Welcome everyone, I’m Sol and today we’ll be talking about character death! Content Warning (CW) for fictional injury and death.
I often say that character death is boring, but what I mean by that is -random- character death bores me. Worse than that, I feel it steals agency from the player on what could be the crowning moment of their character. How a character exits play should always be in the hands of the player, and never at the whim of random chance. At this end of this article, I hope you will agree!
I think we can all agree that player agency is important. Taking control away from a player is seen as a bad thing, and rightfully so. Why is it that killing their character gets a pass? When you kill a character you tell the player “You are no longer allowed to take any actions, speak for this character, or explore their story any longer.” That is the single most agency stripping thing I can think of! Yet we allow it as a consequence for combat very casually. I think that needs to be examined more.
I believe that there are better mechanics we can use when a character is dropped or defeated that will encourage more roleplay, better moments of tension, and empower players and game masters to play more engaging fun games.
From my own table I have a house rule for dungeons and dragons. When you are reduced to 0 hit points I ask you a simple question, “What do you lose?” Defeat carries a cost, and I trust my players to tell me what they lose. They know what they are willing to give up, they know what story they want to tell. So, I let them tell me! I step out of the way of their narrative, I set the dice aside, and I let that player shine. This is established in session zero, I discuss my take on character death and give examples. Some characters lose their life sure, others gain a scar, or lose a limb. Some characters lose hope and retire (but remain playable later), and some lose their temper and claw their way back to consciousness!
When I design games, I always ask myself “How do characters leave play?” and “What are the stakes of conflict?” Looking at those two questions guides a lot of my design decisions, and you can see that at play in Black Hole Era, where the ship you play loses their weapons as they get damaged and eventually are a battered husk unable to stop the alien assault, but you always survive to get revenge. In Last Transmissions from Wayfarer station the assumption is your characters are already dead, they died 50 years ago on this station, you play to find out how it happened and there are no wrong answers! Your character dies when and how you say!
Many games have a health track that leads to the end of a character’s story. This mechanic is tied into so many forms of conflict resolution that when you play a game like this you are drawn to see resolutions in that black and white. You kill the dragon, or the dragon kills you. The mage is killed, or you are killed. There are some abstractions you see, Kill the mage to stop the ritual, kill the dragon to rescue the princess. Yet, they still are framed in death and the end of a character’s story. Mechanics that get shown to us, get used by us, and we are lazy folks inherently, so we take those shortcuts and hold them dear. By changing that single rule, you don’t open anything new to the game (you could always do something different) but by changing it and talking about it at the table, you empower that style of play. You communicate something vital to your table’s culture and ongoing conversation about gaming.
I encourage you to think about character death at your table. No matter how long you’ve been playing for, take some time and think about ways to make that experience better, and to center the narrative power with the players. I promise you, by framing running out of health as defeat and loss rather than death, you will have many more interesting encounters. You can play with more dangerous foes, you can have players make more interesting choices. More importantly, you can have more fun and tell new and different stories than you have before! Just try this the next time you play, the hero is down, they are out of health and defeated, ask the player what they lose, rather than wrapping their story up. Those of you reading, who are playing a game tonight, when you drop an enemy don’t just tell us how you kill them, tell us what you take from them and what they just lost.
The story ending bores me, death is handled poorly by game mechanics and takes away from the player and the story. Dice shouldn’t decide when the story ends! That’s for us to decide!
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