Character Death

I’m working on my recruitment post for a Draw Steel introductory adventure, and this thread has helped me reflect on my stance.

I fall into the "death has to be on the table for the game to mean something" camp as @emsquared aptly worded, when it comes to tactical games. Not all of my RPG campaigns lean toward narrative or slice-of-life roleplay.

Here’s how I approach character death for tactical, heroic, and cinematic games:

If they die, they die. The table can construct a narrative around that to give their death significance and flair. This requires investment from the table though, so it can easily turn into a sour experience if people don't show adequate respect to a death scene. However, games that churn through characters quickly leans away from the dramatization of death. This is totally fine too.

It's all about what game is being played and the appropriate expectations of the table. I've seen some here make the point that character death is unnecessary or solely a detriment. I would disagree with both points. Character death is needed in games where the stakes require it. If it is removed as a story component, then a high stakes narrative no longer has any bite to it. In games that have characters fight for their lives, this often defeats the purpose of fighting completely. Additionally, character death can feel uniquely meaningful and dramatic, providing moments that can not be replicated without it.

TTRPGs are often used as a story-telling medium. Not all stories have characters that die, but I prefer ones that do.

I tend to have a point (around tier 2/level 5) where there are no more rebuys. So, if a character dies, then that player's time in that game is over. The player can leave the game or spectate. So I'm not a "Ready to die and reroll".

Should death have meaning? I don't know! That's a deep question! Perhaps it means the Sword Coast is pretty savage, and players should try rolling higher in the future? Beyond that, players are welcome to find their own meaning.

Although I have played with someone who really hated the idea of their character's death. I pinky swore that I would never let that player's characters die, because no game is worth me enforcing my murderous preferences at the expense of someone else's fun.

Why tho? Never seen this perspective before. It feels incongruous with the notion of disallowing a character's death for the sake of their fun. What's less fun than not being able to play any more? Not judging; genuinely curious.

The invulnerable character belonged to a player whose company I enjoyed, so that was a very special case (I'm mostly joking here).

At tier 2, I feel the players have enough experience and tools to mostly avoid character death if they're very careful. I do it to raise the stakes, which some people find more enjoyable.

Adam is a staunch believer that if you die in D&D, you die in real life! It's not how he enforced it in game that worries me...

Haha that's wild. I think that would just stress me out.

Alas, the player of the invulnerable characters is no longer with us 😢. I only wish I commanded the power of IRL life and death.

I completely understand people not wanting to play for months only to read "Oops - that's a crit. Bad luck. Better luck next game. Don't let the door hit you on the way out". But enough people are signing up for these games for me to believe that there's a demand for them. There again, some players will sign up for anything without reading the warnings, so 🤷.

I think it's an interesting concept for a medium where scheduling isn't the biggest hurdle. Having a pool of players that are already on board with asynchronous play is huge, and so it's easier to cycle through players than live play. If I didn't run niche games, I'd be considering it myself!

It probably also helps that Adam pays me to hype up his games. They're the bomb!

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In a recent game of mine, death was very much on the table and didn't have a lot of meaning attached to it. I had one character killed by giant beetles, and so the player took over an abandoned character. Almost immediately got killed by giant ticks. Laughs were had, traumas were formed (jokingly).

Oh I'm sure there's folks out there with interest in that sort of thing. I guess my problem is I get more attached to the other people at the table than my characters. I don't wanna have to say goodbye. :(

But yeah, it definitely makes sense for PbP to be the route to take such an idea.

He means that literally. So many explosions.

Of course it should be role-played. It's a role-playing game. But on a player level it is still merely a one-sided termination of contract, and it shouldn't be a tragedy for the player or the table as a real death in real life would be. It should be a learning experience on why it happened, though, with a consolation that a game you died in was never a game for you, either because of a skill mismatch or poor balance of the system. Randomly dying on a trap is exactly that, no matter how much role-play you pour into it after the fact.

Also, as a player I would find rushing a doomed and mechanically expired character out of a dungeon extremely tedious. He's dead, Jim.

That feels like a really niche take, or at least one I don't resonate with at all. Character death meaning the game was poorly balanced or just not for you? That's stepping away from half a century of TTRPG history and intentionality.

Not saying it's wrong, just not an objective truth.

