If It Can't Be Killed, Don't Put It On The Board

I've been playing tabletop RPGs for the entirety of my adult life, and I've been a Game Master for a not-insignificant portion of my time at the table. And while there are a thousand and one moving parts that we could talk about when it comes to our games, I want to discuss one of the most important aspects that it is all too easy to fumble when you sit behind the screen.

Namely that if you're going to put something on the table, then you need to be prepared for it to be killed. Even if there's no reason your players should try, or if the chance of them succeeding in this task seems infinitesimal, you need to be ready for it. Because if the impossible happens, it's important to concede with grace, rather than trying to pull some last-minute deus ex machina because you wanted to use that character again at a later juncture in the campaign.

I am speaking from experience, here.

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The Agreement Between Players and Game Masters

There's a social contract between players and Game Masters that is often unspoken, but quite important. Among other things, we all agree that the world in which our stories take place will weigh equally upon all characters in the game. Now that's not to say that all characters will be equal in power level, ability, or toughness (that's clearly not true), but we all agree that the rules are there to govern everything in the world.

If the troll hits the wizard, and does enough damage to crush his skull, then that's what happened. However, if the sorcerer hits the troll with a fireball that does enough damage to reduce the troll to a cinder, then the GM should let said troll die. Even if they were meant to be a bigger threat, or to flee from the combat to inform their superior about the intruders, or if they were supposed to be a recurring bad guy throughout the campaign who would be beaten time and again, sometimes the math says no, this character is dead.

Fortunately, dead isn't always dead for long.

Now, as an important caveat to this statement, both player characters and their antagonists often have ways of undoing (or outright cheating) death in a particular RPG. In Paranoia, for example, player characters all start with a certain number of clones that can be shipped in when they're dead. Similar contingencies can be used for villains, as that's part of the existing ruleset. Dark Heresy, and other Warhammer 40K RPGs, use your Fate attribute as a resource you can spend to avoid being permanently killed. And while average NPCs don't have enough Fate to pull this off, important, named antagonists do, meaning there's a contingency option if players pull off a surprise victory and you want your villain to live another day.

This isn't always a game-specific caveat, either. Games like Pathfinder, Dungeons and Dragons, and others often have some form of resurrection magic in them, as well as various lesser forms of re-animating someone if they've died. In addition to spells like raise dead and reincarnation, one might also be turned into a powerful undead, be sworn to the service of a devil, or granted a favor by an angel to come back. There's all sorts of reasons for characters to come back on the board, and if you need any kind of inspiration all it takes is a basic flip through the supplement I'm Back- 25 Reasons For a Villain's Survival to get your juices flowing!

However, all of these items mentioned function off of mechanics that exist in the game, and these are (at least in theory) things that anyone could access under the right circumstances. More importantly, use of these options does not take away a victory from the players if they earned it; their accomplishment still stands, even if a villain they killed or defeated is resurrected somehow at a later time into a new, deadlier foe.

With all of that said, I feel this next piece is important, and I say this as someone who has made this mistake in the past (namely in my module The Curse of Sapphire Lake for those who have played it). In short, you should not build a campaign assuming that a villain can get away when you want them to. Whether it's a monstrous war leader, a cowardly necromancer, or just a noble lord revealed as a twist villain that you expected to be able to escape from your party in a dramatic moment, if the player characters caught or killed them fair and square, don't take that away from your players... even if it means you have to get creative with how you continue the story from that point forward!

A Note on Gods, Outsiders, and "Untouchables"

A large number of games (particularly fantasy games) tend to escalate things to the point that players take on the gods themselves, attempting to kill them with the power of math. Games like Call of Cthulhu or Changeling: The Lost might even go so far as to directly position gods (or at least godly figures) as the antagonists of their games. However, the question you need to ask for yourself, and for your game, is whether these godly entities operate on the same playing field as the rest of the characters, and if they are going to interact with the player characters in any meaningful way.

If these godly entities are bound by the same mechanics as other characters, and if they operate on the same plane of reality as other characters, then these things are also able to be defeated (even if true death is a far more difficult state to achieve for them). If they aren't bound by the same mechanics, or they don't exist on the same plane of reality, then one could argue that these entities shouldn't be involved in the campaign beyond the absolute necessities, if at all.

This will vary by table and taste, of course. However, if there are powers beyond the players' ability to challenge, and those powers are going to be playing an active hand in the story they're participating in, then it can feel like those things are just the GM's hand in a very visible sock puppet. That's not to say that you should tirelessly stat out every single entity the players might possibly come into contact with, but rather, ask yourself if there is a dialogue in the challenge, or if it's utterly one-sided. If something can affect the player characters, but there is nothing those characters could do in any way to affect that something in return (perhaps because it simply doesn't have stats) sit with that for a bit and consider the message that might send to your players.

Further Reading

If any of today's post resonated with you, or if you'd like to check out more advice like this, I'd recommend taking a look at 100 Tips and Tricks For Being a Better Game Master as well as 100 Tips and Tricks For Being a Better RPG Player. A lot of the advice in these supplements condenses the best tips I've given here on this blog over the past decade or so, squeezing them down into a simple, easy-to-digest format!

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