Can We Make RPG Death Exciting Again?

RPG players spend way too much time trying to stay alive. Okay, I’ll give it to you that staying alive is an acceptable way to play. But what if we could make RPG death exciting? What if we could add a spin on dying that could make your RPG sessions more challenging and rewarding for your players?

I recently released Just Get Better, which — let’s be honest — was an attempt to shoehorn my sword & sorcery ideas into the GMTK Game Jam’s theme. Surprisingly, it worked. But I didn’t realize how well it had worked until I played Blood West.

The Genius of Blood West

Blood West is pitched as a Wild West survival horror. What makes the game great is that it turns grinding into a fun and repeatable challenge.

You’ve got to work hard for your first kill. You might feel more confident about your second, but eventually, you’ll slip up. You’ll get too close, miss your shot, or fall off a cliff.

When you — inevitably — die, you gain a curse. Your first curse isn’t a big deal, maybe a 2 percent reduction in health, but it feels like you’re up against the wall. You can tell that dying will eat into your meager supplies and make an already challenging game harder. So you dig in, ready to be more cautious and cunning.

Now you kill tactically, thinning out an area from the periphery before plunging in where the monsters are thickest. You save whatever you can scrounge. And headshots become your signature move.

But then you die again.

Now you realize that some of the monsters respawned. You have to clear areas a second time. And you remember how hard you worked to clear them the first go around. However, you notice you’re getting better at anticipating how monsters react. You’ve even got some swanky new weapons to kill ‘em with.

The cycle of death repeats. Old areas become speed runs. You can headshot a zombie at a run and have a few tricks for those wendigo. And man, it’s a helluvalot of fun.

Hard As Hell with a Soft Reset

The genius of Blood West is that it tempers a hard game with soft resets. You have options to soften the impact of curses when you die, and not all your enemies return. You also benefit from experience and skills, both programmed and personal. Die often and quickly though and you’ll still get a hard enough reset.

Likewise, Just Get Better works when you combine a player character’s immortality with deadly difficult, repeatable, and short encounters. The fun happens when the players try something different, and it works. That sense of achievement is priceless.

Effectively, you give the players a deadly puzzle and all the retries they need to solve it.

One last note on encounter design: spreading out an encounter gives players some breathing room. If one skeleton can see another but would need a turn to enter combat, then the party has a good reason for executing the first with a quick kill. If they botch the attack they have a round to figure out a contingency.