Greetings gamers from all systems, places and timelines.
2020 was definitely a year to remember. Because of all of the insanity that has befallen the world, like so many others, I found myself with serious time on my hands. Time which, for me, turned into an opportunity for some equally serious gaming.
All this time spent running and playing games provided me with a degree of D&D-related clarity. There are three observations I would like to share with you now so we can continue refining both the quality of our games and styles as players going into 2021 and beyond.
Here’s part one, and the next two will come in following weeks
Observation 1: No one likes character death, but it’s a necessary evil
Now, to be completely fair, this topic has been hotly debated during all my years of playing (and across multiple editions of D&D and even different systems entirely).
Unlike 2020, I doubt this issue will be left in the past because of the very complexity surrounding its nature. Both parties in the argument, the DM and the player who has died, both can make fair and valid points. While it is true that death and killing/slaying monsters are literally woven into the fabric of the game itself, killing off a player is when the rubber really hits the road.
I know what some DMs are thinking: Players die all the time, it’s part of the game, roll up a new character and move on. Some players can bounce back from this effortlessly. I remember one game when my fighter died and I had a new character rolled up before the rest of the party even buried him.
However, in my experience, most players do not take character death this well. (And, honestly, I hadn’t played that character very long, so there is that.)
Character death is the ultimate reality check for someone playing in a fantasy world.
There is no punch to the gut quite like losing a character you have been working on for the last 14 or more sessions. Having a craptastic year? Well, now your favorite character is dead too!
Just to clarify, by this I mean permanent death, not “Your character will be back next game after a trip to see Miracle Max” because you’re “dead dead.”
Now, as a rule, I never specifically “try” to off any of my players. (Because, if I wanted to play inside a giant near-endless death trap, I would just go back to playing the original God of War. But I digress.)
A character dying should hypothetically mean something, but the key word here is “should.” If your character had to die, we would all probably want to go out like either Iron Man or John Marston, but both of those moments were carefully scripted.
Since I don’t plot character deaths, my players have perished over the years in random encounters that went south, grisly traps, or from an unlucky boss crit that nailed the character so hard the person playing them felt it!
Some of these deaths seemed random and/or unfair because it was how the dice fell. Unfortunately, there is no cut-and-dry formula for when a DM should allow a player to come back or not. Over the years, I was a player in two games where this was an issue on both sides of the argument. One game tanked because the DM wouldn’t allow a key player to come back to life, which the other players felt killed party chemistry. In another game I was in, the players had the ability to bring their fallen party members back to life. The problem was, the game was so difficult they were all sick of dying (and that’s a tough one to argue with).
My advice is keep it real and as a DM: Don’t get into the habit of bending fate or reality to bring characters back. Otherwise, it will leave the story with barely any tension as players feel little-to-no consequence towards any of their actions.
On the flip side, if your party is trying to revive a character by means of something like a revivify spell, make sure the material component of a 300+ gp gem is actually used. Here I wouldn’t hesitate to make the party use a more expensive gem to cast the spell as you only have one minute after the person’s death to revive them and the spell won’t make change. (How much did we really like the rogue? I mean, did we “like like” him?)
Final thoughts
Character death is something that does and should happen in D&D but I (quietly) recommend that this is used sparingly. If not, the DM is just running their world on an ultra-violence difficulty without save game and load options. Don’t be surprised when your players just start making throw-away characters like Wally the Wizard and Robbie the Rogue because they know they’ll have a max shelf life of 2.5 sessions.
Whether a character dies in some epic blaze of glory or not, their death usually does mean something, at least to the player. Case in point: If I were asked to remember every character I’ve ever played, I would really need to sit down, get a pen and some paper, probably a cup of coffee, and give that some serious thought. However, if you asked me which of my characters died, I could rattle those names off rather easily,
Let’s now have a moment of silence for all of the characters who wrote their names in the book of the dead in 2020.