Death is Really Quite Dull
Or: If the worst thing that can happen to an RPG character is death, you might be doing it wrong.
As a GM, killing characters is easy. Seriously, it’s no kind of challenge at all. And I’m not talking about what I regard as the silly ‘adversarial’ stuff that I’m told still lurks in some corners of the hobby. I mean that a rigorously impartial GM could play entirely by the rules and still fairly preside over a TPK week in, week out. Far from striving to kill characters I would suggest that a fair proportion of GMs spend a significant amount of time gently steering players away from taking decisions that would result in the death of their characters. How many in- or out-of-character player discussions about how to proceed end with the GM asking ‘Are you sure you want to do that?’
As a general rule, this is fine by me, but it comes with an attendant risk if pressed too far. Players who know they have a GM who will wrap them in metaphorical cotton wool can react in one of two ways - ennui or transgression (in practice, one often leads to the other). Boredom is a predictable response when players begin to grasp that, whatever their characters do, they won’t be compelled to suffer any consequences. Another reaction to this realisation (or to the tedium that precedes or accompanies it) is for players to push the boundaries of character action to extremes in a desperate attempt to make something - anything - happen; to compel the game world and its inhabitants (i.e. the GM) to respond and so force meaningful decisions and genuine stakes on the group. If the GM persists in giving characters impenetrable plot armour (by which I mean the armour is impenetrable, not the plot, although, given some of my more convoluted games…), the result is very likely to be more boredom which induces yet more drastic choices by the players and so round and round it goes.
But note well the assumption that underpins all of this: that death or serious injury is always and only the worst thing that can happen to a character. This is, I would argue, a fundamental error or, at the very least, a failure by GMs and players to use all of the levers that are available to them to make a game interesting and entertaining.
Character death in RPGs is almost always a purely mechanical process. It comes about because the game rules around damage through combat or falling or poison or whatever impose mechanical consequences that result in ‘zero hit points’ or ‘fatal wounds’ or whatever the wording laid over the numerical metric happens to be. This makes a lot of sense from a certain point of view. By making the process mechanical, players and GMs are all cognizant of the fixed and explicable parameters and so it is ‘fair and balanced’ (TM). It does not require messy interpretation or subjective assessment; math rocks (dice) do not lie and probability is not subject to emotional appeal. And death is… well… death. It is the (usually) irrevocable end; the ultimate sanction. As such, it should not be governed purely by GM whim or fiat and, by making the process one of objective mechanics, this less than ideal result is avoided. Thus it is for very good reason that almost every RPG core rulebook ever produced has a chapter dedicated to combat and, very often, one that includes a plethora of systems and sub-systems that sometimes run completely against the grain of the tone established by the more general rules.
But if character death is the only meaningful consequence in an RPG then strange things start to happen. The paradoxical result is that what should be the most impactful event in the life of a character - its ending - can become either vanishingly improbable or trivial, depending on the particular play style or expectations at the table. In games where character death is considered a disaster, GMs and players have a tendency to seek to avert it at almost any cost which, over time, can lead to ennui or transgression. In games where death is a routine, almost casual, possibility, then nobody is motivated to invest in characters as anything other than buckets of stats and mechanical abilites to be cast aside without much care. As Proposition Joe says in The Wire when speaking of cheap electrical appliances and street level drug dealers that have outlived their usefulness ‘Might as well throw ‘em away and get another’.
One solution to this problem could be the maintenance of a genuine balance between the two extremes of virtually no character deaths and absurdly high rates of in-game mortality. But, truth to tell, I have no idea how I would go about finding that balance and implementing it without relying on the iron laws of statistics to impose equilibrium. As we know from the epically broken Challenge Rating system in D&D 5e, probability is a hard thing to calculate in any system which has so many variables in terms of mechanical character options. Even if a system existed that allowed for the predictable and ‘fair’ establishment of the likelihood of character death, it is not my style or preference to be ruled by dice. If I wanted a game that relied solely on the odds of dice rolls, I’d have played Monopoly or Risk for the last 40 years. And in case, even if a system could be found that actually achieved genuine statistical rigour and I were minded to let dice dictate my games, the problem remains that all of this only goes towards settling a dualistic question - success or failure, win or lose, life or death? After 50+ years of the hobby, shouldn’t we have gotten beyond these rather simple-minded binaries?
