Systemically-endorsed behavior. It’s what happens when the way we’re told to do things becomes so ingrained that doing those things that particular way becomes second nature. Raising your hand if you have a question, for example. We’re taught to do it in school. Rewarded when we do. Punished when we don’t. Eventually, if we need to ask something in a group setting, we unconsciously lift our hand to politely grab everyone’s attention.
In roleplaying games, the system that is endorsing the behavior is more overt. Despite the adage that “anything is possible in a roleplaying game,” there’s a literal set of rules dictating how our characters can act. By extension, that limits the choices we, as players, end up making. Even if you’re punk AF and rebel, pushing your GM to house rule your idea, you’re still reacting to a rule or lack thereof in the system.
Eventually, all of those choices we make at the table come together to create our story, and that story is influenced by the game.
Ang, Jared, and I talked about this last week during GnomeStew No. 248 – What the System Wants [1]. As I was prepping to record, there was one particular rule that kept nagging at my brain. A mechanic that, like dice, is so core — if not central — to so many systems that its absence is worthy of mention whenever someone describes the game: Death.
The only thing more sure than taxes. The one thing guaranteed to come for us all. And here, on the cusp between October and November, as the northern hemisphere locks itself away for the long dark winter, Death creeps into our minds, makes itself a cup of tea, and takes up residence for a span.
But if we examine the way our games handle death, we can learn a lot more about how the game wants you to play it. The influence it’s exerting over your stories, and how to harness that knowledge to create better campaigns.
The Only Certainty
In most TTRPGs with death mechanics, death is there as a threat and a consequence. This is what awaits your character should the dice fall not in their favor! OoooOOOOoooo! Finger waggle.
Both the game part of roleplaying games and the story part require us to face some consequences for failure. Without repercussions for our actions, there’s no tension in the rolls or in the plot, and without that tension, both game and narrative stall out. So, having death on the table tells us a lot about the kind of story we’re ultimately able to tell.
How? By setting the stakes.
Let’s look at games like D&D and Pathfinder: they have numerous rules about what happens when you run out of hit points, and most of those rules involve whether or not that number comes back out of the negative or goes away completely. But those games also have ways to bring you back from the dead. A lot of ways, usually. Spells. Scrolls. Gods. Going into the underworld and dragging a soul back into a body (any body depending on your proclivities).
That means that while death is a consequence, it’s a temporary one. It’s not the end. There’s hope, and that hope gives our characters the ability to stand up to insurmountable odds.
Now, compare that to a game like Mothership, where death is (hopefully) the end of your character. As a more permanent consequence, death becomes a much bigger threat. The stakes are higher. The tension is greater. And that ramps up the ability of the game to scare us.
Along with other aspects of the rules, Motherships death allows for systemically endorsed fear.
Now, compare both of those to a game like Daggerheart or Legends in the Mist, where permanent character death is a decision the player makes, not the dice or the GM. What kind of stories do these systems encourage?
I would argue that they are pushing players towards grander acts of daring do. Or at least, grand attempts (because we all know how dice are). But likewise, they challenge GMs to come up with consequences beyond simply dying.
Death as a Lever
Here’s the thing: in the grand scheme of storytelling, death is sort of boring. Sure, it can be sad. It can be a catalyst. It can be a number of things. But it’s hard to make the threat of death interesting on its own.
In a schlocky horror film full of expendable teenagers with more libido than sense, the excitement doesn’t come from whether or not the characters are going to die. It comes from how it will happen. Similarly, the drama in A Fault in Our Stars doesn’t come from whether or not the main character will pass away. The drama comes from the relationships surrounding them.
So look at the death mechanics of your game (or the lack thereof) and ask yourself how you can lean into them to enhance the way you’re telling your stories. And I’m not just talking to the GMs here. Players empower themselves by understanding how (and if) their characters can die. In that way, they’ll know how to react in life-or-death situations.
Use the death mechanics as a lever to inform the stakes of your scenes and the attitudes of characters.
Let’s say you want to run a more horrifying game of 5E D&D, but you don’t want to house rule the death mechanics. Lean into the fact that your player characters are going to be getting back up…but maybe their comrades won’t? Maybe they’re the only ones for whom death is not permanent? And maybe the BBEG knows this, so they don’t even bother to try to kill the PCs. Instead, they focus the folks they know they can off for good.
Now, the stakes aren’t whether or not the PCs will die in the fight. The stakes are whether or not they can stop the monsters before the monsters kill their friends, family, and loved ones.
Death Is Not the End
Chasing the rabbit of endorsed behavior can start with the death mechanics, but it doesn’t have to end there. Investigating the systems you play inside is the first step on a longer journey to designing your own. Even if you have no aspirations to be a fully-fledged game designer, tinkering around with rules is rewarding on its own. You’ll approach your games with more knowledge and confidence, and you’ll make informed decisions that will lead to stronger stories in the end.
What do you think are other Rosetta Stone-style mechanics that help us unlock the systemically endorsed behaviors of games? Let us know in the comments!