Sacrificing NPCs

Sacrificing NPC’s

I’m sure all GM’s do this, kill off a Major npc (Non Player Character) in the game.
It gets done for a lot of different reasons though, usually the NPC is the bad guy the players are after or it’s someone they were sent to kill off.
Other reasons.. Hmmm that’s a bigger list than I can be bothered to type out
How many GM’s will willingly sacrifice a Major NPC in order to save the life of a player, to throw away without a second thought, a plotline???
I had this situation the other day, during a game.
Normally, I would be of the attitude that if a player had the bad luck to roll badly and get themselves dead, tough.
That’s the way the game goes… Well it should anyway, except most of us GM’s don’t tend to do that (Am I being presumptuous in the “most gm’s” part?), and will try and find away for the player to survive the nearly death experience.
There are a lot of times you just can’t save them and there are other times when you find some convenient way of altering the event or result.
Ergo, player survives and is none the wiser/smarter for it.
GM breathes sigh of relief.
Job done!
The other night I didn’t really have that luxury. A player rolled a double 1 (which is by definition, the worst case scenario), and should have died.
Player thinks “oh sh**”” I think “well that’s thrown a spanner in the works”.
(Polite version of what I was thinking)
How to get out of it?  Cue major npc’s, two of them.
I gave one npc odd numbers and the other even numbers for a dice roll, and then asked the offending player to choose odd or even.
During this time, I had not revealed to the player what their fate was.
The player chose, I rolled the dice and then took the player to another room to tell them what had happened to them.
We then came back to the other players, the scene was acted out and right at the moment of certain doom, the chosen major npc saves the life of the offending player.
Exit one plot line.
Obviously the player was relieved to live but at the same time, all of them were saddened at losing the npc.
Was it worth it? In my mind the answer is yes, but at the same time it questions my ability as a GM to ensure a dangerous but survivable scenario.
What I did was lie to the players in order to ensure that one of them survived.
I felt it necessary to, on the spur of the moment, completely change the situation so that I could save that player.
A bit later in the game another player lost their character to a double1 roll and I could do nothing about it.
So, was I showing favouritism? Possibly.
Was I doing what was best for the players as a whole but at the same time killing off one of their major npc’s? Maybe not.
To lose a major npc is expected, but to throw one away to save a player?
Judge me as you will.