The Worst Status Condition: Death

The Phenomenon

A lot of bloggers/writers for tabletop games often tend to weigh in on the subject of character death in RPGs. A lot of the other writers that I really respect have their own varying opinions, which I often agree with. Though, let's face it, death is part of these games. In real life, death is a very real, emotional, and painful experience for those who remain. On the cosmic scale however, it is a mechanic. In a sort of irony, death is a simple mechanic we make a huge deal of in these games.Like in real life, in game it happens. This may be rather nihilistic in tone, but that isn't the point of this article. I don't in anyway want to cheapen death, but we dabble in it in these games as a theme every session.  We inflict it onto NPCs unless you are playing in one of those sort of George of the Jungle rules campaigns where "Nobody dies, they just get really big boo-boos." Though most people don't play that way unless they are actually trying not to kill a character. All else, when you drop a character to 0 hit points, you're killing them. Usually it's a monster of some kind, but in my campaigns, you will fight other humanoids as often, if not more often, than monsters. It almost always ends in death. The games we play emulate rather violent periods in history through fantasy, or times in which there is a particular "lawlessness". Death is dispensed at random, and readily by players and GMs alike.

 Sometimes it hits you with a glimmer of the same emotional effect as it would in real life. Last week, I dropped a Star Destroyer onto a factory where there were thousands of slaves. I didn't save them, I destroyed them. On accident, of course, but that choice my character made, as he was riding the high of his rage and walking in the Dark Side, made him lose his reasoning. He made the call "imperial factory=bad", and proceeded to drop it onto a planet. Of course, I'm an actor type player, and was emotionally entwined with my character’s feelings. When my GM told me what the real effects of what I had done were, I personally felt awful. I felt guilty. Although it was just a game, the emotional connection to the idea of being responsible for that was real. Dash (my character) will, of course, be impacted by this. However, I ask you as we proceed, to look at the mechanical side of death in games. I have illustrated that there is undoubtedly an emotional part to all this, but there is a less often addressed mechanical side as well.

The Effect

Once upon a time in Gygax’s Tomb of Horrors, a player might take a wrong turn. DEAD. They just died, no saving throw, no pomp and circumstance. They were just dead. From a gaming perspective, that isn’t fun. Lawrence Schick’s White Plume Mountain was almost as brutal. I ran White Plume Mountain in 3.5 after I had found the module and had no idea what it was. When one of the characters nearly fell into the boiling mud pits, I realized something was wrong. The potential damage that it could have done was an insane amount, and the characters in this adventure were the recommended level. I was baffled, whoever had designed this was clearly just trying to kill the players. A few years later, it dawned on me, that danger was actually kind of cool. Not from a sense of realism, of course, that would be awful. Who would be amazed with the idea of someone one hundred feet into pools of boiling mud? From a gaming stand point, the peril made it fun. I recently read Tales from the Yawning Portal. As DM Starhelm fully intends on running Tomb of Horrors, I’m not allowed to read it, but I did call “dibs” on White Plume Mountain. So I gave it a once over, and I was sort of disappointed. Those same mud pits did a fraction of the damage they used to. The danger was gone. The amount of damage proposed was underwhelming. Not to say that I will not run White Plume Mountain for my play group, but that danger is not there. The danger makes it fun, does it not? There we have it, mechanics should be fun! A bit of a backwards affective result, don’t you think? Death is fun in games. Not a roguelike, but my favorite fight in all video game history is Kingdom Hearts 2, fighting Sephiroth. At lower levels, say 70 to 80, this fight against the iconic villain is challenging. Every move must matter, every move must be flawless, or Sora (the main character) will perish. What’s more, your beloved companions must sit this fight out. The tension is high and all that stands between you and death is your own skill. Though that isn’t death being fun, is it? Here we see that it is not the source of the fun, but the tension. The tension is there because the danger is clear. It is the tension that sets the tone. One of DM Starhelm’s greatest achievements was running Curse of Strahd as masterfully as he did. Tension abounds in that campaign, in more thematic ways than one. Strahd isn’t just a monster, he’s a character, and a dangerous one at that. Castle Ravenloft is the stuff of nightmares, and it feels like a proper death trap. This didn’t require rules to create the tense relationship to death but the clear presence of danger looms over the setting. As a mechanic, death creates dramatic tension. It is the main mechanic by which the game ends prematurely.

Death Ward

Hit points as a mechanic cheapens this tension. Players say, “As long as I have these X hit points, I’m ok.” To create danger, what do we do? We throw enemies that have enough numbers that that are bigger than the players numbers. This is a gross simplification, but that’s how it works. Imminent death is only a numbers game. In real life, death is not the result of a number but the result of circumstance. There are figures that we know can’t be survived, figures that yield improbable survivability, but our own vitality has no numbers beyond our vital signs- A representation of our actual uncountable health. We have representations signifying our health but they aren’t hit points. I don’t have hit points, you don’t have hit points. What’s more, pain and damage are uncorrelated. Something can hurt can cause less damage than another occurrence. Damage is dependent upon the location. Unless something major happens in some kind of bizarre occurrence, spraining your wrist can’t kill you. Though slipping and hitting your head can. With a hit point system, where you hit is irrelevant. It takes a clever GM/player to paint a decent picture that coincides with hit points. Although the more hit points you have, the less sense the damage you take over time makes. All of it until the final blow(s) would appear incidental. Tension doesn’t really occur unless you know that you have only so many hit points left.

Resurrection is perhaps the usual fallback for most players. In games like D&D, you have resurrection as a staple of the game. Why do you have a cleric? To fix two major problems: hit points and “deadness”. If someone in the real world could die and be definitely raised from the dead, you’d see modern stupidity become even more prevalent. The Darwin Awards would become an actual achievement that you could be proud of. Expendability would be a good thing. That’s not the way the world works, and I would even argue that shouldn’t be how these games work. Not that resurrection shouldn’t happen, but stipulations on resurrection should be facets of the mechanic that is death. I like Matthew Mercer’s house rule in Critical Role that makes resurrections a challenge; they aren’t simply a done deal. This of course, depends on your game. If you have a party of four or five people, that’s fair. On a one-on-one game, or a two player game, that is harder to force on a player. The smaller the game, the more character-centric the story/game becomes. Resurrection is, like death simply a mechanic, unlike the ability to end the game, resurrection continues it.

Before we continue to next week’s Inflicting Death, I recommend you reflect on what death means in your game. Emotionally and mechanically. Is death a trifling thing, or is it final? Try not to be too depressed about it, friends. It is part of the game after all.

Til then, happy thoughts, Arcanists.