Lately I've been watching a number of YouTube videos about tabletop roleplaying games: gaming tips, rules information, advice, alternate rules, that sort of thing. And in watching a variety of different channels, I've become a little frustrated by one particular idea that seems to be stuck in everyone's minds as the most important challenge player-characters should overcome or avoid in ttrpg's: death.
Character death is pretty rare in the gaming group I've been playing with for the past 25-ish years. Admittedly, death isn't always permanent in fantasy games. There are magic items and spells that can bring a character back from death. They're costly and sometimes difficult to come by, but they exist. Our group does not rely on those exclusively, though.We have a house rule in some of our games that states that if a character dies and another character can get a healing potion or spell to the fallen character within the same turn that the death occurred, the character's spirit hasn't yet left the body and the character can be brought back to life immediately without any detrimental aftereffects. It's equivalent to giving a person a shot of adrenaline to restart the heart.
I know that thought might be offensive to some players of fantasy ttrpg's. What good is the story if the characters can't die? Won't they lose all sense of caution? I'll admit my roleplaying experience is almost exclusively with this group, and I haven't played with a group where character death is a common and accepted part of the roleplaying experience. But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy that, and I think most of my friends feel the same else we wouldn't be using that house rule. When we create a character, we want to play that character until the end of the story. We want our characters to be the heroes, to save the day, to be friends and comrades by the end of our shared tale. They can't do that if they die permanently.
There are those who will say that not having permanent death as a consequence makes tabletop games too much like console and computer games, where you can restore from a previous save to prevent your character from dying. To that I say, what's wrong with that? When I've invested a lot of time in my Skyrim character and I want to find out what it will be like to play that character all the way through the main plot of the game, I don't want to have to start over with a new character because my original character died. And when I'm involved in a tabletop game I feel the same way.
I generally have a concept that I want to follow with that character, and I want her to make it to the end of the story. I don't want to have to come up with a new character and find a way to fit her into the existing party, and I don't want my GM to have to go through all kinds of story contortions to do that either. Our group often play pre-written adventure modules, and in many of those it can be challenging to find a way to fit a new character in. Just recently we've been working our way through the Pathfinder Adventure Path 'Mummy's Mask', much of which takes place in various ancient pyramids and tombs in the midst of a great desert. That makes it a bit difficult for a new character to show up. If the party doesn't leave the pyramid for days and doesn't have the magical wherewithal to teleport to the nearest city on a shopping trip, how do you introduce a new character into the group?
Recently the issue of adventure paths/modules has made me even more aware of the problem of making death the primary challenge. What happens if you're in the last chapter of the module and one of the PCs dies? What happens if you're in the middle of a dungeon when that occurs, and the rest of the party can't or won't leave? Now you've got a player who's doing nothing, or running an NPC in whom the player has no investment, or quickly trying to come up with a new character on the fly that they'll only be able to play for a short time before the campaign is over. Where's the fun in that?
If I continue to take Mummy's Mask as my example of how using character death as the primary challenge: in our group's campaign the party is currently inside a huge pyramid trying to stop the Big Bad. They don't have any NPCs with them, and every other creature within the pyramid is an evil servant or ally of the main villain, so those NPCs can't suddenly become player-characters. What would happen if one or more of the player-characters is suddenly slain and can't be brought back? What if the entire party is killed? They fail to achieve their goal, the Big Bad goes on to take over the world, and the players are unhappy and dissatisfied.
My argument here is that there are other ways to challenge the players and their characters without constantly using the potential for death as the motivator. There are many other things the characters could lose besides their lives: family or friends, reputation, self-confidence, wealth or power, home or homeland. I certainly don't expect the game to let them walk through every challenge without a struggle, but the ultimate threat doesn't always have to be their demise. The characters can still exercise caution if they're running low on resources, or they're trying to make a good impression on someone, or they want to adhere to a certain code of conduct. In my group we all want our characters to survive to the end, so we work hard to avoid getting killed because we don't want to miss out on the experience of going through the entire campaign with that character. If making that possible requires a house rule or some dice fudging on the GM's part, that's all the better. The point of the game is to have fun, and for me having my character die in the middle of the story isn't fun.
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