Death and Storytelling

What is your experience in reconciling PC death and storytelling?

More detail on my question.

RPG's usually have a random aspect to the cooperative storytelling, that regards combat and that determines whether, notably, PC's will survive or die in battle (or in other situations such as traps).

However, most popular heroic fantasy storytelling in particular, outside of gaming, does not usually see its main protagonist(s) die: Conan, Drizzt, Bilbo, Aragon, they all survive their ordeals. In a game where each player's PC is the main protagonist, how to reconcile PC death with the storytelling?

Also, what do your games look like with regards to personal agendas/quests for PCs, as opposed to common quests? I love it when PCs have individual reasons to be in the story, and individual goals, as long as the group has reason to stick together and pursue a common goal of course, and the personal agendas don't interefere too much. Does this happen in your groups? If so, how do you reconcile the loose ends, or unifinished chapters of those personal agendas or quests, when those PC's die?

There is a thread presently running on the question of fudging dice, and this topic somewhat coincides with this one: in my experience, a lot of die fudging by DM's occurs to avoid PC death. I have no survey to rely my assumption on, but it seems to me like a DM saving a PC from death by fudging the dice, has little to do with avoiding the creation of a new PC by the player, a task that is usually quite enjoyable. I think it probably has more to do with (a) the DM expecting that the player is attached to his or her PC and would not take well to the PC dying (I won't go into this aspect here), and (b) to the point of this thread, that the story spun around that PC will not work anymore.

Of course, the tension in the RPG is often a result of the possible death of PC's. There is suspense in not knowing whether you PC will survive, as a player. And you must select your strategies when you enter battle, instead of being foolhardy or disinterested, if only because you wish for you PC to surive - notwithstanding having fun playing and wanting to create an interesting story during that battle also. So the possibility of death is always present and, moreso, is an interesting part of the game.

That said, I've played in several short and campaigns of the last 4 decades where no PC died. And in others where many PC's died. In both cases, there is the real or perceived impression that the PC's can die at any time. This is part of the RPG premise, at least in a vast majority of games presumably. Have you played in games where PC's simply don't die? Where the DM deploys sometimes obvious efforts to make PC's survive? (I have.) If so, does this kill the suspense and otherwise negatively affect the gaming experience for you?

So, in the end, how do you reconcile death with the storytelling? Not all deaths are heroic gestures that save the day to the expense of the PC's life. Some seem pretty insignificant, sometimes the consequence of a sequence of unlucky rolls or bad decisions. The PC death is likely to leave some loose ends and unfinished business: that PC had reasons to want to achieve the general goal, and reasons to interact with some PCs and NPCs that are still part of the story. How do you reconcile that, in your gaming groups?

(I suspect, incidentally, that answering this question might in fact partly answer why those that fudge dice, do it.)

My view is it is better to lean into the random nature of RPGs than fight it. I also think the surprise that creates, both for the GM and the players, is one of the most entertaining aspects of gaming. So I am all for allowing death to come with a die roll.

Skyscraper said:

What is your experience in reconciling PC death and storytelling?

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I'm going to actually go off on a tangent with this, which is the D&D-significant availability of coming back from death. D&D makes it easy. A mid-high level spell, *poof*, you're back. From a play perspective, it makes sense, the game does try to model plot armor with hps & saves and so forth, but it's challenges aren't so consistently balanced that things don't go south now & then, so it's a safety valve.

But, it sucks some of the sense of jeopardy out of the game, and doesn't fit genre too neatly, so we get the great idea to 'make death more meaningful' by making resurection a big deal - higher level, or all quests & stuff to make it happen.

IMX, and it's thankfully limited, what can happen is you establish that, have a PC death, go through that long, essentially side-quest, to make the ressurection dramatic and all and resurec the PC. Then he just dies again, like, right away, or the player leaves the group for whatever RL reason, and it implodes.

Bottom line, just running a game with a bunch of people who all have lives introduces so many needs to deal with or just hand-wave characters falling out of and jumping back into the storyline, that you should just be resilient about it, anyway, including character death (either just using the Raise Dead button, or just not and having back-up characters - since it's no more of a stretch than if the player left and a new one brough in a different character).

The story is just the name that we give to whatever ended up happening, as a result of the characters and their actions. Whether any given individual either lives or dies, that is what happens, and so be it.

The PCs are not protagonists in some mere story. They are people. People die sometimes. The story of their lives is not always dramatically satisfying; though in the case of fantasy adventures, it tends to be interesting enough.

Trying to impose narrative constraints onto PCs is inherently limiting, because you either cast them into the role of mere story character (thus taking away their impact as a real person who lives in that world), or their story ends up unsatisfying (because the game world does not actually operate on story convention). You can't have it both ways.

[MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] so I understand that you like to have death be a real threat and let the dice decide when it happens (so do I); but this apart, how do you reconcile death with the story that the now-dead PC was linked to, when it happens? Do you simply let the storyline that was linked to that PC exclusively, die with him or her?
[MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] you appear to suggest that death is frequent, but so is resurrection, so it's no big deal because PCs are brought back easily; or in the alternative, you use back up PC's. In the case of back-up PC's, how do you reconcile the story that the PC was linked to, with his disappearance from the game?

Re: the ease to access of raise dead in D&D: I've done away with that spell, personally; but for the purposes of this discussion, let's disregard the situation where the PC dies but is brought back which is, in essence, equivalent to healing the PC.

