This post is about D&D and the tendency of DMs to go through acrobatics and contortions to (seem to) challenge the characters while taking care to not actually kill them – or let them fail.
I’ve been playing in a group for a few years that’s made up mostly of my old high-school friends, so membership is based on things other than a commonality of play agenda.
When our latest campaign started, most other players said they didn’t want their characters to die. So we crossed death off the menu. We wrote a house rule about 0 hit points instead bringing unconsciousness plus some lingering penalties that are generally bad enough to send the party limping back to town for a week.
Rather than this being a capitulation, it has improved play. The DM no longer has to be afraid to play honestly and push hard. We had our first “total party defeat” a couple of weeks ago, in what was supposed to be the climactic battle. We wasted a lot of resources, failed to win the reward, and the big bad got away. Well, now there is a recurring villain out there! Finally, something unexpected has happened! And we’re all gunning for a re-match.
It’s more honest play now.
(Game system: Level-Up 5E. Not terribly relevant to the point.)
(Image credit: https://www.pugetsoundpaganpride.com/crafts-blog/boffer-swords-joshua )
6 responses to “We Crossed Off Death”
Here’s the Discord exchange which led to this post.
As well as the link it includes, to a comment of mine in an Adept Play post.
When I ran FATE for a stint earlier this year, I stated upfront that no player characters would ever be killed, crippled, ruined or sidelined.
(That last bit should be a given, but I think some players have bad memories of having a character being knocked out / hospitalized / temporarily crippled and then being unable to participate.)
I had several goals here:
– Emphasize a key difference to my regular, deadly campaign with *In the Realm of the Nibelungs*.
– See vulnerable character concepts like absent-minded professors or naive country-bumpkins. FATE provides some support here, e.g. by everyone being guaranteed some ‘spotlight’ via Fate Points.
– See derring-do appropriate to the genre of action & adventure movies (e.g. in James Bond or Indiana Jones films).
I did not perceive a change: The same players took risks, the same players worried, more or less. Maybe given more time than half a dozen sessions, we’d have seen an effect, I dunno.
You guys fared better, perhaps because the DM not having to pull any punches was such a big relief and that paid immediate dividends.
In any case, hats off for effectively tackling the traditional contortions head-on!
The unspoken topic – addressed in my upcoming “Blackleaf” workshop – is whether we are talking about characters or about players.
I submit that character death, as instantiated into role-playing culture through a series of late-1970s artifacts, is a broken construct, as it’s synonmyous with “you must stop playing.” It became, absent any intrinsic logic, a form of failed play as such, even overall. There isn’t any reason for ficitonal character death actually to be this, but people think it is, and nearly every text and subcultural mode of training confirms this belief.
Therefore when you told people that characters would not be “killed, crippled, ruined, or sideline,” it is code for telling them they would not be ejected from play. But they don’t believe you … or more profoundly, they associate the fear of being ejected from play with the primary purpose of play at all! They think it’s intrinsic and that without that fear, there isn’t any reason to play. There’s no way to be happy; it’s entirely neurotic. As John is writing about, it’s based on a big shared lie that we are supposed to fear dying but it’s not going to happen.
Furthermore, from within this broken construct, all the alternatives are basically stupid, in a nest of invalidated play which I’m not going to outline here, especially including the common workarounds. Fate, as it happens, is nothing but all those workarounds built into action and resolution, and yes, that means I think it’s fundamentally a stupid design, lacking in play as such.
No wonder your solution didn’t work. It makes perfectly good sense to say, “hey, this particular experience won’t include character death/etc,” but to people who are operating in a nonsensical construct, that is merely so much noise or (as they probably perceive any assurance regarding play) empty promises. Similarly, if one were to tell them, “hey, this particular experience includes character death, but it doesn’t disrupt your capacity to play, and that doesn’t even include workarounds,” they would perceive it just the same, i.e., not perceive it at all.
What makes John’s example work, by contrast, is to focus on defeat, as a real and possible outcome, rather than death. That’s the key.
I’m not sure how “broken” my solution to this problem is… But here it is.
The social contract at my table is that I will make it pretty explicit when someone takes an action that could lead to death, and never “produce death” outside of that. This allows us to make the choice of risking death, and then everyone becomes totally onboard with bad rolls producing it… But not risking death in any other situation. Our mortality rate has gone up tremendously, but also the general narrative involvement of everyone in it since the players accept the risks only when the narrative stakes are interesting. I.e., they will accept a risk of death when that death would provide meaning to their character.
It does remove the Tasha Yar’s death scenario… A meaningless and casual one shot kill by a boss that you simply encounter. So it’s probably still more broken than everyone being accepting of any deaths (including meaningless ones) happening in RPGs…
(Practically, even with a boss, I will mention that this looks like an adversary that, if you take it on, you could die — but I will provide an option to leave the fight with certainty. Or if there is a gap to jump, I will say explicitly “you can do it, but let’s be clear, failing it is probably falling to your doom. Then we roll, we roll in the open, and we take what happens.)
There is a problem, and it exists due to a bigger, contextual “thing” which is a huge problem, the concept that character death is failed play on someone’s part. It’s not a problem once you know how it happened (it was not design!) and see it as the unnecessary artifact it is, but unfortunately historically it’s been normalized into invisibility … and thus people think only in terms of coping mechanisms. They all amount to trying to square a circle and they’re all broken: deflection, wink-wink, suck it up, and even worse things like “only bad players get dead characters,” and more.
You’re describing a long-standing, widely-practiced application of “death as we know it,” in role-playing terms. However, based on your brief description, you and the others may be transcending the coping and actually dispersing the artifact, whether intermittently or consistently, or with or without realizing it, I don’t know.
I say this because you have implememnted the “accepted risk” or “when I care enough” model, which is most explicitly found in Trollbabe, but evident (in varying coherence) in textual instructions or advice throughout the late 1970s into the middle 1980s. And it looks like you’ve done it fully! Death, in your game, is part of what can happen and is understood as a real fictional outcome, not disruptive to play either in the moment or at a greater scale. This is great to see.
Briefly: all fictional content includes a unique, individual relation of each character to their death. Some are inviolate, otherw are not, then there’s the question of when or why, and then there’s the question of how explicit this may be to the reader/viewer (for which role-playing differs from other media). Every instance of fictional content has its own configuration of these relations. These configurations vary greatly, all the way from anyone-dies to nobody-dies, including every imaginable variation or diversity among characters. As a medium of its own, role-playing is not obliged to have an intrinsic, specific relation of character-to-death. Instead, and for the very same reason, any given instance of role-playing needs its own configuration about it. It looks like you’re doing one of them, which is not merely coping (“solving a problem”), but rather evaporating its context at a more important scale.