Next week we’ll be reading “I’d Hit That” by Logan Knight of Last Grasp.
You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.
In the blog this week we take a long hard look at death in D&D. While the blog club has covered mechanical benefits of lethality and fast PC generation in the past, this week we examine what the level of lethality says about the world state of D&D and how the piles of corpses reinforces the themes of low fantasy.
To recap some of the points made in the post
Deadly encounters can become part of world building. After initial unfairness of the TPK fades the information gained will make the game richer.
If a characters are intentionally bland. Makes it easier to part with them or conversely if they are a weird blend of randomly assigned traits they will be memorable.
The danger and keeps the party together and focused on the mission of dungeon crawling. Not like in BX where everyone gets their own castles.
For me, coming to terms with this deadliness really relies on big shift in perspective away hero based fantasy games to be fans of the party, or even the guild players form as individual PCs bite the dust.
I’m in a time crunch this week so I have to go, but I’d love to read your thoughts on this post.
I think Gus just touched on the usefulness of mortality in old school play. Each and every incident that costs the PCs dearly helps train the players as to what doesn’t work well and provides a specific context to analyze as to what might have worked better. It provides a learning opportunity with harsh consequences that can provide greater feedback to the players about what works and what doesn’t, which one would hope would inform their play thereafter. “Remember when Ealdric died? We want to avoid that…” when considering activity in a similar situation.
Those harsh outcomes also bring the setting into sharper focus. It becomes easier for players to gauge risks and judge the information they learn about locations and inhabitants with greater accuracy. The highly abstracted threat of reported giants, say, gets a bit less abstract in the wake of an incident where a few ogres battered half the party into goo. The equation of “Ogres tough = AVOID GIANTS” helps develop the flavor of the countryside in that part of the setting, with smart PCs either routing around the area or making extreme haste while traveling through or sneaking through at night or the like. Each of those different approaches to moving through the area can reveal more of the setting, which makes for a richer experience of the game world.
The lethality also highlights the fact that player choices are of primary importance. When the PCs step out of the mold without much to set them apart from another of the same class, what ends up differentiating a legendary character in that campaign from the generally forgotten also-rans is both the longevity due to good choices and the added individual flavor and quirks that accrue due to being in play so long. The run-of-the-mill starting PCs become luminaries of the setting after ten levels of care and serendipity. It’s impossible to know at the outset what, exactly, is going to work to make a PC memorable; trying to plan that in advance simply isn’t possible to end up with a diagetically organic PC.