Saelorn said:

The PCs are not protagonists in some mere story. They are people.

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I'll suggest that we name things a same way to avoid confusion in our conversation. Because right now we don't define story characters and people the same way, you and I, unless I misunderstand you. People, to me, are the players sitting around the table playing a game with me. The characters that are played by the players, both the PC's and the NPC's, are characters in a story. Now, I understand your post to mean that, like in a vast majority of stories, you try to have your characters in that story live and breathe and behave in a realistic way, like people, but they remain characters in a story - albeit a game-driven story in a RPG. They are not people. They are imaginary creations, characters in a story.

Skyscraper said:

Now, I understand your post to mean that, like in a vast majority of stories, you try to have your characters in that story live and breathe and behave in a realistic way, like people, but they remain characters in a story - albeit a game-driven story in a RPG. They are not people. They are imaginary creations, characters in a story.

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Ah, I see you've met Saelorn.

you appear to suggest that death is frequent, but so is resurrection, so it's no big deal because PCs are brought back easily

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I'd say the design of D&D does not assume frequent character death, outside of the lowest levels (especially in the older eds when low-level was kind of a prooving ground), but, has Raise Dead &c 'just in case.'

; or in the alternative, you use back up PC's. In the case of back-up PC's, how do you reconcile the story that the PC was linked to, with his disappearance from the game?

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You just kludge/retcon it together like you're writing for a soap opera and one of the stars suddenly got sent to rehab, or wanted too much money and was replaced by someone cheaper who looks nothing like her...

...one of the classic conciets is that the backup character is a relative of the PC who shows up to claim his stuff, and decides to join the party in his place.

Skyscraper said:

I'll suggest that we name things a same way to avoid confusion in our conversation. Because right now we don't define story characters and people the same way, you and I, unless I misunderstand you. People, to me, are the players sitting around the table playing a game with me. The characters that are played by the players, both the PC's and the NPC's, are characters in a story. Now, I understand your post to mean that, like in a vast majority of stories, you try to have your characters in that story live and breathe and behave in a realistic way, like people, but they remain characters in a story - albeit a game-driven story in a RPG. They are not people. They are imaginary creations, characters in a story.

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Player characters are people, as far as the rules and our choices are concerned. They are fictional people, but people all the same. They are the people which the players become, by the act of role-playing. The only difference is that the PCs are people within the game world, while the players are people in the real world. In every way that matters with regards to what happens to them - in terms of how they make their decisions, and how the world reacts to those decisions - there's no difference.

To say that PCs and NPCs are characters in a story would be a misleading way of putting it, because we aren't telling a story. Saying that the PCs aren't people implies that they're less than people, and don't deserve to be treated as such. I guess the most relevant distinction is that people have free will, where characters are mere narrative constructs which can be acted upon with impunity. If you're telling a story, then something can happen to the protagonist because they're the protagonist. When a player takes on the role of their character in an RPG, their will is their own; there's no element of narrative contrivance, because the game world does not operate on narrative logic, and the PC is not some mere story character.

As far as discussing how things play out in the game, and the ramifications thereof, the distinction between characters-as-people and characters-as-story-elements is more useful than the distinction between people-in-the-real-world and people-in-the-game-world. The real people are pretty much irrelevant to the conversation, since they can't influence the game except as their characters. If we need to refer to the players, we can just refer to them as players.

Every character has a story. Some make all their saves, make good decisions, and don't blow huge rolls in key combats and survive the whole way though. Some fail that first save and die in a pit trap 15' inside their first dungeon. I think whether this approach works for a DM is dependent on how they view a D&D session to a degree. An opportunity for shared storytelling or a game where you roll the dice and take your chances and in the end some story will come out of that. I'm guessing most will stake a position somewhere in the middle.

Skyscraper said:

However, most popular heroic fantasy storytelling in particular, outside of gaming, does not usually see its main protagonist(s) die: Conan, Drizzt, Bilbo, Aragon, they all survive their ordeals. In a game where each player's PC is the main protagonist, how to reconcile PC death with the storytelling?

Also, what do your games look like with regards to personal agendas/quests for PCs, as opposed to common quests? I love it when PCs have individual reasons to be in the story, and individual goals, as long as the group has reason to stick together and pursue a common goal of course, and the personal agendas don't interefere too much. Does this happen in your groups? If so, how do you reconcile the loose ends, or unifinished chapters of those personal agendas or quests, when those PC's die?

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Who here has watched Babylon 5? It was a story conceived to take 5 seasons to tell, 5 years in normal time. A *lot* can happen to people in 5 years, and in several cases things happened to people on the show, that led to them leaving. How did JMS deal with that?

Well, the first was to never have an important plotline that was linked to one and only one character. The characters of Na'toth, Lennier, and Vir were there in significant part to act as backup for G'kar, Delenn, and Londo. If anything had happened such that the actor of one of the ambassadors had to leave the show, there was an assistant who could pick up their plotlines.

But, usually in most games, I don't bother with that level of protection. If a character dies, plotlines that they were connected to are either picked up by another character voluntarily, or they just die. So be it.

And, to the point about fudging - I do occasionally fudge, but it is not to protect PCs from death that would kill off one of my precious, precious plots. For me, fudging is a tool for controlling short-term ebb and flow of play, not for managing long term plots.