For me, I guess it depends on the premise of the game. Are you random people who are hired on to go down into an ultra-dangerous dungeon? Then yeah, I assume death is going to happen at some point for someone, and I just try to avoid it being me.

On the other hand, with a lot of games now making character bonds or backstories an integral part of setting and worldbuilding, if that character doesn't live through the game, then there's a lot of paperwork involved. If I'm in a pbta game and I have 3 bonds with this character and he's dead now, my character is different too. And any new character is suddenly going to have bonds with me potentially, which is also weird, so if it's going to happen, it had better make sense and be important. If I'm in a 13th Age game and the world has clockwork dragons (for instance) because I said so and I'm really the only one who even cared that they popped up every once in a while, kinda sucks to suddenly not have that character be there to appreciate them, because the GMs wasting his time on everyone else til he writes up a replacement for them.

On the third hand, even od&d had Raise Dead, and it was there specifically so that players wouldn't lose investment, so even back then, there was some awareness that just maybe player death wasn't always welcome and there should be some recourse.

I fully support death as a consequence not and a predetermined fact. If a character steps off a cliff, shoves their head in a dragons mouth, or walks up to a tank and taunts them then yeah they have to suffer the consequences. That said I also try to reinforce that the characters are the 'heros' of the story and can get away with a bit more. But just a bit. if there are no consequences then what is the point of the conflict and is there really a challenge. Some games are not risk/combat focused so death should be very rare but any game/system that has combat and other high risk situations needs to have DM willing to hand out the earned results good and bad along with players that understand this.

Agree to disagree then. I'm also pretty sure that the niche my take is from is called logic.

There is a concept that doesn't resonate with me either. That concept is "Gamble on your life and die because the monster rolled nat20 and it's an intended part of the game." Even in d20 systems players usually get some means to avoid fatal damage regardless of the rolls: invisibility, stone skin, mirror image, and so forth. Because of that, a player of sufficient skill with sufficient resources will survive if the challenge is adequate. But if that is not the case then either the skill is insufficient or the challenge wasn't designed properly.

There are games that by design are poorly veiled gambling, and some people are okay with gambling their characters away. Maybe it's the thrill of high stakes, maybe they don't take their own story seriously, or maybe they were never invested in their character beyond writing their numbers and are eager for more numbers to try out. I don't really know which, because I was never one of those people. But death of a character will always mean one less character in the game and one less game for the character. You can't have a game without players. And characters are useless without games. Therefore, random death simply isn't constructive, only the possibility of it is.

You need death to exist so that you have a reason to make better decisions, but if you make good decisions, then death shouldn't happen to you just because of a bad roll. That roll shouldn't even be made if you play properly and the system respects your agency. Obviously, you can role-play the outcome of bad decisions after the fact. But that doesn't change that the situation which allowed a character death to actually happen — instead of merely being a possibility — that situation is a result of bad decisions, made either by the player, the GM, or the system developer. If dying regardless of choices is somehow the intended gameplay, then sorry but it informs me that I want nothing to do with a game that treats its characters that way and that I should instead apply my writing to a game that actually prioritizes story arcs over 1-19 or die rolls.

It is entirely possible to incorporate mechanics that prevent random deaths and still allow a lot to depend on a die roll. In fact, many systems have that sort of mechanics. Godbound's Miracles or Fate's Fate Points to name a few. A bad roll can also force a choice: "You can eat the soul of that innocent NPC and survive or die from a mortal wound that was just inflicted upon you." There are ways to extract a lot of narrative from the possibility of death alone and keep the character in the game, enriched with difficult choices and able to complete their story. So why should they randomly die? Because a die told them to? Or because it allegedly has been done that way for over half a century? Do we even have witnesses that can confirm they've always done it that way and prove that they represent the majority of role-players and not a weird roll-playing niche?

No, it's not just my opinion, man. It's logic. But sure, continue being obnoxious and share those belittling comments nobody ever asked for. That is informative too. Although you probably won't like what it informs others about.

Well, that escalated quickly. How about we all take a breather, eh?

Maybe focus on another relevant but lighter question - what are some spectacularly bad or spectacularly good deaths you've seen or experienced yourself in games?

I do like a nice "rocks fell". It's a timeless classic - elegantly simple.