Horror and Consequences (Traditional and Video Gaming)

I've been playing a lot of video games recently and I spent a few hours in Dying Light, before dropping back in time to Dead Island: Riptide to see how Techland evolved their formula.

Both games are pretty similar, first-person melee-combat action games with looting, and some 'RPG' elements like a skill tree. What interested me is that both games seemed surprisingly close to being full-scale 'true' zombie-themed horror games, in gameplay at least if not in tone. You're scrabbling around in containers to scavenge and repair improvised weapons, managing a limited pool of health that enemies can drain really fast, and your combat options are limited by a small 'stamina' pool where your character needs to take a break after swinging around their weapons a bunch.

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What separates them from being genuinely 'horrifying' is their lack of any sort of permanent consequences for failure. If you die in DI or DL, you lose some money and/or experience points and get back up at a checkpoint, with all objectives still cleared and all defeated enemies staying dead. Thing is, impermanent consequences are kind of a staple in video games. Even many 'true horror' games like Silent Hill or Amnesia simply restore the player to a save point or quick-save on death. Video games often struggle to make these failures have any impact.

Limited saves or restricted checkpoints are one approach, for example Resident Evil makes you use consumable 'ink ribbons' at pre-defined save points. My issue here is that this approach doesn't give your mistakes 'permanent consequences', but rather just forces you to re-play segments of a game you've already cleared in order to take a second try at a difficult part. In games that have repetitive or tedious mechanics (such as Resident Evil's notoriously awkward controls), this can kill the tension even faster than a consequence-free death would.

Another approach to solving this is permadeath, seen in a lot of roguelike-inspired games and also integrated as a difficulty mode in games including Dead Space. Personally I can't recommend either approach. In the roguelike approach, you procedurally-generate your levels so each layout is unique, but that unfortunately means that you can't have a talented designer hand-placing encounters and designing a consistent and well-paced experience. The full-permadeath mode, on the other hand, has the problems of the 'limited saves' system above cranked up to 11. Now if you die, you have to replay the entire game! Better hope the cut-scenes can be skipped (which they often can't be) and that the game doesn't have any annoying bugs that might cause you to unfairly die (which it often will).

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'Respawn' and 'checkpoint' mechanics are fairly rare in traditional RPGs, a few notable exceptions being resurrection rituals in high-level D&D, or Paranoia's backup clones. In theory this means you have more permanent consequences, but there's a catch. Making a new PC is usually time consuming, and becomes far more difficult if you want to give them a unique personality. This is compounded if you're playing a more complex system like Pathfinder at say, level 10, where suddenly you need to work out 10 levels worth of classes, prestige classes, feats, skills, attributes and racial bonuses before you even get into questions like "what is their name?" or "what are their ideals?"

Some video games, notably ZombiU have this sort of approach, where a dead player character stays dead and is simply replaced by a new PC. They inherit the same drawbacks too; why make your character unique or invest time into their design if they could die at a moment's notice and need to be replaced? This is where you get all those apocryphal tales of the Dwarf paladin with six identical paladin brothers, from players who just want to play a dwarf paladin and can't be bothered to completely change their approach to the campaign when they inevitably die.

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I don't have a clear-cut solution for this 'problem' and I'm sure to a lot of people this isn't a problem at all. I just figured it was worth saying something about. For the sake of a satisfying conclusion, I'll drop some potential solutions here.

