Character death in Dungeons and Dragons
I recently lost my first character in a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game. It was a sad time. But it also gave me time to think about character death both as a D&D æsthetics (in the sense of the Mechanics-Dynamics-Æsthetics framework), and more practically about how to handle it as a Dungeon Master (DM).
Some background
Several months ago, we started playing a new campaign: The Tomb of Annihilation. (There are no spoilers below, feel free to read.) We cut right to the actual tomb part of the campaign, keeping our existing characters which happened to be of appropriate level.
For this campaign, I played Nithia, a Half-Elf Pharmacologist Monk. The Pharmacologist part is a custom background that’s all about exploring the jungle, collecting plants, experimenting with them and extracting remedies, poisons and psychoactive substances from them. Mechanically, it gives proficiency in poisoner kit, herbalism kit, nature and survival. This was in addition to the alchemist’s supplies and brewer’s supplies proficiencies form Monk and Drunken Master.
Nithia was very much about crafting things out of collected roots, leaves, mushroom, minerals, liquids, etc. In combat, she was running around enemies, never staying in the same place – which was easy because of Monk and Drunken Master features and the Mobile feat.
Eventually, she got paralysed during a fight and, unable to move, died.
Character death æsthetics
The hit-point/damage mechanic gives rise to the character death dynamic which supports several æsthetics12:
Fantasy (or make-believe): it sets the tone for and reinforces the verisimilitude of the world in which the characters live and – literally – die.
Narrative (or drama): it provides meaningful events of character death or near-death that drive the story forward.
Challenge: it adds stakes to combat encounters and in-game explorations. In this way, it is similar to video games with auto-save that prevent do-overs.
Fellowship: it gives players the occasion to role-play their character’s reaction to others’ death. Even though it represents an in-game interaction (character-to-character), it is an out-of-game interaction: as a player with a dead character, you listen to other players role-playing the mourning of your character.
In my case, the fellowship æsthetic culminated when another player role-played his ranger’s animal companion, an ape that could communicate simple ideas, asking “why spider girl become rotten banana?” – making a reference to Nithia’s character/abilities and to the way she died. Out of context it might seem silly; in context it was not.
Expression (or self-discovery): it forces you to face change, to face the departure of characters you grew attached to – yours or other players’.
Unfortunately, these æsthetics can easily break down. And repeated character death is the easiest way to break them down – as explored below.
Æsthetics breakdown
The issue of the character death dynamic is: what to do afterwards? In the most commonly used option, the player makes a new character, the DM whisks the new character into the story, and the player can come back to the table after this interruption – typically, in the next session. However, repetition of this standard option – as experienced in deadly campaigns such as the Tomb of Annihilation – breaks down some of the æsthetics that character death supports.
- Fantasy: the world is one with consequences, but ridiculous ones where new characters pop-up when one dies. Verisimilitude is broken by an endless supply of heroes that somehow appear just as another dies.
- Narrative: the appearance of replacements, whilst technically moving the story, doesn’t so much move it forward as side-ways. It makes the game into more of a farce than a drama – which is fine if you are playing the goofy kind of game, but not so much otherwise.
- Challenge: the stakes are low, you just need to re-roll a character when you die. Worse, many players enjoy building new characters which somehow rewards character death.
- Fellowship: characters that have joined the party recently have not formed strong bonds to other characters, leading to insignificant role-play.
- Expression: you don’t grow as attached to the characters that dies.
What to do as a DM?
As a DM, you bring forward all these æsthetics3 and try not to spoil them. In order to achieve this, you must put the characters into dangers real enough that they may die, but dangers rare enough that they don’t die too often.
It is difficult to turn this general piece of advice into concrete suggestions. The general gist would be
Keep the base difficulty on the low side, and introduce rare but intense difficulty spikes.
Where difficulty is managed through a mix of tuning the challenge rating of encounters, allowing more or less frequent short rests, giving or denying access to healing potions, etc.
Alternative character death handling
Maybe the solution to avoiding æsthetics breakdown is to handle character death differently.
A non-solution is to disallow character backups entirely: when the character dies, the player is out. This non-solution helps preserve the some of the æsthetics for the remaining players but it takes one player out of the game, robbing them of all the æsthetics.
An actual solution is the new character class, the lingering soul, developed by Matthew Mercer as a “death alternative”. The intended purpose is to “allow the continued play of a beloved character when resurrection is unavailable, or as a reward for a party seeking to restore the narrative lost when a central figure has fallen.” This option explicitly seek to avoid narrative breakdown.
The names for the æsthetics in the list are from the original Mechanics-Dynamics-Æsthetics paper.↩︎
Note that I assume a non-goofy style of play. Æsthetics in goofy play are entirely different.↩︎
Arguably, the players are also involved into bringing these æsthetics forward, but here I’m focusing on DM advice.↩︎