“What is death?”
The Archivist periodically sets such questions to you as their apprentice. The lore of countless worlds offer myriad solutions. Death begins eternal life. Death is oblivion. Death begins rebirth. Death begins immortality in song.
As a spectator to the worlds, death has a new meaning to you. It has no hold on you. Instead, you see it only as a chapter in each life. The final chapter, yes, but a chapter nonetheless. There remains a place for mourning what is lost, but also for celebrating what was lived.
Character death: the End for the PC you have loved for the duration of a campaign at the merciless hand of dice fate. Death is a strange mechanic — nothing else is quite as destructive. All the time and effort put into creating a character sheet is cast aside, let alone the effort creating a character. It can be very distressing to lose a character you are so attached to.
Death had better be worth it.
Value Add
Value Add is the idea that every mechanic we add to a system should bring a benefit. As examples, consider healing potions and encumbrance rules.
Healing potions add value, as they create a new tactical options and make defeat (an undesirable event) less likely. However, they also ease combats. A party that stocks up on potions has vastly improved survivability. When making a balanced encounter, should the DM balance it for a party with or without potions? We gain new tactical options and avoid bad outcomes, but at the cost of increased complexity for the DM. In this case, the good we achieve outweighs the price, so healing potion mechanics have a net value add.
Encumbrance rules require players to track the weights of every item they carry. This means the DM must determine weight for every item, and between them they must remember to add the appropriate penalties. The supposed value add is verisimilitude — PCs have finite strength, so can only carry so much stuff. However, it fails to do this — there are too many unbelievable options, like carrying an absurd number of light items, and anyway, most of us do not have a realistic sense of how much gear our PC could actually carry, or how much any gear would actually weight. These rules introduce more “bad stuff” in excessive book keeping than good, so offer a net value loss. As a result, they are generally ignored.
Death
Now to death. This discussion is inspired by 5e’s death mechanics, but most of this is more abstract, so applies to any system with “death is the end of a character” mechanics.
The Reaper’s Gifts
First, we will look at what death brings to the game.
Verisimilitude
It is true that monster slaying is a dangerous business, and can lead to lethal injuries. However, lethal injuries are different from death.
The 1960 film Spartacus features a training montage. During the scene, the gladiators-in-training shown where to strike. The trainer takes a gladiator, and paints each body part a different colour representing the severity of wounds: red for the instant kill neck and heart wounds; yellow for the slow kills; and blue for the crippling strikes. Although missing some details, the principle stands. Most wounds will not kill someone quickly.
Kill shots were especially hard, as the vulnerable parts could be protected with armour and trained instincts. The easiest shots to land were crippling injuries to the limbs. Once the enemy was crippled, there was no need to fight them — a soldier who cannot walk cannot pursue you, and one who cannot hold a weapon cannot fight. The injured could be abandoned until the fight was decided, leaving the remaining fighter free to focus on the actual threats on the battlefield.
An excellent example of this can be found in, of all places, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. Obi-Wan and Anakin track down their foe, Count Dooku, and attack. Dooku immediately zaps Anakin, leaving him unable to fight back, then turns his attention to Obi-Wan — the attacker still capable to fighting him. Obi-Wan is skilled, and does not go down so easily. Instead, they have an extended duel, ending in Obi-Wan’s injury. It is only then, when he is not under threat, that he prepares a killing blow, only to be thwarted by Anakin. They fight, with Obi-Wan left unable to help, until Anakin too receives a crippling wound.
Yoda joins the fight before the two Jedi are killed, and Dooku, having met his match, is forced to change tactic. For the first time, he tries to kill the wounded Jedi while still fighting. His goal is not to kill them — that would not help him. Instead, he distracts Yoda, who he knows will save them, and escapes.
Humans die slowly. We are terrifyingly durable. Our bodies will canabalise their less essential parts to keep our vitals running if necessary. A “realistic” lethal wound might not kill someone for several days. Those several days will likely be agony for the victim and those caring for them, but they will be days, not rounds. It is safe to assume that this will generalise to fantasy humanoids.
Death is also rare because prisoners are valuable. Killing knights was frowned upon because a man wealthy enough to own that much armour would have a family wealthy enough to ransom him. The same principle will apply to adventurers kitted out with magic items. Someone will value their talents enough to pay. If nothing else, they would make good gladiators. Even low-level PCs have value — a tribe of goblins may try to bargain them away in exchange for being left alone.
If the party are fighting an intelligent foe, the enemy will want to capture them rather than kill. If they are fighting a bestial monster, it will focus on neutralising threats and winning the fight before moving on to execute everyone. Death mechanics do not contribute to verisimilitude.