1. Replace most 'deaths' with a different consequence. The excellent Skyrim mod known as Frostfall has PCs be 'rescued' by-default if they collapse from exposure and hypothermia, with the player waking up in a strange place with stat penalties and missing items. Running out of fuel or food in Sunless Sea doesn't just end the game, but triggers random events and skill checks where your crew desperately try to burn cargo as fuel, or draw lots to see which of them gets used as replacement rations. Maybe the Medusa doesn't kill the whole party, just petrifies them for 80 years and the campaign resumes from there? If a party member would 'die,' houserule instead that they've been 'critically injured' and need something like an expensive operation or expert surgery or a kick-ass elvish plant-based prosthetic cyberlimb.
2. Defer death with a wounds or debilities system. As PCs get closer to dying, they rack up penalties such as concussions, burns, or missing body parts. Check out the OSR wounds table on Cavegirlgames for a great example. Ideally, the players will slow down when they realize they're at risk of permanent damage, or have to make the conscious choice to keep putting themselves at greater risk. This is good if you can give really unpleasant and graphic descriptions of the injuries, so it doesn't work as well if your players are gamist-types and just view those injuries as just stat penalties. It's also not a good option if your players are particularly squeamish or have bad responses to gore; even horror games are played for entertainment and not to deliberately dredge up everyone's past traumas.
3. Have a pool of available PCs to replace dead ones. This needs more investment from the players, since they'll be making maybe three or more characters even if they only use one. Decide for yourself if the pool is shared or individual. This has the same multiple-character problems I listed above, but having players create a pool in advance minimizes downtime while they think of a replacement for that dwarf paladin. Also, if players get invested in their characters they could be genuinely excited to play as someone else from the pool even if they miss their old PC. Finally, you can let players swap characters in and out from the pool in downtime or between sessions, which might encourage people to experiment with new builds or even do 'crazy' old school stuff like 3d6-in-order.
4. Have resurrection be an option. No, I don't mean 'cart the body back to the village chapel,' I mean real-shit 'go on a spirit-quest into the underworld to drag their soul out.' Cheap and simple resurrection undoes the permanence of death, whereas a potentially fatal quest into the realm of the damned is both a fun concept for a short arc and difficult enough that it won't ever be the first option to solve the party's problems. Having the party play Frankenstein and assemble a new body for the thief's disembodied brain could also be great fun, or having them run errands for the mob to pay off a replacement chassis for the team's pilot AI. Just remember that the key immersion-breaking question of resurrection in any setting is "why doesn't everyone just do this instead of dying?"
5. All of the above, at once. Overkill? Maybe. But the point here is consequences. The Bard's bad choice to seduce the dragon could lose them an arm, and then they start to bleed out, so the party needs to get them to a surgeon but they pissed off the surgeon earlier by stealing from them so the bard dies, so the party tracks down a powerful Paladin of Debauchery (from the character pool) to aid them on a noble quest: to enter the realm of the dragon god and free the Bard from their clutches in the name of Eros & Bacchus!

My Wounds System (Donut Steel)

I figure if there's anywhere I'm allowed to just post my houserules, it's on a blog I made for myself where I post about my writing and game design. So here we go.

The system's designed for Dungeons and Dragons, or rather for a generic OSR-style hack that's partially LOFTP and partially reverse-engineered from 5th Edition, which is where I started actually playing RPGs instead of just reading about them. Only thing worth noting is that I use 3d6 instead of 1d20, since 3d6 lands on a bell-curve and means I can make critical successes & failures more memorable. They're fun, okay? Remember fun?

As for the wounds themselves, it's a total mishmash that's like 90% in-the-moment rulings. As such, I'm publishing this more as inspiration than as anything else!

tl;dr:

Zero HP or below is Death's Door. Wipe negatives and reset to zero. If a PC takes damage when they're on zero, instead of losing hp they receive a permanent consequence. Enough of these permanent consequences and they're just dead.

The Mechanics

If your hit-points are reduced to zero, you're now on Death's Door. If you'd normally be in negatives, you're just at zero (exceptions below). You are not unconscious, though if you're feeling cowardly you're allowed to lie on the ground and pretend to be dead.

There's now two ways to proceed, pick one or mix and match. Or use a third, I guess.

Stat Damage. (Thanks Chris McDowall and Into The Odd, sorry for stealing from your system.)
If you're on Death's Door then every point of damage you take is removed from one of your stats. Typically, you'd remove it from Constitution or your system's equivalent. If you're taking non-physical damage or under psychic attack, maybe apply the damage to Intelligence or Charisma.

Whenever you take stat damage in this way, reduce the stat and then roll a d20. If the result is equal to or less than the stat you took damage in, then nothing happens. If the result is greater than the stat you took damage in, then you are incapacitated. Typically you're rendered unconscious, but depending on circumstances you could rule this as something like 'hallucinating vividly' or 'asleep.'

Wounds Table. (Cavegirl has a really good table, and Dark Heresy has plenty of them.)
If you're on Death's Door, then every subsequent attack that hits you causes a nasty injury, most of which will be permanent until fixed with serious medicine and probably some magic or something. See how much damage the attack does (e.g. 6) and then find a result in your Wounds Table with a matching number and a matching damage type. Roll randomly for hit location if you need it.

