Death and Such Again
My friends and I got to talking about death in RPGs (which I already wrote about recently) and we sort of came up with a system for dramatic death. I’m not sure if it’s a good fit for D&D but it would probably work really well in a game with a heavy narrative focus.
Characters can not die under normal circumstances: you won’t die to a stray arrow from an orc, or falling down a cliff (we’ll assume something broke your fall). “Death” means that you’re simply wounded to the point where you can not act until you get a good bit of rest and see a doctor or something. If you get a TPK the group might wake up in the villain’s dungeon.
However, if something that the character feels strongly is on the line, the character can put their life on the line: Whatever they are trying to achieve will succeed, but they might die as a result. The gloves are now off.
Say the player feels really strongly about protecting the innocent: the local orphanage is on fire, because the big bad’s minions set it on fire. The player says “Okay, shit just got real, I’m saving all the orphans.” Now, no matter how low the player rolls on their Orphan-Saving Check, they will succeed in saving the orphans, but a failure means they will die.
As an added bonus, the player’s next character will start at the exact same level as their previous character and they’ll start with an extra point of inspiration to boot.
In the context of combat, the player’s character will keep fighting even after the point they’ve died by the rules, and once the combat is over they will collapse from their wounds.
This system should not be used if raising the dead is an option. Once a character has died a dramatic death they can only be brought back through completing a quest, which may or may not involve kicking down the doors of Hades and saving the dead character.
I’ve heard that Dungeon World has similar ideas, but either way it would be fun to possibly run with these rules. What do @aunafoley @love-ashually and @edgelass think?
The concept doesn’t exist in vanilla Dungeon World, but the third party supplement Grim World introduced the idea of death moves, i.e. dramatic effects that happen upon character death giving them one last chance to go out in a blaze of glory.
It’s a cool concept and it’d be interesting to build a game with such a concept in mind from the ground up.
The thing you’re describing seems a bit like Tenra Bansho Zero’s reverse death spiral, where you get bonuses for being injured and -major- ones if you’re feel like it’s something important enough to check the death box on your health track, and you can always concede a fight without death if you want.
(My favorite ‘come back from death’ mechanic was Tunnels and Trolls, which had a solo adventure you could play through to try and fight your way out of hell.)
I need to check out both of those things. Is the solo adventure you speak of included in the Tunnels and Trolls core rules? I think I might have them from a bundle from a while back.
The Solo was called “Abyss”, it was one of the pocket solos line. Don’t know if it got included in the core rules at any point, sadly, but I also haven’t gotten any of the more recent editions.
I apparently have the latest version of Tunnels and Trolls that was Kickstarted at some point in the recent years and Abyss is included in the core rulebook. Going to read it right now, thanks for the recommendation, I would’ve never known to look for it without your help!
I like the Shadow of Mordor idea of killing something, only for it to come back with evidence of your last encounter. Something like that would be awesome for a character, I think
I haven’t actually played Shadow of Mordor but I’ve heard about it, and there’s one mechanic I could see myself borrowing from it: assuming that the GM can rationalize the characters not dying through a TPK (say, if we assume that a TPK just means “the characters get knocked unconscious and thrown in the enemy dungeon”) the creatures responsible for the TPK could be basically “upgraded” through having taken out the PCs.
So, if the group was taken out in a skirmish against some orcs, the orcish sergeant responsible for taking them out is suddenly upgraded by one “tier” if you will. Suddenly the nameless orc sergeant becomes a named orc captain (who has probably stolen some kind of a trophy from the characters), which will give the players good reason to track them down and settle the score.
deepintheshadyglen