1. What’s Fun, What’s Not
Nobody likes it when their character dies in a role-playing game. It’s just not fun, and RPGs should be fun.
But the suspense of being in a situation where your character might die…well, there’s nothing else like it. That’s intoxicating.
How do you square that circle?
Most GMs, especially in D&D, lean heavily on the mechanics that make it virtually impossible to die. Even after you’ve gone to zero hit points, there’s still death saving throws, right? And, in addition to that, your enemies don’t hit you after you’re down. And, in addition to that, your friends are usually available to heal you.
And, and, and.
Those same GMs give you plenty of warning if you’re going into deadly situations, so you can know to prepare more, to be more cautious, while still allowing for a more carefree, chaotic attitude in most cases.
This works, for the most part, but it still feels like an unfortunate dynamic to me. Because it still leaves GMs scrambling when the dice do say that a character has to die.
The alternative is — well, the GM hastily concocts some sort of deus ex machina that prevents the death.
That saves you from the unexpected demise of a character, but it takes the tension away, too. You know, the thing I said was so exhilarating? You can’t both have the delicious suspense of death around every corner and the safety of knowing your character will survive.
For me, it’s a fundamental contradiction of D&D and its ilk.
2. The Horror, the Horror!
In horror RPGs, like Free League’s Alien (yes, from the Ridley Scott movie and its sequels) and Vaesen (dark fairytale 19th-century Scandinavia), death is far more overt and commonplace.
The Alien RPG’s mechanics are specifically designed to replicate the movies, where, once the action starts, tensions run ever higher, and violent ends pile up.
Marrying the RPG format (where you’re supposed to have the agency) with an Alien movie (where there’s tons of inevitable deaths) is not, for me, a great combination. The two sides aren’t complementary: they’re at war.
I want to feel like I have at least some say in whether I live or die, and how. And I didn’t feel like I had that when I played the Alien RPG.
OK…but if that’s true, then why do I think Vaesen, published by the same company, with many of the same rules and even worse player character fragility, works so much better?
Vaesen adventures don’t feel like movies to me. They feel like short stories.
In short stories, there may be a violent confrontation, where people die, but there’s generally only one of them. And every character gets to have their moment in the sun. They’re not just sacrifices on the way to the Final Girl.
You’re more careful under these circumstances, where real death is always right around the corner, but there’s also heightened terror and wonder as well. Personally, I like this setup more than the implied-but-often-not-really danger of D&D games.
And what’s true in D&D is true here as well: if your GM intervenes to save you, the tension goes out the window. So I prefer GMs who will follow through on a dangerous situation. Which isn’t all of them!
3. The Story’s the Thing
The trick is to make the character’s sacrifice matter. And here’s where it evolves from just die rolls and numbers to how both the GM and the player handle the story, the narrative elements.
I’m not a fan of games where it’s all narrative elements, where it’s just players improvising with no rules or rolls — I want the rules and rolls! But, on top of that, you have to weave a tale, something that ties together the randomness of the dice and the structure of the system. You have to make it mean something.
In D&D, the story is more like a novel — and beyond that, a long-running novel series, like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. The characters always come back for more adventures.
But as I said above, I think of Vaesen at a short story. You craft a beginning for your character, and — partially as the dice dictate — you also craft an end. There’s danger, but you have a choice how to go, how to tell your own saga. Unlike in real life, you get to narrate your own death, to your own satisfaction.
And that’s how I square that circle.
Weaponized Fluff 
