I think this is one of my biggest struggles with OSR adjacent play. I want the problem solving, exploration and consequences. Death being the default fail condition so much of the time is kind of a bummer for me. I still want some protagonist energy. I want recurring villains/antagonists.
Something I have never seen in a TTRPG is the moment where the villain defeats the party, grabs the magical Mcguffin, kicks the heroes and leaves. That moment is demoralizing, but shows the hero they need to grow or plan better or make allies.
I want games that feel novelistic or TV-like, where death is rare to help build a more character centered narrative.
Here’s some older brainfood on the topic from Wampus County: Getting Worse.
I tend to lean into techniques like these for some of our games where the framing/expectations are a little more Heroic, or Character Death is off the table for various reasons (such as the games I run for younger audiences).
I really enjoyed that blog post. I do agree that the default should not be to kill, but to defeat. It might be as simple as asking the player “Do you finish him/her?”.
Death is definitely an interesting consequence. But there’s a plethora of interesting consequences in between.
Defaulting to nonlethal stakes makes things easier on the GM too. You have more room to experiment with the challenges you come up with when a miscalculation doesn’t risk a character being removed from the game entirely
And then receiving that same courtesy in return. This is the part that I struggle with: in some groups you may just say, “This fight is to the death, nothing else will satisfy the Lich you’ve been thwarting for years.” but other groups will definitely not like that meta framing. Something that works like Dogs in the Vineyard’s escalation could be cool: negotiations lead to blows which lead to drawn steel. Or stop anywhere along that path. Or jump ahead!
In my mind, enemies being willing to leave you alive means that your enemies have more motivations than “kill PCs because they are there.” Having enemies with more motivation than that I think leads to better games overall.
The opposite is interesting too. By default, we take for granted that all fights are to the death. But imagine having a fight against a group of ruffians… without knowing what their intention are. If they defeat us, are they just emptying our pockets and taking our jewelry, or am I risking having my throat cut?
I feel like not knowing if the consequences will be deadly potentially more terrifying than knowing it will be.
I have to agree that there is a lot of room to explore defeat.
I wanted to bring up that the game 13th age has a fleeing from combat rule that reminds me of these principles. When a party essentially has lost the combat and only has 1 member left standing, the DM can give the party an option to retreat in exchange for an undesirable outcome happening in the world called a “campaign loss”. Usually this bad outcome is directly tied to the circumstances of a parties defeat and lets them live to fight another day in a worsening world. Or the party can take their lumps accept their deaths. The game outlines that this option may not be on the table when you want to emphasize a truly terrible threat (dragons, devils, liches)
Overall I think the main purpose of the rule is to erase TPKs rather than individual character death from a campaign and ensure that there is narrative consistency and that you don’t have to keep starting over if that is undesirable to the party.
For example if the party is almost slain by minions of the chaos cult and barely escape with their lives they might find upon their return to the Keep on the Borderlands that a coup has resulted in enemies taking over what was once their safe haven. They may now have to regroup with the scattered forces of law that have gone into hiding.
I think with a bit of fine tuning this principle could be used in conjuncture with non-lethal defeats outlined above. A downside of this is I think it becomes a larger responsibility of the GM to outline the stakes of a conflict to ensure arbitration still feel fair and not personal when death does crop up.
I totally agree. It bothers me when games like 5E sort-of half-way deal with this issue.
“Oh, melee attacks can be non-lethal.”
But of course, that doesn’t extend to ranged attacks, especially spells.
I’ve heard the argument made that there’s no way someone could possibly make a ranged weapon attack non-lethal?
Whereas, Grognar’s two-handed flaming skullbliterator of +1 soulpiercing? They can just decide to “knock someone out,” yeah, no problem.
Questionable realism aside, I much prefer it when games give the same option to everyone: to make killing optional.
If a player decides, yes, we are going to kill this guy on purpose, that makes it all the more interesting when Dead Guy’s brother unleashes a vengeance quest on the PCs.
Personally, I’m leaning on just having characters or monsters being defeated at your usual treshold (0 HP, or whatever) then you have to give them the coup de grace.
I’ll argue that accidentally killing or wounding someone is also very interesting narratively. Your character might not want to kill the enemy, but I’d guess it’s pretty hard to balance trying to hurt someone but not killing them.
I like Burning Wheel’s wound system (albeit a bit complex). I lean towards wound systems lately.