Raising the bodycount AKA I'm not killing quite enough NPCs

[CountClockwise]

I'm not sure if this is really a problem or not but I feel like I'm not killing enough NPCs. Part of me wonders if this is me getting too attached to NPCs or watching too much of Moffat Doctor who but I wanted to emulate the style of classic who and the Russell era a bit more by having more people die. I didn't want to go 5th Doctor levels of death but a bit more would be alright. I was thinking of having few pre-scripted deaths and others based on the actions of the players or if these NPCs run out of story points when they get into trouble. I've killed several already but nowhere near as often as I'd like.

"Everybody lives! (except the villains)" happens too often and I want to make steps to correct it. I could be completely wrong of course but it's just thoughts I had.

Edit: My apologies for posting in the wrong place, still getting used to posting regularly

[Marnal]

For what its worth my favorite Dr Who writer [Lawrence Miles] confessed that he always feels horrible when he kills someone off in his books and thus rarely does it. Once he said it, I thought back to the story lines of his books and realized he's right, while horrible horrible things happen to people almost nobody ever actually dies. [and his books are considered to be some of the darker ones of the series]

Likewise there are so many wonderfully evil things I can do to my PCs [and their NPC allies] that I rarely ever bother threatening to just kill the PCs off.

[Catsmate]

Dec 22, 2016 19:59:24 GMT Marnal said:

For what its worth my favorite Dr Who writer [Lawrence Miles] confessed that he always feels horrible when he kills someone off in his books and thus rarely does it. Once he said it, I thought back to the story lines of his books and realized he's right, while horrible horrible things happen to people almost nobody ever actually dies. [and his books are considered to be some of the darker ones of the series]

Likewise there are so many wonderfully evil things I can do to my PCs [and their NPC allies] that I rarely ever bother threatening to just kill the PCs off.

Plenty of nasty places in history to dump people without killing them. 'Galley slaving' it was called in one of my old time travel campaigns.
In Meddlers in Time one of the protagonists dropped the abusive boyfriend of her daughter into the hands of Josef Mengele..

[Stormcrow]

Bodycount has risen and fallen over the history of Doctor Who, and I'm not sure you'll find many people particularly proud of when it was high. I don't think there's really a need to kill off characters just because.

But if insist, you can just make sure that disposable characters have no Story Points. In the world of Doctor Who those are the only thing keeping characters alive.

And you don't have to treat attacks on non-player characters as Conflicts, anyway. If a Dalek shoots at an NPC, don't bother rolling; that NPC is dead. It doesn't even have to be an "L" damage code, either: if one NPC attacks another NPC with a knife and you want the victim to die, don't roll, don't assign damage: he just dies.