Death & - Moving Towards Lethal-Lite Rules

Dying is a big part of living. We say goodbye to our pets, our friends, our family, and eventually everyone when our own time has come. It's the great equalizer, the timer we're all on to get done what we feel needs to be done in our flash of the pan of consciousness. So it stands to reason that my favorite art form (games) engages with death quite frequently - Often as an overly punitive fail state.

THE PROBLEM

A lot of the thoughts here were sparked by Personable Thoughts' fantastic little post Toppling the pillars of the OSR: against lethality - It's pretty short and well worth the read but the gist is that lethality isn't necessary for an interesting OSR experience, and some recommendations of how to remedy that with consequences outside of death (as exemplified by Markus' own Death, Injury and other inconveniences). However one quote stuck out the most to me:

"A dramatic death because of calculated risk gone wrong, or a heroic last stand against an ogre while the rest of the party escapes are fun, interesting deaths. A stray arrow from a random encounter with bandits is less so."

Because, to me, this is the bigger issue I have with lethality in a lot of elf-games - Death (a large and weighty consequence) is largely left to chance and often sets a player so far back that it is more of a "well that was a waste of time" bad feel, as opposed to the more interesting "oh no my blorbo!" bad feel. I think a good dose of randomness makes games interesting, and that the lethal randomness of OSR combat is intentionally there to inspire fear, but to me it never quite works. As Markus points out, it's not particularly ideal to have players "enveloping their characters in bubble wrap, with only their ten foot pole sticking out" - But I think there's more ways to alleviate this fear than simply reducing lethality altogether.

WHY LETHALITY MATTERS

So I first want to push back against reducing lethality altogether (though I think a reduction of purely random lethality is important), and why I personally enjoy a more lethal game. There is something palpable about the tension of a combat where you know a series of bad plays could get you killed. Games (especially OSR styled games) have a heavy focus on resource management, and what resource is more precious than your own life and the time you have left? (See also: Do Fear the Reaper) Additionally, rolling new characters and trying new classes is fun and a high lethality game can lend itself to getting to try out a variety of play modes. Funnels and one-shots also rely on this high-lethality to be as fun and evocative as they are (My time playing Sailors on the Starless Sea was an absolute blast that relied very heavily on its own high lethality). 

Most importantly though, I think lethality is important because death (as mentioned) is an important part of life. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners wouldn't be half as impactful if it wasn't for how fragile its characters are, and it's part of why I was more than a little disappointed to find Cyberpunk 2020 itself isn't particularly lethal.

Now you don't always need lethality to highlight the importance of death: Steel Hearts is a high-octane mech game with high pilot lethality (should you get into a shoot-out) but low MEC lethality (using death to highlight the fragility of the pilot versus their own death dealing machine of depersonalized violence). In games like Vampire: The Masquerade, immortality and its consequences are central (as is the fragility of the mortal lives around you). Even a narrative-heavy, low-lethality game like Blades in the Dark is in dialogue with death at every ghostly turn. Similarly this is why I think Markus' solution works incredibly well for Songbirds given its own dialogue with death, rebirth and transformation. But when it comes to the more traditional dungeon crawl, death is the main avenue for both tension and drama... if only it were a bit more refined.  

In the OSE Barrow Maze campaign I'm playing in, the fear of death has lost a lot of tension. Sure we're afraid of traps and dying would suck, but our armor and HP has become so bloated as to make combat a nuisance more than a terror. Likewise the handful of deaths we have had have felt rather cheap in comparison (with some notable exceptions). A stray arrow from a lizardman being one of the literal deaths that happened which felt very eh - especially when compared to one of my own characters getting his throat ripped out defending his friends, or another character still dying because he boldly thought he could work around an instant-kill trap we'd identified. This is of course paired with the very real world sting of having to start a completely fresh character that you functionally have to grind back up to the aforementioned bloated power-level, which often sucks away attention and emotion from the more interesting consequences of death.

However, to me at least, the solution of dying being more rare feels... off. I'm definitely for insulating players a bit to get them to be more daring, but I like that my character can die, that death waits in every corner, waiting for you to slip up. But I think the key idea there is that you have to slip up for your character to die. You have to push things too far, dig too deep, play hero, or make a horrific misplay. 

