Greetings gamers from all systems, places and timelines!
Spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077 and Avengers: Endgame, in case you were living somewhere without access to the internet.
Recently, I completed Cyberpunk 2077 on the PlayStation. While the game was enjoyable, I found it disappointing that the main character dies at the end – and not because there was an option to do something which was both awesome and reckless that shut down the antagonists forever. Nope, this was something that was just inescapable, as well as ironic . Early on in the game, it’s revealed that the main character is dying and the whole point of the game is not to do so.
Now I get that not every story has a happy ending and some of the greatest of all time don’t. But when this happens to your character in a table top game it usually plays out and feels significantly different. So as a DM, if you have a chance to kill a player, should you? And, as a player, is this what you expect at the table? To help sort this debate out we are offering our top two pros and cons to consider if this makes sense for you and your gaming group.
Con #1: Empty Deaths
Unfortunately, not every character death is going to be either as cinematically pleasing or as memorable as Iron Man’s at the end of Endgame. With that in mind, some players show up to a game with three characters in a folder hoping to get a chance to try them all, while others spend days or weeks conceptualizing one. So, understandably, if that type of player’s character dies for good in game two, it can be a bag of mixed emotions. You know, somewhere between trying to handle it like a good sport while at the same time trying not to think about how much energy was just sunk into an now unusable backstory.
Not that it feels much better when a PC you have had for a while eats a nasty critical hit in a random encounter and bites the dust. In fact, it’s worse, because at this point you probably were invested in them. In this respect, it’s somewhat like playing a video game when you’re twenty plus hours in and your character dies. Except, when you go to load your save file so you can try again, you find that it’s been deleted. So maybe you went out like a baller in a blaze of glory against the BBEG and you can walk away from the table with a feeling of satisfaction. Or your feeling anything but that because someone in your party set off a fireball trap and you were the one who blew their Dexterity save.
Pro #1: Actions Have Consequences
What does a campaign look like when none of the players get zeroed for good? Well it can go one of two ways. Sometimes the players really appreciate that they get to play a character which they enjoy for so long and reach their version of a happy ending. Or it can also go like this other game I was part of back in the day….
In this campaign, the players handled every situation with a frontal assault. Which was like a joke that was somewhat funny the first time but it got old really fast for all those involved. Admittedly the game had gone on for a while and we had become a formidable group. So random encounters that were planned to be both special and over clocked were nothing more than speed bumps in the afternoon drive; except these ones sometimes dropped loot.
And while this might scratch the itch for the player who wants to show up at the table and win constantly, it doesn’t exactly provide an interesting gaming environment. Because if the encounters are hardly challenging, there is nothing encouraging anyone to to think twice about yelling initiative at every foe they come across. So we went around the world hacking monsters of all forms to bits, taking their stuff until we no longer felt like it, the end.
Con #2: Upset Players
Years back I was in a campaign with DM Thorin that had an extremely high character mortality rate. Not because we were being bad players, but the DM had hot dice and the edition we were playing took no prisoners. During one of our typical harsh battles, his character was about to die for the third time and his response was “if I eat it here, next time I’m coming back as either Freddy the Fighter or Wally the Wizard.” Meaning that he was still going to roll up another character, but he would be pretty checked out.
In other cases, after their characters death, some players never said that they were either mad or upset. But later dropped out from the game for completely unrelated reasons, such as needing to put in more hours with work or school. I can think of few people who I’ve gamed with who are still salty over the loss of one of their characters over a decade later.
Pro #2: Not Upset Players
There is a degree of sacred disbelief which is hidden behind the great curtain of the DM screen.
Sometimes the person running the game intervenes to save a character or even the party from a TPK in a way which shatters the continuity. You know the scenario where the random NPC that gave you the quest just happened to arrive at just the right moment to destroy all the monsters when things got out of hand? Or when a low level character dies and a random God swoops them up, makes them their herald and puts them back on the board better than before?
I’ve seen this happen a few times over the years and while each one had its own varying stench of cheese, this next one has to be my all time favorite:
We were playing in the Rifts system and one of the players really nailed how to play the “selfish” alignment, which is that game’s version of Chaotic Neutral. First, we tried to talk some sense into him and, when that failed, one of the characters who was wearing something called “Glitter Boy” power armor shot him with his Boom cannon. (Look it up you won’t be disappointed)
Needless to say, he was dead.
But wait, a mysterious demon got a hold of his soul and gave him psychic powers and revived him so he could have his revenge on the party for his murder. This would have been a cool story in a graphic novel but played quite differently in a TTRPG.
Final Thoughts
After years of being on both sides of this issue, death is a necessary component of the game no matter what system you are playing. You at least you need your players to think that you feel that way.
TTRPGs are not novels so when one character dies, the DM has to keep moving on with the story. It’s not planned out by an author.
Of course this is where I am obligated to say something about the value of good communication which should take place not only during Session Zero, but throughout the entire campaign. And if you have read the room and feel that bringing an expired character back is the right thing to do, it should come at a cost. Maybe they will be undead or need to win their soul back before a year has passed. Just make it interesting and not debilitating, so that now that they are back they aren’t stuck with in an unplayable scenario.
What are your thoughts on such a contentious issue as death in your games? Where have you found the best place to land on the subject? We’d love to hear your stories.
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[Alternate PoE. A mysterious, rather selfish demi-god pilot is flying mach10 in his Metal Siren, while his AI reads him the daily version of his universe’s Reddit feeds]
Gemini: “heh.”