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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8959390" data-attributes="member: 82106">Honestly? If you want just a completely divorced from any previous context answer? In neither Blades in the Dark, nor in Dungeon World, nor Torchbearer2, three 'narrative' type games that I've played recently, nor in 4e D&D as I ran it for 10 years (as a pretty narrative game), was death literally mechanically 'off the table', nor was there ever any agreement between participants that it would be off the table. In BitD if your Harm reaches level 4, you DIE, plain and simple. Its not THAT hard! Harms stack, so if I am full up at level 2 harm, and I get more level 2 harm, that's it! Level 2 is a pretty ordinary consequence too! Heck, serious threats dish an AUTOMATIC level 2 harm every time they get to move! (it might even be level 3 depending on the relative power of the threat and the PC). You do have armor and the ability to resist, so normally you can kind of mitigate the harm strategically and make it through, but not always. You can also 'trauma out' in BitD, 4 traumas, you're a jellyfish, no coming back. Trauma CANNOT be removed from your PC either, its a ticking 'you are done playing this character' 4 tick clock (there are ways to add a 5th tick).In Dungeon World, you have hit points. MANY monsters can simply do damage to you as a GM hard move! Some of them bypass armor and other nasty stuff too, and armor is only so good. I don't think DW is generally a super deadly game, but there aren't actually hard and fast rules about that. The rules are more like the GM is supposed to be a 'fan' of the characters and make their lives dangerous, etc. You could certainly interpret that as "kill them unless they really work to survive!" It would be a particular spin on that game, but I don't think it would be 'wrong'. (nor is our less generally lethal play).Torchbearer2 is actually pretty hard to survive! Its a rather brutal game to be honest. I mean, dying is not going to happen like "gank! you were fine, now you're dead!" (I guess it is technically possible) but death is simply a condition! You can certainly be killed by, say, losing a fight with a tough monster (one with a might of 4 or higher would likely kill you if you badly lost a kill conflict fight to it). My first PC actually got ganked in a fight!Death is thus perfectly well on the table in all of these games, and its supposed to be. However, its VERY likely if you do get killed, there will be at least something dramatic about it. In BitD you're probably in a pretty epic fight, trying to help your buddies carry out some score that they need to pull off for reasons that are important to them. In Dungeon World, you probably die trying to fulfill a bond, or an alignment statement, or fending off a campaign front doom, or something like that. TB2, meh, maybe you just die in the muck, but its kinda the point of that game...</blockquote>

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