Threat
Death functions as a very real consequence. If the players are unfortunate, or make poor decisions, something real that they do not want happens.
This point is divisive. Some players enjoy this threat: the danger keeps them excited and engaged. Others do not like the risk. Both are fine — have fun in whatever way you would like! However, 5e faces a problem here.
It is very hard to die in 5e. First, you must be reduced to 0HP, despite the game’s maths making this unlikely, and healing making it even harder. Then, you need to fail three death saves without being healed or stabalised, or succeeding on three saves. Given the duration of most combats, this will not happen before the end of the fight, so your allies will need to do nothing and let you bleed out. Even then, you are more likely to succeed a save than fail it (9 out of 20 rolls are failures, with the other 11 being successes). To make matters worse, you could roll a 20 on any of those saves and just recover.
This is not a threat. Players looking for that kind of experience will want to use a different system. So far, that is fine — no system can be all things to all people.
5e’s problem is that it also fails to please the other side. Death is not a big enough threat for those who want it, but it is still there, which will distress those who wish to avoid it.
The death mechanics of 5e fail to deliver on threat by being both too threatening, and not threatening enough. It is a compromise that achieves none of the desired goals.
Easy Penalty
Death can function as a DM tool. It is an easy penalty to inflict. What happens if the PCs lose this fight? They die. No need to plan anything else.
This is fine. Games need mechanics like this, or the DM’s job becomes impossible. There are other ways we could do this that are less extreme — loss of treasure (which is effectively what Resurection spells are); loss of XP; or some kind of injury penalty mechanic. But death works. The other options are worth considering when we look at value add, but at the very least, this is something the death mechanics do achieve.
The Reaper’s Costs
On the other hand, we have the negatives. What is bad about death?
Disruption
Death is a disruption. The game grinds to a halt for at least one player as they go through character creation (potentially for a high level character), and need to learn new rules. While they are doing this, they are on their own. The rest of the group continues on the adventure until the new character can be introduced, but until then the victim of death is unable to fully take part. This is a significant issue in a social game about interacting with friends.
Derailment
The DM must then find a way to introduce the new character. This may be tricky, depending on the nature of the adventure. Mid-way through an extended dungeon, why do they find a new ally? If the party are the elite guardians of the realm, how come they have never heard of this other elite guardian?
This is a frustration, but can generally be hand-waved as players want to get back to playing the game and understand it is necessary. Nonetheless, it is in inelegant requirement.
Not to mention, of course, any backstory-related plot elements tied to the dead character are now irrelevant, so foreshadowing and preparation are wasted.
Distress
Players get invested in their characters and stories. Over time, their motivation to engage with the world and go on adventures grows, making the DM’s job easier. They get excited about being the character they love.
Death ends this. It is a lost opportunity — they can no longer be who they were. Suddenly, their (new) character will be an outsider, rather than part of a close-knit group.
For at least some players, this is a source of distress, and we would be poor friends to our players if we did not acknowledge this. We play games to have fun. If they are instead upsetting, that is bad, and we should play a different game.
Resurrection
To complete the picture, we must also address Resurrection. This is a built-in acknowledgement that death is an undesirable part of the game. The rules say that if you want to un-die, you can.
Provided you are rich and powerful.
Mechanically, this is fine, and makes a certain amount of sense. Losing a low level character after a few sessions is not nearly as upsetting as losing a high-level PC after years of play. On the surface, we should be happy to have the option at high levels, and the threat at low levels.
However, I personally do not enjoy the suggestion that the rich and powerful deserve to live forever while the weak and poor should die. That is not what makes me excited to play a fantasy game. I will get more enjoyment out of a game where heroes use their ludicrous wealth to make the world a better place, rather than making their lives better while leaving others to suffer.
Value Added?
So, is death worthwhile?
There is little in favor of death. Verisimilitude is a lie (and even if it were not, should give way to what is fun). Failing to commit to either being threatening or avoiding threat leaves everyone disappointed. All death achieves is a price for failure — something that can be achieved in many other ways. Death has value, but there are alternatives.
Death has problems. It is disruptive to the game session; it derails the adventure; and it causes distress.
In D&D 5e, the death mechanics are a net value loss. The minimal good they achieve is not enough to justify the downsides. This is why it is designed to be unlikely, but as with ability scores, making the bad merely unlikely is not good enough for me. This is also why magic that stops death is considered so essential — the mechanics may be bad, but at least there is a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card!
We can do better.
Defeating Death
As things stand, death is a problem. What is the solution?
Plenty of Ways to Fail
The one good thing death offered was an easy way for the DM to handle failure. What could we do instead?