What I propose is adding Lethal-Lite systems and procedures to one's games, retaining the looming specter of perma-death but taking away some of its meta-game sting and luck based determination. Your blorbo is still oh so fragile, but the tools you have to defend them and the means you have of moving on when they meet their end can be a bit more robust.

LETHAL-LITE SOLUTIONS

Armor Against Bad Luck - This one is maybe the simplest to apply to traditional, highly random OSR-y systems. Players can sacrifice a magic piece of armor or weapon to negate the consequences of a critical hit against them. The PC lives but the item is lost. Simple. This is an extrapolation from my own GM's house rule that you can sacrifice a shield specifically to negate a critical hit, which also works well. A more codified (and forgiving) version of this would be something like what I have in WILD - a game where a headshot often means instant death. PCs each have a "hat" that can be checked off once per session (losing the hat) to negate this instant-death headshot. A small buffer that immediately gives them an opportunity to retreat now that said armor has been lost and they're truly as vulnerable as they would be in a gunfight.

Legacy Points - Alright so your PC actually died. You opened the obviously trapped chest, failed your save and now there's 4 levels down the drain. Or is there? Legacy Points are a way for Players to roll up a new character without needing to start again from scratch. Essentially the new character starts with the previous character's XP (rounded down to the nearest level). You can also spend XP (let's say 600 to 1) to modify the results of your random rolled character's stats (this can only be done thrice). This way losing a character presents as an opportunity to jump in with a character who will not only be relatively caught up, but has the potential to be far better suited for dungeon survival. Death in this sense becomes a bittersweet opportunity for a new beginning.[*1]

Sole Survivors - TPKs suck. Narratively it's difficult to justify the recovery of any equipment or the passing on of important lessons because, y'know, everyone's dead. If TPKs are on the table, a procedure I recommend is the Sole Survivor (adapted from my own Demon Crawl: Gothic) - Whenever the party is completely wiped, random roll a single member who manages to drag themselves out (likely horribly wounded and deeply emotionally scarred). Grab your favorite "horrible things to happen to my blorbo" table and give it a roll or two. This allows the party to have a contiguous through-line of information and connections, while still carrying the weight of a TPK (in fact it gives the TPK far more weight, as now one PC is having to sort through that grief in-game instead of just breezing past all that death in a new blissfully ignorant party). 

Whatever ZombiU Was Doing - There's a super neat mechanic in ZombiU (yes, the critical flop title for the critical flop console) where whenever the player dies their previous character becomes a zombie that carries around their inventory. This makes getting back one's gear a bit of a hassle, but also fairly interesting in a way I think could be easily adapted to the OSR. Instead of having to haul out every last bit of what you had, it hauls itself out close to the dungeon entrance, you just need to kill it.

Make the Players Kill Their Characters - Alright now we're fully into the New System territory where not a lot of this will graft well onto your favorite OSR and may need a new system altogether. Making the Players Kill Their Characters comes in two main forms:

• Glorious Sacrifice - You know how you can knock down the Jenga tower in Dread to kill your character but instantly get a critical success? That. I think high-lethality games benefit tremendously from a bloodied character who knows the odds are against them being able to sacrifice themselves to make a difference. Is this because I have a martyr complex due to my Catholic upbringing? Maybe - But the option still rocks.
• Everything Drains Life - The other option is that HP (or some other critical resource) is functionally constantly draining at a steady rate controlled by the player. Each roll carries with it the possibility of bringing you closer to death even on a success. In Burnout Reaper the player's HP is also their dice pool (from which they can roll any number of d6s to get their desired result), however any 1s are removed permanently from said pool. This results in players red-lining their characters until they finally decide to relent or die in a blaze of glory.

This post ended up being a lot longer than anticipated, but hopefully it got your own gears turning! Character death (and death in general) is something that's always rattling around in my brain for how beautiful and tragic it can be, and hopefully these Lethal-Lite mechanics preserve the feeling while smoothing out some of the more meta jank of dying in a tabletop game that takes hours to play to a random roll that took seconds.

[*1 : For a more bespoke and fleshed out version of this idea, see my blog post on Re-Imagining Character Progression in WILD.]