edge of death, but it will never actually happen. It has to actually be possible for the PCs to die, and to prove that it's possible, some - many, even - of them must die. Players in my campaigns know that their actions carry true risk, and that they must do more than simply not make any bone-headed mistakes to live. If circumstances mean the character would die, they die. I've lost characters I liked and everyone else liked to this rule, but that's the price.

The players in the games I'm involved in all run multiple characters, anywhere from a few to a lot, and I have my own as well. If I'm just looking for a sacrifice to build tension or establish credibility for a villain, I go for one of my own. That's the price of being the DM's character, naturally.

As to the question of rather a world which exists on its own, a 'sandbox' as such, can maintain a strong and consistent story: Yes. My PCs have been following the same story for 8 years, and it's very near to its world-shattering culmination now. They can go wherever they want and do whatever they want; my campaign plans just consist of what is going on, how its happening and who is doing it. More specific plans are drawn up as I find out how the characters plan to deal with it, if it isn't what I expected. Usually, they do what I expect - I know this group very well.

But they choose to do what I expect because what I expect is what makes sense, not because I force them to. I've been wrong several times, and I've drawn up a plan for where they go instead and what's happening there. They still follow the main plot because it's important to the characters and it's something they want to work to stop - if they wanted to, they could go off and raid random dungeons until the Elder Gods remake the multiverse in their own image and end time and conventional reality forever. Actually, that became something of a problem for them recently, as they spent way too much time raiding a dungeon which contained information they needed instead of just going through it as quickly as possible.

Post-Preview EDIT: @Velaryon: Heh; you had me at the idea of a critically injured man riding down the high road in a wagon with a gorilla. I love that mental image, and the fact that it ended in a sick way only makes it more brilliant.

[MachineWraith]

Interestingly enough, most of the PC deaths in my campaigns have been at the hands of other PCs. I've actually had a TPK because of party infighting. Granted, I provided the scenario that caused the argument which ended in lead flying, but I didn't pull the trigger.

That said, I like my encounters to be difficult but manageable with proper planning and tactics, and I don't fudge. Thus, if the players don't approach a situation intelligently, it's entirely possible they'll die.

My first PC kill was actually in a home-brewed zombie apocalypse campaign adapted from D20 Modern. The game had the standard slow, stupid hordes, but also had some special infected, ala Left 4 Dead. I had a player who insisted on being exclusively a melee combat character, despite many party urgings to the contrary. This same player worked with me on a backstory in which his older brother had been bitten while defending him, and told the PC to run while he held them off as long as possible.

Naturally I had to use that somehow, so the brother wound up being a slightly more powerful version of the Hunter-type special infected (pounce, claws, speedy, and able to track by scent). After already being wounded from an earlier combat, he decided to try to take the thing on, solo, with a sword.

My description of the result was, "He's playing with your guts like a two-year-old plays with spaghetti."

[Randomguy]

My first kill, as a DM, was entirely accidental.

I'd designed a puzzle wherein the sword that was the prize for the puzzle (Meant for the parties warforged fighter) was very clearly labelled, via hieroglyphics, 'hilt kills organics on touch'. The pedestal it was on had these hieroglyphics. The floor and wall had them. It was, in fact, told to them by an NPC due to some successful social roleplaying.

Naturally, the human wizard decides to grab it, and rages for about three minutes when they die.

You mean he didn't grab the blade and use the hilt to bludgeon his enemies to death?

[Tathum]

I've only ever killed one player in my years of being a DM...

One of my player's GF (eventually his wife), wanted to join us in a run through ToEE and she took over control of one of the Orc Prisoner's that the group had freed. She became a devout follower of the Paladin leader of the group who took it upon himself to make sure she left her wicked ways behind and join the forces of the light...

Can't remember why I killed her (I generally like to keep things close, but still sway in the PC's direction to keep things fun), but I do know that the group traveled to the City of Greyhawk, found a High Priest that was swayed by the anguished pleas of the group to bring an Orc back to life, and paid for the Resurrect Spell.

Now, I did have a player that I killed recently out of spite, much to the delight of the rest of the group. He was drunk, being a complete moron; having brought the game to a halt twice that for 30+ minutes each time by complaining.

The first time was during a battle where he wanted to drop his spear, pull out his crossbow, load it and fire it all in the same round. When we told him that he could draw the crossbow off his back, but not be capable of loading it until next round, he began to stand up, pace about, and say that we were out to get him, cheating, and disappointing him on a personal level. This was while all of his were trying to explain to him that he could just walk up and stab that sleeping mob he wanted to hit with his spear, and then get a free AoO while it got up (most likely killing it), but he demanded that he just get to do what he originally wanted to do. Finally just told him he lost his turn and moved on.

Later that session, when the group got to town (level 2 and close to 3), sleeping for the night and striking out to the next area to explore and surely get a good 50+ gold apiece and items in the morning, he refused to pay the 2 gold to the innkeeper for a room because he was down to his last 10 gold. There was complaints that I was bleeding him dry, everything was overpriced, the game was unfair. Everyone else was stunned, saying they were about to hit a small payday, there was supposed to be a daily gold drain.

Eventually they came up with the idea that he could bluff the innkeeper to accept a 3gp gem to pay for a 10gp charge to have the room for a full week. I thought it was a good idea and gave him a 20 DC on his check (with a +9 Bluff Skill roll modifier, this gave him a 50/50 shot to get a guy who didn't really deal in gems get excited enough about a a cheap looking stone to give up one of his best rooms). Everyone else thought it was a great idea and a fair chance, he still took about 5 minutes before he even agreed to try and roll.