Lose XP
Death could be replaced with an XP penalty, representing the effort needed to recover from the injury. Clearly, this will depend on how you handle XP, but it offers another easy way to attach a real penalty to in-game failure.
Mechanical Penalty
We could use an injury mechanic to penalise failure. Like XP, this is easy to implement, and believable. For ease, we can just use existing conditions (Blinded, several levels of Exhaustion, Unconscious), and set a recovery time (some number of long rests).
Lose Treasure
Failure may affect more than just one PC. In the event of a TPK, the party could lose treasure, and be left for dead. This is easy to do, but feels unsatisfying, especially when fighting an enemy with strong reasons to kill everyone.
Complication
A TPK might introduce a complication in a quest. An intelligent enemy who hopes to ransom the PCs could imprison them. The PCs then have the choice: try and escape, or wait for ransom. If they are ransomed, is the price paid by a friend or enemy? The quest continues, but likely just got harder.
Fail Quest
Some adventures have clear goals. A TPK could cause this goal to become unreachable. Fail to warn a city of the approaching horde? It is destroyed. Fail to guard the royal heir from assassins? They are dead. Unlike a complication, this ends one line of the story. There is no recovery. Instead, the PCs must work out a new way to advance, if any is possible.
Death
Admittedly, sometimes death is unavoidable. A TPK at the hands of an evil dragon leaves few narrative options. In this case, the party must die. Just make it more awesome than all bleeding out over the course of a minute.
Saving Lives
Ideas are a good starting place, but if we want to replace death, we need to turn this into a functional system that can easily integrate into the rest of 5e. Time do do some real work.
Dying
The rules for dying work. We do not need to change death saves. However, they are not particularly exciting. If we know death is not the end, a heroic last stand becomes a little more desirable. We could add the following:
Heroic Sacrifice: At the beginning of your turn, if you have 0hp but are not Critically Wounded, you may act normally. For the duration of your turn, you are Immune to all damage and conditions, and treat all d20 rolls as natural 20s. At the end of your turn, you Face the Reaper.
Death
We also need to replace the rules for death.
Variant Death Rules: When you would die, instead Face the Reaper.
Face the Reaper: You have been critically injured. If you wish, die. Otherwise, gain the Critically Wounded condition.
Critically Wounded: While Critically Wounded, you are Unconscious. You cannot benefit from healing, and cannot gain XP. The condition cannot be removed except by taking a long rest. When this condition is removed, you are restored to full hit points, and are Severely Wounded.
Severely Wounded: While Severely Wounded, you suffer an additional condition chosen by the DM. This condition lasts until you finish a long rest.
Players who prefer high mortality can die. This lets them try out new characters if they want, but does not force threat on anyone else. Being Critically Wounded forces the PC to rely on their party to get them out of trouble — they may not be in a safe place to take a long rest, and may have to face additional encounters while dragging your body to safety!
Being Critically Wounded is also a good opportunity to give a PC a scar. Leave this option up to the player, and do not punish them for it. Let the scar stand as a monument to their survival!
The Severely Wounded condition means the death replacement packs a little more punch. Suitable conditions include (but are not limited to): Blinded, Poisoned, Frightened, two levels of Exhaustion, or one level of Exhaustion and Deafened.
In order for this to work, long rests must be somewhat hard to come by. In my games, there must usually be at least a day of adventuring between long rests. If there is no cost, Severely Wounded can be easily negated. In a future post, I will show how resting can be improved with treasure and experience budgeting. For now, you can leave it as is — this will work like recovery from Exhaustion, so there is already RAW precedent for long-term recovery like this. Just know that it could be even better.
Total Party Kill
In order to recover from Critically Wounded, the PC must be able to take a long rest. If the entire party is Critically Wounded, no one can take them to safety. In this case, the DM must choose an appropriate way forwards:
- Deadly Encounter: The enemy is bent on destroying the party, and shows no mercy. All PCs are now actually dead.
- Complication: The PCs face a new hurdle, with an opportunity to recover. They awaken after completing a long rest, but are still Severely Wounded, and are either prisoners, or left for dead. In either case, it is likely they have been deprived on gear. The path forwards is not obvious, but all is not yet lost.
- Failed Quest: If the PCs were not an important objective, they may be abandoned without further though as the enemy moves on to advance their plans. The PCs wake up, as with a Complication, but instead of having an opportunity to recover face a drastically changed world, and are forced to totally change the direction of the campaign as they attempt to recover from their failure.
Once More Unto the Breach
Different groups will handle death differently. The truth is that 5e’s rules come up infrequently enough that you can get by without changing anything. If you’re happy, that’s fine! Play the game you enjoy. But if you have been persuaded, feel free to try these rules out and let us know how they go!