O! Death

I've been thinking about death a lot lately.

Like, as a mechanic in games, sure, but also because it's the time of year I remember the loss of some of my highschool friends' parents, both of whom who have now been gone from my friends' lives for as long as they were in them. Death in real life is a cruel and uncaring thing - it is rare that someone goes "Yeah, this person died at exactly the right time, we're all happy about it" unless that person was a truly reprehensible person (and even then, we might wish Death had paid them a visit a little earlier on). In roleplaying games, I feel this is why there is often such discourse about the agency of a player in the death of their character - constant cycles of people creating mechanics to let a character escape death, or lamenting how a bad roll can damn a character at a narratively unhelpful time. Why should a character we've invested so much time in die before they get to finish their goals? What's the point of even playing a character who can die to a random goblin poking them in the butt with a spear? On the far opposite swing of that though, you also have folks who play games like DCC who treat character lives as entirely disposable, pumping characters through level 0 funnels and not getting attached to characters until they've "earned" it, if ever.

In life, as in TTRPGs, an unexpected death is generally deeply unsatisfying - particularly for the main party involved. While I am in no way qualified to be a grief counselor, I do think that I'm particularly qualified to talk about RPGs and death mechanics, and if you'll take my hand and walk with me a while, I'd like to help you become okay with the reality of death in your games - and why talking about the expectations of what death looks like in your games might be an important but oft overlooked safety tool to consider bringing up. 

Who Decides Who Dies?

I would argue that essentially every game descended from the tabletop wargaming scene is a game about death. Sure, it might also be about the bard trying to seduce the dragon, but most of the rules of the game are about inflicting death on people. But herein lies the rub - I find many players perfectly willing to dole out death upon their foes, but when it comes to their character (or, more often, their character's pet/animal companion), it's this big no-no - a "what's good for thee ain't good for me" kind of moment, if you will. These players want to retain the agency on who lives or dies at all times in the narrative - and that's okay in some games! But that's something that you need to discuss ahead of time, with all players including the GM. I think the prevalence of this desire to protect one's blorbo stems from something that people don't necessarily think to include in their session zero: if you're playing a game to have a power fantasy, what does that mean to you? And if someone wants to play a game where death isn't on the table for the player characters, an important thing to ask is - does your game even need to be about death? Should you perhaps look to a different game to tell the kind of story you want to tell?

Is Your Game About Death?

The Skeletons, by Jason Morningstar, is at its surface appears to be a game about death. You do, after all, play as skeletons - something known first for its distinct lack of life and secondly for its proficiency at autoxylophonics. I would be willing to bet that most people who actually read or play it, however, would say it's actually a game about life. While you're playing skeletons who have been stationed as tomb guardians, your brief moments of consciousness as you are called to duty to defend your tomb are actually much more about remembering who you are - or were - and coming to terms with that. There is death that your characters inflict - but the how of how that happens is something that the game is largely unconcerned with the specifics of except as to how it affects your character. 

The other thing about The Skeletons is that all players have full agency over life and death in the story - at least, right up until the end, but the game is very clear about how the skeletons are eventually overwhelmed which means that everyone can go into that portion of the game informed and prepared for the end. It sets this up right at the beginning and then gives you three different ways to play the game, letting you dial in the kind of narrative you want to explore. I think this is a game that people who are afraid of having their characters die should play to explore what that actually means and take that experience to reflect against their time in other games.

Betrayed by RNGsus: or, 

The Fallacy of Wanting to Die When It's Narratively Interesting

On the subject of player agency about character death, one of the other big complaints I've heard over the years is "Oh, the dice fucked me! It's stupid that this one random roll killed my character! That sucks!" And like, yeah, congratulations, you're right, dying randomly sucks. However, in this case, what you're saying is "I don't like that I rolled a number that was bad for me" - which is something that is part and parcel with any game where random chance is involved. If you cannot reconcile with the fact that sometimes you will roll numbers that are bad for you, I once again direct you back towards The Skeletons and would gently suggest against buying that bus ticket to Atlantic City. But digging even deeper here, what I personally think that this reaction stems from at its deepest, truest heart, is the feeling that the character's death was pointless. The same folks I see getting bent out of shape about random character death are often the same folks ready and raring to go about making a heroic sacrifice where it counts, which means it isn't the dying part that's the issue but rather that they 1. didn't have agency in it and 2. the death didn't meaningfully affect the narrative, it just took them out of the game.

