On Killing A Player Character

I had to kill a PC last night.  It’s the first time I’ve ever killed a PC.
I’m still a little upset about that.
Now, when I say “I had to kill a PC,” that’s a ludicrous statement: I’m the GM, the guy who runs the game.  I control reality.  I could have turned the villain into a cloud of balloons, or had Superman fly in from above to save them, or given the merciless Borglike creature attacking poor Gigi a change of heart.
Yet all of those alternatives would have radically changed the nature of the world I’d created.  In a game, you try to set up a realistic set of expectations, and ensure that those expectations are met.  In some games, that expectation is, “You will never die, because you are a hero,” and to that end almost any bending of the rules is okay.  In other games, that expectation is “Death comes easily to anyone, often for trivial reasons,” and in games like that you would feel cheated if someone did fudge a die roll to save you.
My game – like most games, I think – has the implicit expectation of “I’ll try not to kill you, since you’re the hero, but if you make a lot of bad tactical moves, then death is an option.”  And a lot of bad tactical moves were made.
Thing is, I tried to stop her.  When poor Gigi abandoned her fellow PCs, hell-bent on tracking down a wussy enemy of hers in a dark warren called The Murder Holes, she snuck off alone without telling anyone.  She encountered a hidden nest of spiders, whose razor-sharp webs did damage to her, which was my attempt to say “Hey, you’re injured, go back to your healer and group up” – the player interpreted that as “These warrens are dangerous with webs and traps, I shouldn’t backtrack.”  I used an echo to show that her enemy was mutating into a monster that shot energy bolts from his fingers, energy bolts that incinerated a whole nest of spiders – but the information that Joe McWuss here may be transforming into an actual threat was dismissed.  I made it clear by cutting to a scene with the other PCs that they were at least fifteen to twenty minutes away from helping her, and that got overlooked.
The overwhelming display of power I had the now-mutated boss monster – who had been designed to face down three PCs and their sidekick and fight them to a standstill – merely convinced Gigi’s player that retreat was useless, put her back against the wall.  When I had the boss monster say, “You’re getting tired, I can sense it,” that was me, trying to tell Gigi’s player You are running low on hit points, GTFO – but it was taken as taunting, the kind of thing every paper monster says to make victory all the sweeter.  
When Gigi took the fatal hit, I put the game on hold and walked in the yard for a while.  How could I save Gigi?  I eventually said, “Okay, instead of killing her, the monster will infect her and the other PCs can save her.”  And due to more subtle miscommunications, the players approached this Big Boss as “We can kill this monster!” instead of “We need to rescue Gigi and get out!” and by the time they finally decided it was time to flee, they consciously and purposely left Gigi behind.
Now, I could have reduced the threat of the boss monster (who’s intended to be the main nemesis of much of the campaign), or magically transported the other PCs fifteen minutes ahead in time so they charged into battle just as Gigi was about to fall, or any number of other subtle changes.  I didn’t.  And when the players left her for dead, I couldn’t think of a way to save her that didn’t involve things I found to be unbelievable stretches of the imagination.
So I looked Gigi’s player dead in the face and said what all GMs essentially say whenever they kill a PC:
“Your character’s life is not as important as my game’s reality.” 
That’s a tough goddamned call.
And yet, for me, that kind of call is necessary.  I don’t want to play in a game where my success is a given – hell, isn’t that obvious from my love of Magic, programming, and writing, three skills where you learn by slamming your face into failure?  I want a game where if I screw up, significant losses can accrue, where every battle has a chance of going really badly if you don’t plan carefully. Where death is not a given, but always a potential concern.
If I had chosen to save Gigi, I feel – and every GM has to make their own call on this – that I would have irreparably damaged the contract I quietly hold with the players: namely, that actions have consequences, and when actions are not wise, not all of those consequences will be pleasant ones.  I would have saved one game session at the cost of future ones, bending the game towards a style of play I dislike.  (And though I am in charge of trying to provide a fun adventure for my players, as the GM, I am not their bitch.  My enjoyment has to count for something, too.)
Gigi’s player was irritated, which is understandable.  Nobody wants to lose someone they’re attached to.  Yet I remember when we were playing Delta Green a few weeks ago, when Gigi’s player, frustrated by me constantly asking, “Uh, are you sure that’s a good idea?” finally exploded and told me, “Look, just let us make the stupid moves and let us deal with the consequences!”
Well, this time, I let them make the stupid moves and doled out consequences.  Yet that didn’t go over well, either.
That’s not necessarily hypocritical.  People go to games for escapism.  Being in a game that’s frustrating or involves losing is not fun.  Discovering that the GM does not share your opinion on the effectiveness of your tactics is not fun.  Spending your entire game getting killed is not fun.
And tonight, I ran a very not fun game, and as I said, I’m still a little upset about that.
Yet those not fun nights will happen occasionally as a GM.  To Gigi’s player, Gigi was making a solid call.  She had an enemy who she’d wanted to kill since the first game, one who she had a firm shot at, who she could finally track down in isolation.  To Gigi’s player, I have no doubt that this seemed like an awesome idea – and in many games, it probably would have been.  If I’d been running a game where the PCs triumph no matter what, I would have twisted things so Gigi would have been rewarded for her bold initiative and taken out her enemy in style.
But it wasn’t.  I was running the kind of game where running off alone into a dark maze of tunnels to kill a mutating opponent wasn’t a very good idea.  And I was running the kind of game where the philosophy is, “Some nights suck when you lose, but the victories are so much sweeter when you finally figure out the right tactics.”
Nobody wants to be told that their tactics aren’t the right ones. As a GM, it’s my job to say “yes!” as often as possible when players devise weird new approaches.  Yet it’s also my job to judge when a plan simply wouldn’t work, and that causes friction when the player thinks this is a good idea and you do not.
As a GM, it’s also my job to tell the players what kind of world they live in, and to enforce those boundaries – and if my world is the one where all roads don’t lead inevitably to triumph, then that means some nights they’re gonna have the Empire Strikes Back of the soul.
Maybe they like that style of game, in which case they stay.  Or they don’t, in which case I hope the thrills they get when they win offset the occasional nights of suck, and that they learn to pick up when I’m flailing my GMly arms to send signals that whoah, pull back, retreat, this is not working!  Because I suspect a lot of tonight’s death came from a quiet misalignment of gaming philosophies – acting like the hero of Die Hard works if you’re in Die Hard, but what happens if this is Game of Thrones?
I’m a little upset because I don’t like upsetting my players.  But I’m also a little upset because I don’t really see what else I could have done and kept playing the sort of game I want to run, and that’s a rough beat.  A very rough beat.