How do you feel about adventures where the PC's must die?

[Chess Lane]

I'm personally not a fan of them. I ran From the Shadows back when it first came out and there was such an uproar from my group..! The first character that fell to the Horseman's sickle was abandoned by the player, the character sheet torn in half. The next few were spared the latter fate but there were bad vibes in the air after the PC's died so early on and so systematically.
Hour of the Knife and Adam's Wrath also call for the characters' deaths and I've never ran them because of it (and I have some issues with the writing in AW but that's for another topic).
I don't know how to put it all into words but I am just not interested in running any module or pdf quest that requires the group to be killed off. Staying alive is one of the goals of every player and while I've denied other goals (such as killing off an enemy, finding certain items, winning a lady's hand etc) it's not the same. Players grow attached to their heroes and if they fall and come back in some way, I've gotten the notion that it "cheapens" the love for the character. I've had plenty of PC's die in my campaigns but scenarios like the one in FtS leave a bad taste in mouth and in theirs.

Please share your opinions on the subject.

Thanks for your time.

[ewancummins]

I'm against it, unless the adventure is used as a 'ah, in the course of actual play--not through railroading-- we had a TPK, but here's a cool and spooky way to resurrect the PCs.'
That's the kind of thing you can only do once, I think.

[Chaot]

I used the Horseman stuff from From the Shadows for the start of a game. I specifically told the Players that something like that was going to happen. It worked ok but kind of felt like I was just going through the motions of moving onto the real story.

From this point out I will be using those things for starting out short campaigns. Let the Players know that their character has just died and let them have some input during character generation. Pick up the action after they wake up on the table.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

I'm torn on this. It's the sort of thing that makes a DM say, "Isn't that cool!?" and then the players say. "No. It is not cool."

When those modules were published, it was probably the sort of edgy, out of the box adventure design that made Ravenloft different than other settings. But now it seems kind of quaint, and definitely railroad-y. Since I DM more than I play these days, in the few opportunities I have to be a player, I don't resent the railroad much at all. When I recognize the rails, I trust that the DM needed them to make things work and go with it. But not all players will. And not all DMs are worthy of that trust. If I were a player and it became obvious that the DM had forced a TPK we couldn't avoid, I'd trust that it was the beginning of something cool and different, and that I'd likely get my character back soon enough. But as a DM, if your players aren't savvy enough to see that, you need to use a light touch with it.

And as ewancummins said, it's the kind of thing you only get away with once per campaign. I would not run 2 of these adventures in the same campaign without drastic changes to remove the forced TPK to some of them.

I did run From the Shadows in my campaign, and I have a soft spot for that adventure in general, despite its flaws. When I did, I replaced the whole Horseman Scene with an entire adventure to build up to the forced TPK. Then just before the climax of that adventure (where the TPK was about to happen), I told the players we were going to do an interactive cut-scene to help flesh out the background of the adventure. I gave them "disposable pre-gen characters" which were actually their PCs, disguised, then ran From the Shadows, starting at "heads on a shelf". When they reached the library and found their real characters' books there, their Darkon-stolen memories came back. Then I ran the TPK as a flashback, and it didn't sting so much since they already knew they had gotten their characters back.