Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Ignore The Text
When an RPG nerd gets into OSR gaming, they quickly learn about the style’s reputation for high lethality. This reputation is not undeserved. Games exist in which you are expected to lose several characters during the first session of play – and OSR games tend to make character generation fast because it will be so often re-done throughout the course of a campaign.
Dice kill the players, risks have consequences, hardcore players plot and scheme to survive absurd situations, player skill turns the tables, and every death is your fault. These concepts are repeated axiomatically by many DMs, but I’m not entirely sure those that follow this dogma succeed with making a highly lethal game sustainable (and more importantly, fun!) to run. It’s easy to fall into a trap where players feel their actions are meaningless if the death is improperly telegraphed, especially if the punishment is to start over from scratch.
I’ll take a look at games my friends and I have run in which I think the concept of High Lethality was not handled well. I hope to learn from these execution mistakes and present a game style which feels fair to players without pulling punches.
Case: My Flameskulls and 24d6 fire damage
Back in 2016 I ran a popular 5e adventure which contained encounters of ambushing Flameskull trios – little bastard flying undead who hate the living and can shoot one fireball each. The setup was simple, hide some Flameskulls in the room, jump out at the players. Explode them.
And that’s how it played out.
Notice something missing?
How about some tension, some buildup, some counterplay? Nah dawg – this was Barovia I needed to make sure my players knew it was dangerous. Mistake.
I wound up downing a wounded bard in one hit and scattering the rest of the party in what was a pretty lame death. The game slowed down, any momentum to the plot was lost, the players didn’t feel like they had any choice in the matter – because they didn’t. Definitely could have been handled much better.
Imagine foreshadowing the pale green light of the undead flames throwing wan shadows that dance under the doorway. Giving players the sound of crackling of fire, tempt them forward with the allure of something bright shining in a pale green light. Use the setting to communicate a choice to the player.
The way many dungeon rooms are written, it’s a simple laundry list of items and occupants – always look for chances to creatively tie those items together into a coherent scene!
Case: The Displacer Beast Incident
A few years back, I was part of a Basic Fantasy west marches campaign hosted on a friendly discord server. For months, around 20 players struggled to level up to 2. I was on my 3rd character in two months – a dwarven barbarian (I figured hitpoints and battle prowess are the way to go here) – and our group had set upon a journey to a collapsed mine to find riches.
We knew we were looking for a cave in the hills, what we didn’t know is that the DM had rolled a random encounter right as we entered the area and had generated a cave of displacer beasts in the same hills as our mining cave. We find the cave, walk in, and are immediately torn to shreds by two overpowering enemies which were also faster than anyone in our group. We spent four hours on that session in prep, travel time, death, and retreat. Nothing was gained.
Again, there was no foreshadowing, no available counter play, and possibly not even a reaction roll on first encounter. Just a sudden detour into death without making any progress or learning anything interesting.
Hindsight is 20:20, but you can always benefit from that hindsight in the future. There are tons of way to do a thematic beast cave with interactive foreshadowing for the players.
You could hook em in with something silly “You step in beast dung, weird though because you saw the pile and walked 3 feet away from it” to eventually get to “The droppings were displaced!” – that would put the party on guard for the beasts well before they reached the cave. You could show scratches and territory markers outside the cave, animal scents within, or dead bodies with good loot just within the entrance which could turn the fight if only they could grab it in time – not only would that foreshadow a powerful foe capable of killing the fore-bearer of the loot, but it also gives the players hope to best the beasties with quick thinking.
The problem is none of that foreshadowing could happen because the DM rolled the encounter right before the players encountered it. Improv is a powerful tool, but it’s hard to beat 10 minutes of prep on the encounter tables.
Case: Telegraphing Ypsilon 14
Played Mothership with a friend last summer who wanted to provide us a horrifying tale of tragedy and woe. Right on! We rolled up our dudes and commenced play. What happened next was around two hours of investigating dead ends and red herrings terminating in an invisible monster eating one of our players before we could do anything about it.
The booklet gave rules for when the monster was to attack the players, the dice were rolled, the monster attacked and our player died without being able to do anything about it. There is tons of foreshadowing in the module, none of which we happened to find because we failed to specify the exact location where the DM hid it. “Staying true to the book” in this case trumped the story actually moving along.
The beast is allergic to water, one clue is a broken showerhead snapped off by an infected crewmate – but we saw neither sign of infection nor broken showerhead when we checked the showers because we failed to specify that we were looking in the specific stall which contained the clue. This is one such example, but when most of the information you have is a red herring to obscure the real clues, then deaths will come out of nowhere and feel awful.
The Dice Are Not A DM
A common mistake in all of these games is the DMs treating the dice as word of god, when in fact they are a tool for generating roleplay hooks just like anything else in the game. Your game is not “more real” because important rolls are decided by dice – in fact, strict adherence to bad tables and un-creative rolls can erode verisimilitude.
If a die roll doesn’t produce a useful result, just pick the next item down on your list which actually does work – or think of a new entry which would actually serve the game better. The dice are a starting point to setting a scene, not the finish.
Curating Tone by Curating your Lists
A big issue in a lot of these was relying on the lists provided by the authors of the game material without any curation. The power of having dice to choose from a d6 table comes from your ability to write the entries – fill the table with possibilities that each advance the game in their own unique way, and if you’re using a prefab set of tables – edit them in your own voice to give them those same unique advancement opportunities.
Own your lists and commit to each consequence before you roll the die. Make sure the whole table is in your own voice. Having knowledge of what’s on them in advance is key to foreshadowing them properly. You don’t need to write paragraphs for each entry – just a sentence or two to help flesh out the result of the roll.
Killing Players Properly
I’m over-simplifying but I hope these will be useful to you in your continued and effective murder of player characters:
- Let players know taking an action is deadly using many sensory clues.
- Communicate the existence of a risk and reward decision to the players using those clues and situational improv.
- If you’re going to be using random encounters to help kill players, prep each listing out into a little stub a sentence or two long in your own voice to help foreshadow them.
- Give players a chance to gain progress even if there’s a high chance of death – don’t reset them to square one for making a mistake in a deadly game.
- Once you do get into a situation where a player has made a choice and it’s gone poorly, make a proper scene of it! Give the player a chance to chew the scenery and bring out some drama – it’s their last chance to play the poor bastard!
- Give your players something cool for overcoming your lethal situation – don’t make your game only risks without reward!
- Memorialize the death, include bits of that character’s legacy in the world so that their impact is remembered. At the end of the day, we are literally here to make fun memories!