What is a "Fair Death" in RPGs?

A few weeks back I talked about Death, And Its Role in RPGs. Folks seemed to really enjoy that entry, so I wanted to talk about something that didn't get mentioned at the time, but which is a topic that's been rolling around in my head for quite a while now... the idea of the "fair" death when it comes to our tabletop games.

Death, like a good GM, should be impartial.

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Death, and The Roll of The Die

In the previous entry I talked about the role that death plays in a game, and how it needs to fit with the themes your game is about, and how it should be more than just a thoughtless "game over" screen. However, even if you know the role death plays in your game, the purpose it serves, and how it plays into your story, all of that is just figuring out where death is perching, so to speak.

When it pounces on a player, you need to be sure it does so in a way that feels fair.

Fortitude save? Why?

Death, like all consequences, needs to feel appropriate as a possibility for the actions taken by the players. As an example, entering combat usually has the lurking possibility of death. Some games may be more lethal than others (such as comparing Mörk Börg to Scion, for instance), but when the blades come out there's always a chance that death comes for the PCs rather than for their enemies. Death could also come from starvation, from exposure to the elements, or from traps sprung in a dungeon.

In all of these examples, the player should have agency in choosing the path that led them toward character death. If death is a result of their own decisions, then that is (at least partially) on them.

In addition to being a consequence for actions taken, death should be impartial. Or, put another way, the monsters want to kill the PCs, but the GM shouldn't. Death should be a result of strategy and dice rolls, rather than something that the GM purposefully tries to engineer for whatever reason. Whether it's stacking the deck by throwing monsters at the characters which are far too powerful to be defeated (or spawning new monsters on the field until the PCs finally die), or making sure the saving throws against lethal traps are impossible for the characters to make, this can feel like there was never a point in participating because the end was a foregone conclusion.

Perhaps most importantly, however, death should feel appropriate to the situation where it occurs. A random dragon passing overhead and strafing the party with its breath weapon while they're walking down a mountain path, being struck by lightning, or getting caught in the midst of a massive avalanche without any kind of build-up or context are just random deaths that serve no purpose, except to annoy and frustrate players.

Why You Should Care if Death Feels Fair

Full disclosure, I have never killed a PC as a GM. I'm one of those people who feels that the purpose of a game is to tell a story, and that killing off members of the main cast is going to create far more problems than it does solutions, so I try to make sure that death is held in reserve as a last resort.

Perhaps you take a different view of things. Maybe you feel that death is a natural consequence of playing an RPG, or that it should happen frequently in order to keep players on their toes. We could debate the merits and drawbacks of those beliefs, however, there is a practical reason why death needs to feel like it's fair.

Player engagement.

Buy-in is important, after all.

Generally speaking, when players make a character for a game it's because they want to tell that character's story. Death cuts that story short (unless we're in a Dark Souls RPG style game where death is expected to be fairly common), and even if it can be reversed it can cut down on player investment in the game. The less involved a player becomes, the shallower their participation becomes, and the worse the game gets overall.

This is where the fair death can make a big difference. Because if a character died in a situation that was fair (say they challenged an NPC warrior to a duel, and they were evenly matched, but they just didn't come out on top), then that's just the way the dice fell. It might be disheartening, but you pay your chips, you roll the dice, and sometimes luck isn't with you. That happens. But say that a character was forced into a 1-on-1 confrontation with a warrior double their level who had a bunch of other advantages... sure, the player still got to roll their dice, but doing the math probably feels like rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic; no matter what you do, you're still going down. That sends a message that either the person running the game is incompetent (because they don't understand how to build an effective, fair challenge), they're cruel (they put you through a whole scene just to kill you in a way that's probably humiliating and frustrating), or some combination thereof.

Sometimes PCs are going to die. Sometimes villains are going to die. Those deaths shouldn't be retconned or dodged when they happened as a result of open dice rolls, and the natural physics of the game. At the same time, though, these deaths should not be a result of unfair circumstances, GM fiat, or completely random happenstance. Otherwise players are going to be less and less invested in their characters, since they could just die at any moment leaving their story completely unfinished.

Recommended Reading

This week's installment has been a deeper dive on some of the topics I mentioned in 100 Tips and Tricks For Being a Better Game Master. So if you found this week's installment interesting, consider picking up that splat book along with its sister supplement 100 Tips and Tricks For Being a Better RPG Player as well!

And as a bit of fun, I recently did an audio for the introduction to the latter book. Because nothing is worse than when the Big Bad gets halfway through their monologue, and realizes the murderhobos have utterly stopped paying attention. Worse, they have no idea who this monster is, why they're here, and what this moment represents in the culmination of their story. We are all Faragor the Undying sometimes.

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