While I don't necessarily think the OSR mantra of "Only Roll Dice When It's Important" is a catch-all piece of advice, I DO think that somewhere in the fields between that sentiment and "Character Death Should Only Happen When It's Narratively Important" grows a fruit ready to be plucked, and the name of that fruit is "Make Every Moment Important." If you are playing some kind of heroic fantasy that puts death on the table, consider just making every time where you could die actually matter. Why go through "We got a quest to go burn down that goblin camp and oh man now I'm Big Angy that one of those goblins shot me in the butt and my character died, why do they get to kill me back when I'm killing them >:( " when instead you could have something like "The party needs to go take out a goblin encampment that has been terrorizing a nearby city - these goblins have been killing everyone and stealing their stuff, and the only way to free this town from the terror of this menace is a decisive victory. If they can do it, they'll ensure this town lives on for another generation - if they fail, both the townsfolk and the party's lives are surely forfeit." It's the same story - but in the second version, the stakes are more clearly set. It's not "randomly" dying - the party knows the stakes going into it, and their actions will impact the story of the game world whether they live or die.

There's a corollary to this too, which is that I think that people get too afraid of losing their character because they have a bunch of specific goals in mind, whether that's because they built a big backstory for that character or because they've got some other thing they want to work out through that character. I used to be this kind of player, to be clear, especially deep in my D&D days. What I would hope that people who play like this might consider is that just like in real life, your character's legacy can continue on in the story even if they're not alive! If you made Your Original Character Blonan The Barbarian whose family was wiped out by a warlord and on whomst he swore revenge but gets killed before he can mete out justice on the edge of his blade, consider the fact that that warlord still exists in the game world. Talk with your GM! If you were really married to this storyline, a good GM will likely find a way to keep it relevant in the game world - because spoiler, if you put in the effort to do good worldbuilding, you've saved your GM the effort of coming up with things! Helping lighten the load for your GM's prep is almost always a good thing! And how cool will that be when your party strikes this warlord down and your GM gives you a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure-esque cutscene with your old character looking down from the clouds, giving the party a thumbs up and then disappearing as they can finally move on?

When You Die In Game, You Do Not Die In Real Life

I've been playing a lot of "Play To Lose" games recently. In the last few months, I've been in one shot APs of Trophy Dark and Inevitable, I was on a three part promo series for the recent Hellwhalers crowdfunder, and I've been running a lot of Mothership for my friends (I got the taste for it after playing it for my first ever AP series back before 1e dropped). These are all games that are all up front about how bad things are going to get for your character. Survival is possible, but unlikely. The interesting part is playing to see how far you can get with them before they get got. I mentioned DCC's funnel system at the beginning of this for a similar reason - there is a certain style of play which much more strongly emphasizes that the activity you are performing with your friends is a game and not just sitting around telling stories with your buddies. Your character is merely the way that you interact with the game world - and while all of those games encourage you to put as much effort into those characters as you'd like to, the words MEMENTO MORI might as well be carved into your character sheets. 

When death is inevitable, I find that this allows players to be much freer with how they play their characters - making much bigger swings, doing more bombastic things because they know that their time in this world is limited. You might not get another chance to do something wild, so why not do it now? Every thing you do brings you closer to your inevitable end, so why not have some fun and save the world along the way, right? I take no responsibility for how much of that apply to your real life and choices thereof, but I DO think that taking that philosophy into your gaming table will lead to much more interesting games. If you've made your peace with the fact that your character can die, then rather than playing cautiously and protecting them so that maybe they'll reach the end, you can do things like make absolutely wild choices that you and your friends will be talking about long after the game ends. So what if you burn through five characters over the course of an eight year campaign if each of those characters goes out in a blaze of glory - or doing something hilariously stupid like rolling to seduce The Tarrasque? (Arguably still a blaze of glory, depending on what happens and who's arguing.) You just have to reframe your "win" condition, and remember that a character dying is not some kind of moral failing or slight against you the person - you are not your character, no matter how much of a self-insert they may be.

Outro

My roller derby friends will, somewhat jokingly, sometimes say that if you're not playing hard enough to get fouls, you're not playing hard enough. This isn't because they all have infinite bloodlust and a desire to hurt people - it's that if you're not playing to find the limits of how hard you CAN play, you don't know what you're missing. And yeah, sometimes you make a big play and you catch a foul - but sometimes you make that big play and everything is just fine and that puts you WAY farther ahead than you were! 

My point here is that you shouldn't fear the threat of death if you're playing a game with death on the table - you should just endeavor to do everything you can to make any situation in where someone might die be interesting enough that it doesn't feel boring if it happens. And, much like playing roller derby, if you're not comfortable playing a game where you might get hurt then you can and should consider a different game - which is fine, because there are many, many games that can and will cater to the story you're trying to tell. You just need to be able to articulate what kind of game you want to play with your friends.