Steal This Rule: "Death is primarily a narrative conceit"

Imagine this: you have spent some time kicking off your solo campaign. A few sessions in, you have backstory and lore. You have an entire chart of threads and characters. You have a hexcrawl with a dozen notes. And then, your second level wizard springs a trap and you roll on a table and get poison. The effects say, "Make a saving throw or die." And you roll a critical fail. What happens next?

It is a fascinating aspect of the tabletop sphere that out of all the many genre hobbies - comic books, movies, novels, videogames, etc - that really only tabletop games, including role-playing games, consider the death of characters (or, in the case of many board/card games: depletion of a life point type pool of the player) to be a primary driver of narrative tempo. 

In books and movies, death is side story reserved for plot twists and big reveals and mostly impacting side characters and NPC types. In videogames, while you have a dedicated fanbase of hardcore runs,  you still have restarts and save points and resurrection deals and campfires so that the vast majority of lost run are generally, cognitively, the start of a new one that is very similar to the old one, immediately with little pause. 

In RPGs, including solo play ones, death is an outsized driver for the way we conceive of story beats. A side effect of RPGs being rooted as modular expansions to war-gaming means folks sometimes ask how a relatively deadly game like Shadowdark can be more deadly[Reddit]. and you find cases of people trying to nerf things like fudge/fate/hero/luck tokens or resurrection because, for a certain mindset, death justifies all the AC and the HP and the XP and the STR and the GP. Characters overcome death to face higher level death down the road. Time is a flat circle. 

Searching Google/etc can bring back a host of articles about how to handle character death ranging from "get over it" to "maybe don't kill off characters possibly". It is so baked into the baseline assumption that people who come up with reasonable responses to how to handle it (see Dealing with Character Death [Youtube Video] and How to Handle Character Death in Dungeons and Dragons [DnDBeyond]) still have to dance around whether or not there should be some mitigation for the inevitability of 0HP (usually now some -XHP) in a way not unlike how we would talk about grieving and dying in the real world.

Yet, outside of RPGs, these discussions are almost nonsensical. Batman and all the various Robins have clocked up multiple deaths, each. Many fantasy novels have characters fail battles but the outcome is retreat, imprisonment, or some other safety rope tossed in by the author. These stories are not necessarily about trivializing loss but more finding a way to make 0HP a narrative increase rather than a cease. 

In a recent response to a r/solo_roleplaying thread about lowering lethality to avoid character death, I wrote: 

In a lot of novels, movies, and so forth the main character "dying" is usually just a phase: they wash up face down on a beach, they get rescued by a new ally, they get imprisoned/have to escape, or they wake up in a hospital with no good explanation how they got there.

For this look at Steal This Rule! I want players, especially but not just solo roleplayers, to consider this:

Death is primarily a narrative concept...

That is taken verbatim from many of the micro-setting/scenarios for Tricube Tales ([DriveThruRPG], link goes to the one I've been posting on this blog: "Guardians of the Shadow Frontier"). When I first read this, I merely nodded. As I've played more and more, I realized how it allows the players (including the GM) to regain a piece of power that roleplaying games have traditionally removed from them: to decide what 0HP means. A few bad dice rolls (especially at early levels), a particularly unfair trap, an oracle going a bit awry, or just a side-effect of players not really actualizing the world in the way that characters might: all can lead to a death that was completely unseen or unexpected a scene prior. 

That's partially why I am suggesting to players to go with...

0HP can mean the character is unable to act, not necessarily dead. 

Rather than threating 0HP as perma-death, treat it as a temporary inability to drive the story forward. A 0HP character is knocked out, captured, lost, injured, retreating (painfully), or just generally unable to engage in elements like combat or controlled mobility for a time. 0HP means the character is "at the mercy" of the game world at large (and the enemies that caused the HP loss).

What this means can be a number of things. In a truly-Solo game (one character only) this might involve a time-out of sorts as they regain some HP. During that time, the world goes on without them. In a party style game, the 0HP character might be out until healing spells or items can revive them. At least until the Total Party Wipe occurs. 

Whether captured by enemies, rescued by an ally (or a new character), or generally forced to wake up weak and alone on a dungeon floor, the total loss of HP does not end the story but offers up new avenues to add to their story. 

0HP can be a narrative increase rather than a cease

Who rescues them? What does being captured mean? Are they tied up? Tossed in a cage? Left in a pile of rubble? How do they overcome washing up on shore? How do they survive on a hostile planet after being marooned from a crash? If 0HP is a loss of ability to engage in the narrative then what story beats can you use to return that ability to the character?

Death is still an option if it suits the current story.

And all that is not to get rid of death entirely. The character is not newly immortal. This is not about cheating death but about making the story rich and meaningful. There are times when it it is all said and done that that 0HP = narrative shift means that 0HP = death (at least for a time). This is not about making death impossible but about taking one of the three de facto assumptions of RPGs (random rolls, character abilities, HP/death) and saying we can do something different with it. 

Note that besides Tricube Tales, Fate has had this aspect (PUN!) in their SRD for some time [Fate-SRD]. And I think it is time that we apply it to other games to try and tell the kinds of stories we like without feeling like we are cheating.

Unless you really like 0HD = permadeath and then, as always, you do you, Boo.