Death Happens

This week in D&D, a fight ran a little long, and most of the players were acting bored and twitchy by the end. It didn't help that I killed one of the PCs and several others had near-death experiences.

No matter how good a sport the player is about it (and he was a good sport), there's always an awkwardness when a PC dies. I've noticed it across game systems. The energy level of the whole table drops when one player is involuntarily put out of the game.

You can stop some of the loss by immediately assigning the player to run one of the party flunkies--an NPC or animal companion. But I didn't think to do that before the player, with an hour drive ahead of him, decided to call it a night.

There's a lot of D&D talk about how character death is too easy and meaningless because of access to raise dead effects. I haven't experienced that. I played for four years in a campaign at WotC, where my character got killed 6 or 7 times, sometimes in spectacular, horrible ways.* I gained 15th level three times. Eventually it wasn't a show stopper, but I never ceased to care. It never got boring.

I want to make returning from the dead even easier. It's punishment enough for a player to have to sit out of a major fight. Why should I make it harder for you--for all of us--to keep playing? All good games are designed to keep players viable to the end. I think only atavistic devotion to simulation makes role-playing games different.

4th edition D&D seems to take the Champions-esque smoke-and-mirrors road, which is: Make it so freaking hard to die that it basically won't ever happen, but let's nobody admit that so the illusion of death remains.

Although I never read it (apologies to Monte and Sean who will probably see this at some point), the Ghostwalk setting book had a great solution: When you die, you become a resident of the land of the dead. A ghost. You can return to the land of the living, or you can just stay a ghost for a while. I like the idea of death being an altered state rather than a terminal state.

Riffing off that last thought, I might try introducing another way to do death when our current adventure is done.


*Once, my elf barbarian, Sevet, was killed by massive damage--not the damage itself mind you. I rolled a 1 on my massive damage saving throw. How embarrassing. Then the evil cleric we were fighting cast create undead on his corpse, he sprang up as a vampire, and promptly started tearing into his former friends. The sudden appearance of mid-level barbarian vampire is hella scary to your own party.