I feel like I need to remind people that this is a meme. It isn’t meant to be taken seriously.
If I’ve truly painted myself into a corner in a situation like this I’ll sometimes break character to let the party know that the NPC is suffering from “cutsceneitis” and offer them a get-out-of-death-free token they can redeem later if they’ll let this current guy go as planned.
Generally speaking it’s better to roll with it if at all possible, though. You can perhaps Final Destination the guy and have him be a bad luck magnet for the party until he’s taken care of. Or just throw out your plans and see where this new adventure is going to go. I still regret not doing that a few years back when there was a sole survivor of a battle whose only purpose was to spout a few lines of information and then conveniently die, and the party tried to save him. If they’d succeeded I now realize in hindsight it would have been a lot of fun, the party would likely have wanted to kill him themselves in the end.
I don’t think you should ever bank on a character dying 100%. You can make it really hard to save them but if the PCs pull it off you should reward that effort.
I’ve learned a long time ago that when you need a character to die permanently, with no chance of rescue from the party,
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It has to happen fast (from complete safety to vanished utterly in a single round, if at all possible)
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The body has to be completely lost (taken away in a dragon’s stomach, submerged into lava, planeshifted to the elemental plane of acid, whatever)
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Ideally, it should be very clear to the observers that the character was without a doubt dead (their body being separated into different–and large–pieces is generally the only way to do this, though if you turn them undead before moving on to step 2, it can also go a long way toward selling the event)
If you do all of these things, you have an approximately 75-85% chance of the character being permanently dead. In the other 15-25% of cases, they somehow manage to miraculously figure some nonsense out, and yes, you should absolutely reward that effort; though if nobody was counting spell slots in the events that occurred in the original meme, that’s honestly a fairly decent way to go about it.
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That and if you really need him dead for the current story, just have the spell mysteriously not work. Not all souls can be called back; maybe he’d rather be feasting with his ancestors or maybe he’s a devil’s prisoner and the next adventure is a rescue mission.
Is that Danny Devito smacking Bob Odenkirk in the face with a 2x4? What the heck is this from?
Close, its Danny Devito smacking Nate Mooney with a 2x4.
Its a scene from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Aw, come on now. They saved them fair and square within the bounds presented to them, and they almost certainly did it because they genuinely liked them. And you cheated them out of that win for… what?
Don’t let your attachment to a pre-conceived idea of how things will go cause you to deny your players something that they’ve rightfully earned, especially when it’s likely a small flavour thing that they care about. That minor NPC isn’t going to break any plots or questlines.