He failed.

After that he proclaimed he would cheat the system and just sleep outside of town. I told him that if he slept near the town limit, the guard would arrest him for loitering. He said he would just sleep further out. I told him that as a Sorcerer and a min/max'er that refused to put skill points in anything but stuff that he felt his character needed to deal damage and avoid being hit in combat, he had a zero survival score and no outdoor knowledge, he would most likely get killed by bandits or wandering goblins if he left on his own just to save a few gold. He sneered, said I wouldn't kill his character, that I was just bluffing.

The rest of the group breathed a sigh of relief and thanked me after the night was done when I took his character sheet and told him he was dead; middle of the night, in his sleep, bloody mess ... THE END!

[BootStrapTommy]

Never had to kill my players. They do it themselves.

This.

I've never "killed" a PC, because I'm not a ****. I've dealt damage to them for meta-gaming or forced them to lay the bed they made, but I've never killed them. Much to my annoyance they always claim I'm out to get them because of this. They've even rage quit before. But *I* don't kill them. Their poor decision making does.

[Remmirath]

Ah, these are some great stories. I wish I could remember for sure what my first kill as a DM was, but I can't. It may have been one of these two:

My first MERP campaign, neither I nor any of the rest of us in the game had realised that OB was not supposed to be applied to criticals. We also thought that there was no initiative and everyone just went at the same time. It was fairly screwed up all 'round. This entire story was not one of my finest moments. I was, in my defense, quite a bit younger. Anyhow, the characters were at a funeral for one of their own (a hobbit scout of mine who had been killed previously in Exediron's campaign); and for some reason that I no longer recall, a large and evil man had been hiding in the casket and jumped out, attacking one of his characters - a dwarven warrior who was standing nearby - after taking a casual swipe at the elven bard nearby, breaking his arm. They both swung, both dealing E criticals, and because we were mistakenly adding the OB on in criticals and also doing things simultaneously, both the dwarven PC and the human NPC died instantly due to crushed hearts.

The second possibility was a one-shot AD&D game I ran, which may or may not have been before the previously told of MERP campaign. I had several thieves break into the inn they were staying at with a plan to knife everybody and take their money. Only one of the PCs actually even woke up, ineffectively cast Colour Spray, and was straightaway stabbed in the back. The thieves made off with all of their money. That was certainly my first total party kill...

I don't actually believe it was either of those - there's a good chance it occured in my first AD&D campaign, which I can't recall - but those were both quite early, at least.

Also, I agree with most everything Exediron said concerning character death in general. I was going to write out my view on it, but he already said it more eloquently than I would have.

[Phoenixguard09]

Alright then, this was with a Warhammer Fantasy Homebrew system.

I had a player who was one of those "friends," you know, the kind that you only tolerate because he's been around so long that getting rid of him would lead to all sorts of awkward questions.

Anyway, he was walking down the streets of Marienburg after being busted out of imprisonment. Without having to pay a penny I might add. I did have a justification but this was quite a long time ago.

Anyway, he wants to break into someone's house to steal some food (looks like prison did him a world of good) and perhaps some money so he can find an inn to stay the night. I might add that this is his plan for the afternoon as, in game, it's about 3pm.

His attempts to break in are met by the angry yelling of an elderly woman on the other side of the door, who threatens that she has a handgun.

As the GM, I'd already decided that she was bluffing but I wanted him to get on with the quest rather than end up getting captured again. Anyway, he knocks on the door an offers his services as a prostitute.

I promptly decide to shoot him through the door.

I have killed maybe four other characters as the DM, two of which were played by this same guy. All of the kills bar one were due to pissing me off with stupidity. The last kill was really unfortunate and I am sorry for it.

[Erik Vale]

I think you dropped a not there, but still... Granny says:

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(Spoiled just in case)

[Amazo]

I insist that my first kill wasn't my vault. In 4e, I had a player with a kalashtar warlock with 20 Charisma, 10 Dexterity, and 10 Intelligence. The player insisted on playing a character with as much Charisma as possible and always felt the need to walk in front of the party in case something needed to be talked at. He didn't last 2 fights. Both of which were against mobs of minions. With me fudging rolls like crazy. The running gag after he died was that the beastmaster ranger's hawk would become the party's point man in his stead since the hawk had significantly better AC than him

[Yukitsu]

First kill as a DM, I was running a horror themed campaign. Players were stumbling along modestly, but were trying to get the hell away from the place instead of fix anything. They kept going about it in really bad ways (build raft with rope and limbs to cross ocean... Of acid...) but really wanted to leave. Eventually, one character capped himself in the head rather than keep going. I took that as a general sign that the horror part was at about the right level.

[Drako_shorty]

My brother DM's for me and we have a lot of fun, and he made a game where I made three separate characters. The first was chopped in half by a party member who started going insane, the second was first killed by an evil clone of himself, then reincarnated as a Minotaur/Mindflayer crossbreed, and he was killed by the demidragon, which then resulted in me making a halfling bard. The point being, he killed my characters plenty of times, but he never did it on purpose, it was all just rolls, and I loved it, cause everyone role-played emotions at my deaths, even with the reincarnations.

Also, my friend made a guy who was killed, reincarnated, and then like ten minutes later, beheaded from a crit kill.