A while back I offered a popular piece of advice in Dungeon Design Tips: Find A Reason For PCs To Survive (And Try Again). The purpose behind the post was to remind Game Masters that in a lot of RPGs, death is a particularly boring fail state. After all, you want your players to keep playing, to overcome challenges, and to keep striving... but if they feel like they're going to have to roll up a new character every time they fail a saving throw, or choose the wrong door to walk through, that can get discouraging.
While I stand by that advice, I feel it is important to mention that it is advice given mainly for games where the entire goal is to follow the saga and growth of a single party of characters throughout their adventures. Whether it's one of the later editions of Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, most of the Chronicles of Darkness, Exalted, or any of three dozen other games I could mention, they are structured so that player characters can survive trials and tribulations to persevere. Many of these games even have resurrection spells that allow players past a certain point of growth and resource acquisition to return to the world to continue their quests.
But that is not some universal truth of RPGs. There are games that are intended to be highly lethal. Games for which that is not a flaw, but a feature of the challenge. It's part of the tension that keeps them running, and it's part of the appeal of that kind of play... but if you're going to run a game with high lethality, then you need to make sure you're telling the kind of story that benefits from that kind of Sword of Damocles hanging over the table.
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| I feel we might be in danger, my friends... |
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Fragile Characters, More Contained Stories
Whether you're running something like the doom metal game Mork Borg or one of its imprints, something like OSRIC, or something a little more mechanically complicated like the latest edition of Warhammer Fantasy, there are a lot of RPGs out there where the world is supposed to be lethally dangerous. Games where even experienced characters can die due to a lucky shot from an enemy archer, a missed save against a spell, or just being surprised by an enemy at the wrong time.
However, when that is part and parcel of your game, it's important to recognize that you need to change your storytelling style, stakes, or both to reflect this sharp curve up in lethality. And there are a couple of games I would recommend GMs examine, as well as an entire genre that a lot of people have forgotten about in the dusty tomes of the pulp era.
Namely the Sword and Sorcery genre, which had a much greater impact on the early days of gaming before high fantasy rose to eclipse it.
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| Things are terrible, and they're only going to get worse. |
The first game I would recommend is Darkest Dungeon, a dungeon-crawling RPG where your "heroes" delve deeper and deeper into dark dungeons in search of treasure and answers, surviving battle with horrible foes and fighting off madness. The second game I would recommend is Fear and Hunger, where players must survive the terrors that lurk in the forgotten depths of an ancient dungeon, and where the simple, initial motivation of freeing a prisoner becomes far more convoluted by the game's end.
Content warning for both of these video games if you've never come across them. We're talking some Lamentations of The Flame Princess level stuff, so proceed with caution.
However, while both of these video games are survival horror wearing the skin of sword and sorcery, they illustrate in both tone and mechanics what I'm talking about in this week's post. Because in both games there is a high amount of lethality, and even if characters survive they may be crippled in mind, body, or both. Every encounter poses a serious risk, and every step further into the darkness comes with the potential for risk and reward alike. Additionally, both games are built on a basis of players feeling like they're gambling with their character's lives with every decision they make.
This speaks to the kinds of stories high lethality games tend to tell. Because if player characters could die on any given roll of the dice, then grand, sweeping epics where we follow their entire journey aren't really a good fit for those mechanics. Rather it's a good idea to focus on something smaller, tighter, and more serialized. Also, it's a good idea to not put combat as the central focus of the games, or the sole method for achieving goals.
For those who haven't seen this video, I talked about this diversity of solutions regarding the World/Chronicles of Darkness a while back.
Consider, as an example, the humble dungeon crawl. Yes, these adventures are inherently dangerous, and there is at least the opportunity for combat to occur, but these locations are also filled with traps, puzzles, and natural disasters. And while we often focus on the dungeon part of things, the crawl is there because they're meant to be tense. Players are meant to move quietly, carefully, and to make sure they don't step on a concealed switch, rest their weight on the wrong board, or rush headlong into an ambush. While the foolhardy might charge forward shouting a battle cry and banging their ax on their shield, that's a good way to die a quick, pointless death.
