[D&D] Death & Attachment

 D&D is a villain holding a gun to a puppy's head.

You are being set up to get upset.

D&D is kind of in a tug of war with itself. On the one hand, it tries to be a story emulator. On the other, it tries to be a game. The more you want it to be a story, the more the game part interferes. The more you want it to be a game, the less control you have over the story.

I ran a questionnaire. It was a small and therefore biased amount of responses. But, from those responses I gleaned that story & role-playing were by far the most important aspects of the game. But when it came to chances of character death, people still wanted it to be a real threat. The game part (stakes) still matters.

In fiction, characters are never at any real threat of dying. Characters die if it's dramatically appropriate. The stakes aren't real though. The writer is in complete control of that. As an audience, we buy in to the illusion of threat in order to enjoy the story.

In a game, you can lose, whether by difference in skill or by chance. The stakes are real. We play the game because we want to test our skill or luck, and for that game to be satisfying there has to be a real risk of losing.

To reiterate simply: A traditional story must be rigged to be satisfying. A game cannot. That's the tug of war.

What's the gun to the puppy's head?

D&D these days gets touted as a story emulator, by the product itself, the marketing and the popularity of live gameplay productions (made by professional entertainers and storytellers). They really push the idea that you're going to lovingly craft a character for yourself and you'll get to go on heroic adventures, making a story together with your friends. You're going to get immersed in the fiction. You're going to get attached to that puppy.

But then there are game rules and dice. The gun. That puppy gon' die.

(unless you're clever and lucky and win the game)

Now, this has rarely been a problem for me. I've been lucky enough to play with groups where PC death was no big deal. Expectations were managed.

But going off this survey, conversations and countless online threads, it seems a lot of people are getting sold on the wrong fantasy. I don't mean elves. I mean the fantasy that you can recreate and star in your own novel or movie.

Not to say that you can't. But if you want that, you'll need to tweak how the game works. Take threat of death off the table. Make it a dramatic choice. If someone goes to 0hp they're knocked out but not going to die. It's up to the player and DM to decide if death is appropriate and fun in that situation. I've seen games successfully run like this, and it can be pretty fun.

But if you want to run D&D as written, it's important that expectations of PC survival and story are managed upfront. You gotta let people know that it isn't a traditional story with a 3 act structure and character arcs. It isn't Lord of the Rings. It isn't even Critical Role. It's a fantasy world simulation. The stories don't have structure. The stories emerge naturally from the butterfly effect of action and reaction. Your PC might die for any number of reasons. You can't rely on plot immunity. Free will and the dice make that impossible.

I think the marketing department are aiming for wide market appeal. That's why they push it as a story emulator. They seem to think people can more easily understand and engage with the concept of telling a capital S Story, over running an imaginary simulation.

Top 10 Best selling videogames of the 2010's according to Wikipedia; Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto V, Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, Mario Kart 8, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Diablo 3, Terraria, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Red Dead Redemption 2, Call of Duty Black Ops.

Grand Theft Auto 5, Red Dead 2 and Skyrim are the only games on there I'd consider are notable for their story. But the gameplay itself is largely open world simulation. People are not spending hundreds of hours playing through the story sections. They're fiddling about in the world making their own stories.

Minecraft up the top. No story to speak of. Wildly popular and influential.

Zero linear story games in the top 10 (nobody is buying CoD for the story). The first one that pops up is The Last of Us at 18th.

The producers of D&D don't give people enough credit. We'll like and play D&D as an open world sandbox. And we'll get less upset about our characters dying if you advertise it as such.

I'd say if people still don't like losing their progress from PC death, then maybe some kind of legacy system could be useful. Like, you can cultivate your next character in some way while playing your current one so that you have something to look forward to in the event your current one dies. That's a post idea right there.

And to beat my broken drum again, I'll say; pare down the mechanics. No wonder people get so attached. Sunken cost fallacy. You have to put so much time in to making and maintaining a character. It's an ordeal. You'd be less bothered about PC death if it only took 10 minutes to make one.