Well, the good news is, we have. Almost certainly since the inception of the hobby, and definitely since the ‘story-telling’ boom of the 1990s, individual tables have been playing RPGs where death is only one among many consequences that characters can be faced with, and perhaps not always the most interesting or harrowing or impactful one. This can be achieved by establishing a style of play in which characters are part of a meaningful wider world. They can still be the heroes, but the PCs are not the only true characters in the setting, but rather are one (very important) part of a world in which NPCs matter.
A Brief Digression on NPCs and the Pernicious Influence of Video Games on TTRPGs
As a side note, I watched askance as the term ‘NPC’ crept in to modern discourse as a short-hand term for anyone who one wants to parody or dismiss as having nothing interesting to say or is incapable of original thought. True, the term emerged from video games rather than TTRPGs, but I am deeply suspicious of the closing of the gap between TTRPGs and computer games. It seems that the traffic is all one way, with the former moving ever-closer to tropes and language of the latter (BBEG, ‘play loops’, ‘tank’, ‘glass cannon’, NPCs) in a way that I find dispiriting because this language reflects a changing conception of the experience of RPGs towards the infinitely less satisying, less expansive and less creative medium of computer games.
It is important to note here that when I say NPCs matter, I am not saying that they should matter to the GM. My experience has been that, whenever I try consciously to create an NPC that I think is interesting and that the players should find compelling, it doesn’t work. The only NPCs that players find absorbing are those that they choose to become a focus of their story. The reasons why a group of players might find an NPC worthy of interaction are so varied as to make almost all attempts to force the issue by GMs a failure. This is not least because players themselves often do not have a clear sense of the sorts of people that their characters would find engaging until they are afforded an opportunity to make that choice. So in order to have NPCs that matter, the GM can only create a succession of marionettes and see whether, through interaction with the characters, that NPC evolves into something more real and important.
So now you have worked through this process and, for whatever reason, the feisty, headstrong, tomboyish teenage daughter of the local tavern-keeper you came up with more or less on the fly has attracted the interest of the players (and therefore the characters - I take this example from my own long-running Symbaroum campaign). How does this help with the problem under discussion about the banality of consequences in RPGs? Well, now what you have is a lever; a pressure point; a thing that the characters (and therefore the players) care about, and anything that is important is fodder for stories and action. Better yet, the plots and events that can be coaxed out of this relationship between the characters and the NPC are all the stronger because they rely on the players’ decison to make that NPC part of the tale. To be clear, this is not a process that can take place only employing NPCs strictly conceived. Players can be encouraged to care about pets or places or even objects and the end result is (more or less) the same - a tool for the GM to introduce jeopardy other than the mechanical injury or death of a PC. This is the purest form of meta-gaming - employing the wishes of the players to feed into, motivate and decide the actions of their characters.
For those of you who are already gnashing their teeth about the use of the word ‘meta-gaming’ I’ll up the anté and throw in the fact that an important NPC is an excellent conduit for GM fudge and fiat. When an in-game event or effect will impact a character it is usually right and proper that this is fair process, either mechanically or by not presenting players with an endless series of Kobyashi Maru tests. Those rules do not apply to NPCs. You want to have that good and faithful squire fall victim to a Charm spell or the poisonous sting of the noctiluca? Go right ahead. No ‘to hit’ or save needed. It just happens. Why? Because imperilling an NPC is an excellent way to achieve a number of desirable things in an RPG. It can serve as a clue, a warning to the players, foreshadowing or simply as a meaningful event that is not PC death or injury. Most important of all, it is a plot device or prompt, an invitation to decision and action that is far more powerful and interesting than yet another local lord who wants the strange cave/abandoned mine/lost temple investigated. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.