But high-lethality games are good for more than just dungeon crawls. They're great for high-stakes heists, for mysteries (particularly murder mysteries), and for games that tend to focus on a single, relatively contained story. Rather than using the Lord of The Rings as the framework, where we follow the fellowship across their massive walk across the continent, consider something more akin to Conan, Solomon Kane, or even the James Bond stories where we follow the characters through adventures that each stand alone as their own chapter but could be connected into a series if you wanted them to be.
Build The Story As It Goes
Another contention I have seen from the old guard who grew up playing high lethality games is the aggression toward the idea of working out a character's story before the game even starts. As the argument goes, "Your character should be a blank slate, and they should be shaped by the adventures they have!"
I disagree with this on a fundamental level, however, I feel like this comes from a lesson learned in high lethality games. Namely that you need to come to terms with the fact that your character is likely going to die long before they get within bow shot of old age, unless they're starting the game as a senior looking to go out in a blaze of glory. If you're going into a meat grinder, don't get attached to an endgame you're probably never going to reach.
This goes for players and Game Masters alike, though, so perk up your ears for this one!
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| Because there's a LOT of stuff to take in here. |
Just as players should probably have backup characters and concepts for when their current character dies a horrible death (it's statistically likely, after all), Game Masters shouldn't count on the characters making specific decisions, acquiring particular items, or even surviving in order to create a single, unbroken plot.
Now, those who've played adventure paths or pre-written campaigns have likely noticed that they read like long novels. You can switch characters in and out as it goes, but they're meant to act as supporting stories for the same characters from beginning to end. High lethality games, though, work better as a series of modules, each of which might be a chapter of an unfolding campaign. Because characters might die, but it's far easier to come up with some kind of way to continue on (and to introduce replacements) if you're just flipping back to the start of last session.
Think of it like how a video game might start you back at the current level when your character dies, instead of sending you back to the start screen to do it ALL over again.
But this is where building the story as it goes comes in, as well as collaborative efforts between the GM and the players. Do the players just want to put together a whole new party, and start a whole different adventure? Do they want to put together a new party that all have reasons to seek out their previous characters? Do they want to put together a new party to complete the adventure that killed them, but they want these new characters to be utterly unconnected to their previous characters and whatever stories they had going on?
If you've been planning specific arcs and long-term goals, then as a GM this will be intensely frustrating for you, because now all the things you'd planned as character moments or opportunities for the first band is going to waste because they're dead. So the Game Master also benefits from not planning too far beyond the current chapter, because they don't know if the characters are even going to be around when it wraps. So plotting for a high lethality campaign is basically akin to prepping a series of modules... you can't go too far down the line, because if you do there's a good chance the characters in question will all be dead, replaced by fresher faces.
Why You Can't Just Bring Them Back
Have you ever seen a parent that counts down from 3 when a child is misbehaving? The child knows that if the parent counts down to 0 then something is going to happen... but if the parent gets to 0 and they don't do anything, now the kid knows it's a bluff. From that point onward, there's always a chance that nothing is going to happen.
This is also what happens if you have a high-lethality game, but you look for reasons to resurrect/save characters who should be dead. Much as with several of the games mentioned above, once resurrection makes an appearance (or once death stays its hand), it takes away the tension and the bite. So while I will absolutely advocate for chases, and the lesser fail states like being taken prisoner or having to face some kind of additional challenge, games that are supposed to be lethal are the ones that don't benefit from allowing characters to just come back from the dead... not unless there's something going on beneath the surface, at least.
After all... coming back wrong can be useful for Game Masters. Especially if it means there's a ticking clock over the character's head that might lead them to taking a few more risks than they normally would to try and escape their dark fate.
On the subject of resurrection, though, I would check out the sourcebook for The Black Ballad (which is all about campaigns set in the underworld once a party dies), the supplement I'm Back: 25 Reasons For A Villain's Survival, as well as my older post Villains Can Cheat Death (Without Taking Away Your Players' Victory).
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