No "should" about it - ask the players, see what they want.
At the end of the last Swords "scenario", for their third meeting with a Recurring Villain, I did ask the PC who was about to meet him at the climax of a HQ how he'd like to do it. He chose chained simple, so that's what he got. And thanks to good use of augments, community support, and nobbling the RV's followers earlier on, he took on an NPC considerably more powerful than him, and delivered a Complete Defeat. Since the lead ability was a "Decapitate Foe" feat, and the NPC in question was a vampire, this was most definitely Dead, not just Dying. No Nearly Headless Nick problems here! And, to my complete delight, the result only just made it to Complete by one point: the one point in question being the +1 augment from the NPC follower who had been persuaded to change sides. Lesson to all vampires, mistreating your followers is not a survival trait.
> There's nowt wrong with the mechanics, in my
> opinion. If PCs very rarely
> 'die' in HQ, or even have the threat of 'death'
> hanging over them, then
> that's because of the way that we tend to *use*
> those mechanics, not because
> of any deficiency in the numbers.
Yes, I suspect that as GMs the old fear of accidentally doing the PCs serious harm still holds us back, and we don't make the opposition tough enough.
Did I, here?
Ah, thinking back, I missed something. (Sorry, flakey memory this week.) We did inflict a Complete Defeat on a PC during that scenario, and it was one I half-expected, too. Powerful vampire using his Enthral on a junior Humakti PC. I think he had about two masteries to spare. So he grabbed the PC and kidnapped him: back to the Lair for future nibbles (and for use as a sacrifical "prop" in a vampiric HQ). Could I possibly do anything nastier to a Humakti?
Of course, far from causing the player serious problems, what this actually gave us was the "So, Mr. Bond" scene where the Master Villain explains all his plans, and Our Hero then escapes, having been brought into the centre of the enemy stronghold that he would never otherwise have reached. Yes, he did find the equivalent of the Big Red Button, thwarted the Cunning Plan with seconds to spare, and of course killed the Villain as described above.
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