I could do up a table here, but there's a ton of good ones (one of which I linked above). The important part of using a Wounds table is the permanence of it. Once you're at zero HP, then your lifelines are gone and even a scratching blow dealing 1 damage can result in your character losing an eye, whereas larger hits of 8 or 10 damage will often just straight up kill you dead.

More Caveats

The reason for the 'Death's Door' mechanic is pretty simple- it gives the players a vague second chance. If they're on 1 hp and take 10 damage, it's not instant death- they're put to zero and then their next mistake has permanent consequences. That said, I would always apply a 'massive damage' exemption for situations where a character would be put to like, -20 hp in a normal game. If a PC jumps off a cliff and takes capped fall damage, there is no way that they should pull a 'b-but the mechanics say Death's Door' on you. I'll just tell you to rule this case-by-case. A hard number like -20 might be okay for a low-level dungeon crawl, but a high-level campaign might have the party exchanging damage numbers like that in a single hit.

You don't have to offer a way out from your 'permanent' wounds or 'permanent' stat damage. Actually make it honest-to-god permanent if you want to! Just don't break your own fiction to do it. If NPCs are regenerating missing limbs with first-level spells, then it's rude to arbitrarily prevent PCs doing the same thing.

Violence, Depictions of Violence, and Gaming: In Practice

Just like anything in gaming (and fiction), you don’t want to make your violence too real and thus have it be too complex, potentially off-putting, or both. Finding the line between ‘immersive’ and ‘unenjoyable’ is virtually impossible as well, because it’s such a subjective judgement. Look at the sheer volume of ‘realism’ mods found for sandbox RPG video games such as The Elder Scrolls or fan-made encumbrance rules in tabletop dungeon-crawlers. Finding a ‘perfect’ level of abstraction for gaming violence just simply isn’t going to happen on a large scale; thus the responsibility falls on individual groups and GMs to tailor their experience or choose/write systems that appeal to them specifically.

Speaking as another subjective GM, here’s some stuff I’d do.

Implement a wounds system.

I’ve seen a lot of games with ‘wounds’ and a lot of ways to use them. My personal preference is for wounds as punishment for poor play, rather than the fairly common ‘wounds as result of critical damage’ approach. Ever since reading the system Chris McDowall used in Into the Odd I’ve had that in all my OSR games, since ‘damage suffered after you’re out of HP is temporarily deducted from your stats’ is brutally punishing, but it also requires PCs to make the choice to stay in a dangerous location after they run low on HP.

Another option for this system is to have your ‘wounds table’ only come into effect after characters reach zero hit-points. (Cavegirl sniped this one from under me, seeing as I was already using a similar system and starting to rough it out into writing as well. Definitely worth a read.) Put simply, make it possible to receive injuries that aren’t soaked by hit-point abstraction, and maybe even let them have permanent (or semi-permanent) effects on your PCs. Potentially apply the same thing to NPC enemies as well, if you’re willing to do the bookkeeping.

Implement a morale system.

Lots of OSR stuff already assumes morale systems and reaction rolls and so this goes without saying. If you’re playing something more like D&D 4e/5e, you might need to houserule one in. A morale system gives mechanical representation to the nigh-universal drive that sentient beings have to not be brutally murdered. You’ll probably want to keep it fairly light and flexible to account for unprecedented circumstances, and it’s your choice if you want morale calculated per-person or for a whole group. I guess you could apply morale to the PCs as well, but I’d personally be against doing that.

When thinking about morale, factor in: relative numbers, relative gear, motivation to fight, who’s ‘winning,’ personal tenacity, appearance of the party, ‘intimidation’ checks, who’s dying, etc. A particularly nasty wound dealt or taken could have an effect on morale, as could the death of a key team-member (e.g. an officer). Whether you use a mechanic or just eyeball it, keep one question in mind. If I were the NPC, would I be willing to risk a painful and violent death in order to continue this combat?

Don’t expect opportunistic bandits or cowardly goblins to fight to the death when they could run instead. Even if NPCs choose to fight on, have them acknowledge the threat in some way! One option is having one bandit from a pack of 12 choose to run. Another is bloodied enemies choosing to surrender. A third is changing tactics, from ‘rush and engage the barbarian in melee’ to ‘keep as far away from the raging half-orc as possible.’

Narrate your attacks.

