"I can tell you how you die."
Maybe you'll let the player decide: that's ripe for tragic reversal. Maybe you'll roll on a random table; I've thoughtfully prepared one for you. But if anyone's brave enough to take you up on the offer, you've hit the motherlode. The player will think, 'I'm bloody immortal as long as I avoid my doom'. And you, as the DM, are in the perfect position to be an actively malicious universe. It's a wonderful game of cat and mouse, with the player trying their damndest to dodge their fate and the DM gleefully trying to shoehorn it in.
The best thing about this is that by being unable to kill a character 99% of the time, you are thus excused to pile on them a heap of suffering and sorrows. Sure, your character can't die to these orcs, but you can pass-out, lose your arm, be dangled on a rope and used as monster bait, end up in a stew pot, etc*.
For the truly industrious GM, such trials and tribulations can be used to break a character, who will then plead for their fate to finish them. Or maybe, in the process of trying to avoid their doom, they will enable it. Or find a clever loophole. There's a lot of classic options here.
YOU WILL DIE BY
- Turtle
- Flail
- Siege Weapon
- Whore
- Gold Coin
- Splinter
- Fire
- The Sea
- Villain in your game.
- PC in your game.
- The weapon you are currently using.
- Crane
- Dog
- Your Father's Hand
- Giants (Plural!)**
- Grass
- Goblin
- Greed
- Steve
- Macho Man Randy Savage
- A nine-fingered man.
- Under moonlight
- Child
- Falling
- Poison
- Wood
- Rats
- Royalty
- Witch
- Angel
Feel free to come up with more. Hound the player. Allude to their doom frequently, get them freaked out. Always give them either fair warning or time to respond. Make attempts at them, and embrace failure: the story of the PC constantly dodging their inevitable death is FANTASTIC.
* I believe that's called the "It Gets Worse" rule, and I'm cribbing it from Wampus Country.
** The plural thing is great for anything really.
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