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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Undoing Character Death: Unique Methods of Resurrection in Pathfinder

Before we get started this week, I'd like you all to know that I've bowed to the pressures of the Internet. I am now on Twitter @nlitherl. Come follow me if you'd like to watch me stumble through this quip-based form of social media.

Every experienced player has a story about character death. Whether it's a heroic tale of self-sacrifice like when Blackwood the Mad held the bridge so the party could escape, or a frustrating account of how that level one dwarf fighter who didn't even have a name yet went down from an unlucky critical hit, all of us have felt the reaper's hands on our character sheets.

Some of us handle it better than others.

Death is not the end in games like Pathfinder though, especially with spells like Raise Dead, Reincarnate, and Resurrection just a few high-priced spell components away. The problem is that by reducing death to nothing more than another temporary status condition your game can lose a lot of drama, and as we know from comic books an underworld with a revolving door gets really boring really fast.

Finding the middle ground between death is insurmountable, roll up a new character and what happened last session, I was dead at the time? isn't easy. Here are some suggestions for keeping the mystique around death, without making it so every character at the start of the campaign has been killed and replaced half a dozen time by the end of said campaign.

The Death Quest

This is perhaps the oldest trick in the book when it comes to resurrecting a dead character, but it's one a DM willing to roll up his or her shirtsleeves can really make work. The formula is pretty simple; a party member dies, and the dead man's comrades want to give him another chance at life. The priests in town do not have the power to do this, but there are whispers of a miracle worker in the wilderness. The swamp hag with her queer ways, or the necromancer who lives in the frozen waste. There may even be rumors of powerful spirits or forgotten gods who will offer resurrection... for a price.

Just sign on the dotted line, and we'll get this party started.

This could be something as comedic as a trip to the Miracle Max's hut, or as foreboding as finding MacBeth's witches; it all depends on the tone of your game. The point is that the party has to seek out some entity with power over life and death, and that entity will ask some kind of price from the party. If it's a demon it might demand a sacrifice or (if its sly) ask for a seemingly innocuous cost. If it's an ancient spirit it might set a task that must be completed, or the practitioner might simply demand a favor from the party at some point in the future; the most ominous of prices.

The death quest goes one of two ways, usually. You bring the corpse to the entity, and the entity sets the cost. The party either pays it (perhaps it's a year from the end of each of their lives, or some other symbolic cost), or goes off to complete the quest to resurrect their fallen comrade. For groups that don't want to leave the dead character's player out of the action the entity could resurrect the character, and then place a time limit on their new life; so the party is back together, but if they don't bring the aged crone the Heart of Emperors, the lost ruby in the ancient ruins of Halcion by the next full moon, he will pass on to the other side never to return again.

An Outside Force (For Faster, More Immediate Resurrection)

While the Death Quest is a great option, sometimes it just isn't practical. After all, if you're seven stories into the desecrated Temple of the Hanging Damned then you don't need the barbarian to come back in two weeks; you need her back now.

If you have characters that have been around the block a few times then all you need is a creative solution from the DM to make that happen.

Like a diverting chess-based minigame!

This is a solution that works best with examples. So here's a few to chew over!

- Helmund the Red, a hero of the Order of the Dragon falls in battle while helping his comrades defeat the savage Bugbear King. Assumed dead, Helmund's horse kneels by his side, pressing its forehead to his and breathing heavily. Helmund's eyes open, and his steed's close forever. (Bonded creature such as mount, animal companion, etc. gives its life for the PC, or alternatively the action links them together so that their lives are now one meaning if the mount or familiar dies, the PC dies too.)

- Caprica Vaine, alchemist extraordinaire, has a spear driven through her chest during battle. Dead as dreams, the party has just managed to catch its breath when she starts screaming and batting at the flames on her shirt. Her elixirs, potions, and one of her catalysts were smashed open and mixed in the wound. This chemical accident brought her back from death's courtyard through sheer lucky circumstances. (Some twist of fate allows the character to come back from death, but that instance cannot be repeated no matter how the character tries to figure out what happened.)

- Caldon Baile, cleric of Pharasma, falls to the grasping claws of an undead horde. While his compatriots fight them off, Caldon lies dead. Moments later a chill fills the air, and a weak gurgle hisses from his lips as breath finds its way back into his body. He awakens, and the ragged hole in the hollow of his throat has healed in the shape of a spiral scar. He has one phrase running through his head like a mantra; "It is not this day." (Servants of the gods like clerics, paladins, oracles, and warpriests can be presumed to have some sort of special pull with the divine. Similarly, characters like sorcerers from the Destined bloodline may have fate let them cheat death.)

In order for this get-out-of-dead free card to work you need to have a few elements in place. Firstly, it needs to really fit the character and the scenario. While it makes sense for the pious warrior to be given a little more life to fight the enemies of her god, it doesn't make sense for a character who eschews the divine or actively blasphemes it to be given the same deal. Generally the more roleplay heavy a player has been the more opportunities will present themselves. And secondly the Outside Force should be at the storyteller's discretion. Maybe it worked once, but what makes it special is that the player has no guarantee it will work a second time.

Boons, Gifts, and Strings Attached

This method of resurrection is the least common in most games, but it can be the best for both immediacy, as well as for making players feel like their actions really matter (both for good and for ill).

Just take a sip... what could it hurt?

These are the subtle methods which are driven entirely by a character's own actions. For example, say that the barbarian finds an old woman being hassled in an alleyway, and drives the thugs off with a snarl and some busted heads because where he comes from you respect elders for their wisdom. The old woman gives him an ancient medallion to keep him safe, pressing it into his hands and saying that she would be safe as long as men like him existed. If he takes it and keeps it, instead of hocking it at a junk shop or giving it up, then he might find when he should be killed that he's instead brought back from the brink because of the life he saved.

This could take all sorts of forms. Perhaps the fighter defeats a fae prince, but stays his hand instead of delivering a death blow. Maybe the bard was given a tattoo by a tribal shaman as a protection from death after the bard's songs gave strength to the tribe's swords in battle. It's just possible there was something to that old story about the heirloom ring the wizard bonded with, and about how no spellcaster of his line had ever died while he or she wore it.

These methods reflect on story, and on the rewards characters might earn for doing good deeds. There are also less beneficial options.

A dying witch might spit a curse at a bloodthirsty assassin, but rather than dying the curse is to live until he's washed the blood from his hands. The greedy warrior, eager to make use of his plunder, draws the sword of the immortal warrior without pausing to contemplate that all those who have wielded it have died by their own hands according to legend. A soldier who dies with vows unfinished might rise and keep fighting, unable to rest until he's kept his word.

There are a lot of different ways to keep PCs in the game. As long as the player wants to keep playing the character, the method involved is appropriate to the situation, and it feels like a reward instead of DM pity (or the DM fixing a screw up on his or her part) resurrection can be something cool and unique to add into a character's growth. As a final note though, it is also important to ask what happened to your character in-between that moment where they died and where they came back. Being in hell, even for a few minutes, can be enough to make you change your ways when you open your eyes again.

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