For some this’ll go without saying, for others it’ll feel like a time-wasting flow-breaker. (I guess it is, if you expect to be running multiple to-the-death combats per session.) Let your sword swings result in more than ‘six damage!’ If your hit-points are highly abstract (in a ‘fighting spirit’ sense) then you can have attacks fail to connect but still reduce HP. If your system gives characters a lot of hit-points and expect them to be depleted by a lot of attacks… maybe don’t do this. There’s only so many times you can hear ‘the sword grazes their [body part]’ before it loses any meaning.

As for narration, I did a handful of examples a month ago. They’re not great, but hopefully they’re a good starting point. The goal of this is to drive home that every single ‘attack’ action represents a real and serious attempt to cause injury to something or someone!

Don’t run multiple to-the-death combats per session.

It’s hard to make combat and death feel authentic and relatable to the players if your PCs are hacking down sentient beings by the dozen every few dungeon rooms. It’s hard to make your super cool and intense narration (see above) work if you have to come up with new verbs and adjectives every few in-game minutes! It’s really hard for your players to buy that a small town of 200 peasants and no fighters manages to flourish in a forest if the party’s attacked by 3d6 bugbears and 2d12+4 goblins fresh off the random-encounter-table every time they step off the main road to visit!

“Any situation that would reduce a character's head to the consistency of chunky salsa dip is fatal, regardless of other rules.”

There’s a lot of ways of saying this. I’ve heard Massive Damage, I’ve heard Coup De Grace, I’ve heard System Shock, I’ve heard Mortal Wounds. Essentially, don’t let mechanical abstractions (such as hit-points) overrule what’s actually happening to your characters! If you’re a regular human holding a live grenade when it detonates, it’s pretty safe to assume a max-damage critical hit to the hand in question rather than rolling damage. If a PC is hit by an explosive projectile but the hit location is a limb, assume the explosion spreads beyond that limb even if the rules don’t explicitly state it. If a PC is falling from orbit at terminal velocity, maybe it’s not authentic to break out the “make a dexterity save to roll when you land and take half damage” clause from the corebook… or if you’re playing with superhuman PCs, maybe that’s just a regular tuesday. I don’t know what campaign you’re playing.

Apply this principle to things other than just damage. Don’t add a ‘dodge’ bonus to armour class on a character that’s unconscious, for example. Don’t have enemies roll to hit at -4 because of ‘partial cover’ if the enemy is behind the PC or tall enough to just shoot directly over it! Don’t let an untrained animal companion make a medicine check to heal a party member, even if there ain’t no rule saying that direwolves can’t use scalpels!

1d10 Ways to Make that Attack Action Sound Cooler

You just swung a 'sword' at a 'bandit' and you hit them for some 'damage.' Let's make it sound cool.

1d10 Ways to Make that Attack Action Sound Cooler

1. You feint a thrust to the head and the foe loses their nerve, flinching momentarily to cover their exposed eyes. In that moment, you slash your cutlass across their thigh, tearing through their clothing and inflicting a shallow cut.

2. Your opponent eyes you warily and shifts their footing, only to stumble momentarily over an uneven flagstone. She looks at the floor momentarily and you strike, a slash to the wrist that clearly stings but fails to pierce their mail.

3. A sloppy mistake- your opponent fails to withdraw their weapon after you parry a thrust. Using your free hand, you grab the spearshaft and pull it to the side, causing the foe to stumble forward into your deadly counterattack. He stumbles backward, bleeding heavily from his now-empty eye socket.

4. Your foe over-commits to an overhead cut, which you catch on the blade of your longsword and turn aside. While they are off-balance, you strike them in the side of the helmet with the pommel of your sword, then a second time, then a third. She falls to the floor, motionless.

5. You barely give your opponent a chance to blink, sprinting across the chamber with sword in hand. They barely get an inch of blade from their sheathe before you run them clean through the stomach, twist the blade violently, then kick them free. The swordsman staggers back, but somehow manages to stay on his feet. One hand raises his gladius, the other presses down on the mortal wound in his stomach.

6. The opponent surprises you with a lightning-fast kick to the groin, which horribly backfires upon them when their toes break on your armour.

7. Wasting no time, you simply let the weight of your greatsword carry its point through the front foot of your enemy and into the dirt below. A well-placed strike to the forehead with the guard causes the bandit to lose his footing and hit the floor, before you tear the blade free from what's left of his foot.

