"Is This the End?"

A Meditation on Death and Dying in Tabletop Gaming

6/28/2024

In common tabletop role-playing discourse, there are some university acknowledged truths: 

Player agency is a good thing. “You control your world but your player's characters and their decisions are theirs”.

Railroading is bad. “It's one thing to have a story in mind but to insist on an outcome or things going your way despite player action is another thing entirely.”

Players’ and DMs’ relationship is not adversarial. Most popular TTRPG horror stories we hear stem from GMs skirting this really fundamental truth. We're all here to tell a story together and DMs control the enemies but should be fans of the players.

These assertions will typically evoke no pushback from thought leaders and the average discourse enjoyer I encounter.

Curiously, many of these same groups and voices tend to contradict these tenets in their approach to consequences and death. With the glee you can sometimes hear GMs describe player death with, and the surprisingly frequent statement that games without PC death have no stakes, i believe there's a disconnect caused by a common unspoken assertion: 

I believe that many unconsciously believe that death is the most interesting thing that can happen to a player character.

Narratively speaking, death is dramatic. It is shocking and by nature represents the climax or resolution of a story being told. For the characters, that is. 

For the players, it typically amounts to an acknowledgement, some dice rolls, and they are back in play within a few minutes (or next session in extreme circumstances). Now that player has a new character with new motivations and new relationships to discover and embody, and their last is pushed into the halls of temporary remembrance. 

Before I make my next point, I'd like to highlight some common media touchstones and how they handle stakes, failure, and consequences. 

Let's look at superhero storytelling (yes, i know, bear with me) and Avatar: The Last Airbender. In a Spider-Man or Superman story, deadly challenges are commonplace but you don't read to find out -if- Superman succeeds. You want to find out how he does, and at what cost. Spider-Man probably isn't going to die in any given story. But he will suffer and his loved ones might die. Even in Batman stories where he is often outmatched by his adversaries, the excitement doesn't come from “does he die?”. The question is “how the hell is he going to pull this one off?” In Avatar, nobody dies ever. But stakes get pretty high and escalate to the point where the end of the world hangs in the balance of the final scenes. If our heroes succumbed to their weaknesses or enemies' best laid plans because that's realistic, there is a strong chance the story falls flat. Maybe not once or twice, but unfinished arcs are inherently unsatisfying. “But Jack”, you say, “we hate superhero fantasy and we know that you do too!” 

And you're right. But compelling storytelling is compelling storytelling and unless we're telling an explicitly horror-focused story, heroic antics are the goal and we're simply attempting to negotiate difficulty and frequency as we crank the meters on darkness and lethality. 

If what really gets you going is pushing through a location in a horror-survival style game while churning through a village’s worth of low level adventurers, I'm not here to disparage that. It's a perfectly valid way to play, and I only aim to highlight and sow thought seeds for alternatives in those that aren't certain that that's the specific experience they are after. But I firmly believe that outside of that specific experience, Characters losing, failing in their goals, and having to deal with the consequences is more interesting than them dying. 

Let's walk through some examples of playing death narrative-first: 

Rohan the warrior and his party have run into an insurmountable force: a dragon its legion of animated mud golems. They fight valiantly but as enemy reinforcements enter the field, they recognize the danger they are in and elect to retreat next turn. Unfortunately, the dragon has other plans, attacks with a claw, and reduces Rohan to 0hp. 

GM: “Is this Rohan's last battle?

Let's lay out some possibilities 

1. “No, Rohan survives this fight”

   1. Rohan is raked by the dragonclaws as they shred his defenses and inventory. “Your weapon, armor and backpack are in tatters. You cling to life, however barely, with 1hp. Describe 2 items or pieces of equipment that remain unbroken and tell me what you do next.”

   2. The dragon's claws cleave through armor, flesh, and bone in a sickening swipe. “As the dragon contemptuously steps over your broken body to pursue other players and you lay bleeding, tell me: did Rohan just lose an arm or leg to that near-fatal blow?”

   3. The dragon elects for a backhanded swipe that sends Rohan sailing into a nearby tree. “Your vision swims and the darkness takes you. The last thing you perceive is a golem grasping you roughly by the leg. Rohan is being dragged away, unconscious. Which retainer are you playing until he is recovered?”

   4. Rohan (alongside the rest of the party, eventually) is incapacitated and awakens, recovered and in a messy tent. “You’ve been unconscious for weeks and the forces you’ve opposed were able to wreak havoc unmolested. In this survivor’s camp, some of your allies that escaped the carnage might be found. Do you want to look for anyone in particular? Let’s roll to see if/how they made it”

2. “Yes. Rohan dies in this dungeon

   1. Rohan receives a mortal wound and chooses to fight on. “The dragon's attack peels your armor back like paper and cuts a deep belly wound. It's painless but you feel warm liquid pooling in your boots. You have [mechanical advantage] on your actions and roll a death save [50/50 chance of survival] each turn and every time you take damage. Each save is harder than the last, and when you fail, your heart stops at the end of the round. What do you do? And what do you say? Does the party notice?”

   2. Rohan receives a mortal wound but takes a final action. “The dragon slashes you deep, far too deep to recover from. Adrenaline floods your system as you ready yourself. You may take [Rohan’s level, # of sessions survived/3, d4+1] actions on your next turn. Rohan’s heart stops at the end of this combat round. What do you do?”

I don’t think there’s a lesson here. Just vibes. 

Expect more on the subject in the future, though. 

This post was released early on Patreon, alongside plenty of subscriber-only posts.