8. After your first flurry of cuts deflect off the target's plate to no effect, you turn aside their counterattack with your buckler and follow through with a shield-assisted punch to the face.

9. You stare down your opponent for several seconds, pacing in a circle, before you end the fight with a single, precisely-placed rapier thrust through the eye-slit of their greathelm. Your victim barely makes a sound when you withdraw the blade and watch them fall.

10. Your opponent is a skilled swordswoman, and manages to deflect your first chain of attacks with great effort. When you step back to recover her arm is visibly shaking, and you see obvious dents in the blade of their cheaply-made jian.

Lethality Paradox Part 2: Death Moves

For part 2, I'm living up to my first post and shamelessly riding on the backs of more established authors. In this case, I'm riding on the back of Grim World from Boldly Games and their frankly excellent 'Death Moves.'

For those not in the know on Powered by the Apocalypse (and the original game Apocalypse World), a 'Move' is an action a player or GM makes when something occurs in the narrative. A basic 'Hack and Slash' attack Move in Dungeon World starts as "When you attack an enemy in melee," and then throws out how you roll dice and confirm successes.

By extension, a 'Death Move' is something that happens on a death, and the Grim World crew absolutely nailed it. A Skirmisher's last action is a spear throw that legends will speak of. A Necromancer's last breath unseals a relentless army of the undead. The death of a Battlemaster is merely the next step in a lifetime-long gambit.

While I'm singing Grim World's praises, they've also got Death Moves for other PbtA games like the base Dungeon World classes and Inverse World. Examples include Adrien Thoen's Fae pronouncing a bitter curse or perfect wish upon 'a land, a people, or an individual,' or the Golem of Inverse World having a 60 second countdown followed by a catastrophic core meltdown & explosion.

Maybe other systems call it something else, or it's considered a 'ruling' and not a 'rule' for most OSR players. Whatever. Let's use Death Moves a ton more in anything even vaguely resembling a heroic narrative. Your gritty funnels and Torchbearer cavern crawls can have PCs choking to death on their own blood, but if you're the chosen of an elder god, you get to go out in style.

Coming soon: 1d20 Things to do in Your Moment of Death When All Hope is Lost.
EDIT:  Find 1d12 Things to do in Your Moment of Death When All Hope is Lost HERE.

Build in the suggestions from the previous post to try and make a Death Move an active choice by the player. What if their last action undoes all the good they did up to that point? Is it worth rejecting a death saving throw (or equivalent) in order to use a Death Move? Mix carefully, and running out of HP might be viewed as a role-playing opportunity rather than an abrupt end to a promising character.

Lethality Paradox Part 1: A Worse Fate

How to approach character death is a universal problem seen by game designers the world over. The issue is usually thus:

1. I want to make death a constant and present threat so that players are cautious and deliberate.
2. I don't want to kill off characters my players are invested in and then have to spend minutes or hours making new characters instead of playing.

A 'solution' I have seen (and one I have used myself) is to make death SEEM constant and terrifying, but actually have it be rare and unlikely. This is a bad solution. It's not good. Don't do it. One day the players will see behind the curtain and their whole experience will be ruined.

Instead, I ask a simple question. Well, a few questions.

What is worse than death?

1. What, to a player, is more challenging than rolling a new character?

Roll up a table of hit locations. Hell, here's a simple one (thanks Nemesis!)

1 Left Leg    2 Right Leg    3-4 Left Arm    5-6 Right Arm    7-9 Torso    10 Head

When a player character (PC) runs out of hit points and would 'die,' instead roll a ten-sided die (1d10). You'll get a hit location. Hurt them there. Right arm? Break their sword. Torso? Tear open their backpack and smash all their potions & scrolls. Head? Take one of their eyes. Left leg? Chop it off at the knee. Pick something narrative-appropriate, and don't use it too often.

2. What, to the character, is more confronting than mere death?

This is, to me at least, the fun one. It's also got more potential to backfire, since it requires you (usually) to forgo a mechanical penalty in favour of a narrative one. In some cases, you might even give a mechanical bonus to a character who in traditional rules should be dead. Handle with care.

A holy man, fallen in battle. Their god abandons their spirit, and so a passing devil offers them a return to life. A proud shepherd of the forest, their wounds stitched by cold steel and factory-spun thread. A death curse that can't be dodged, but can be redirected onto a blood relative. Make your players (and by extension, their characters) choose a fate that, to them, may be worse than death.