the gift of death
the inspiration
I was watching this video last night by Dael Kingsmill titled “Why don't we want our D&D characters to die?”.
I highly recommend it. She talks about the philosophy and psychology around what we feel and how we interpret the death of a character that we've created in a role playing game. She also brings up some rad books that I’m gonna have to check out.
The video was so inspiring to me that I felt like sharing my own story about the power of death at my table, and why I think it’s a gift.
I thought I’d tell a story about death at my table and how I perceive death to be a gift.
The Story
If you are familiar with my podcast Out of Depth Plays, then you've probably heard the voice of David Jackson. He's been with us for all four Sseasons he's a really good friend of mine. And if you've been listening to Season 4, then you've been introduced to Tara who is also a really good friend of mine. All of us used to play Dungeons & Dragons together, along with my wife Gail and David's wife Dayna. It was a great time.
When we started our campaign, David and Tara decided to play twin gnomes, who were separated when they were kids. Our not only the groups first adventure, but also the reunion of these two lost souls. It was a great time.
This is a story about how I killed David’s character, Grattix the gnome barbarian, and we all got sad.
There's a lot of people online who think that Dungeons & Dragons 5e combat can be a bit of a slog. And it really can be depending on the night. I’ve been in some where I wanted my character to die just so something would end.
But on this night, the fatal night in question, we played just one combat encounter for 3 hours.
And I am not lying when I say say it was one of the greatest game sessions I've ever played in my life.
We all knew going into it that the players would be engaged with a group of bandit/cultists. The baddies had been tracking our heroes through the ruined caverns of Khundrukar, aka The Forge of Fury, and now it was time to fight.
I spent the day building a battle map HeroScape tile, if you remember that game. HeroeScape tiles were these little hexagonal bits that could lock together and stack. So the battle map, Had height and depth and places to hide. There was also a river running through it, and we had the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other. Then there was a third party, troglodytes who were between the two. They weren’t on anyone’s side they just wanted to eat. You know what I mean?
So we had this great setup, and the battle was absolutely epic with little combats happening across the board. Shooting spells, firing arrows, pushing people into the water and the awaiting troglodytes. It was one of my finest moments as a Dungeon Master.
Sadly, the combat took a turn for the worst when David's character, Grattix, dropped to zero hit points.
In D&D 5e, when you drop to zero hit points you make what's called a “death save” every time it’s your turn. That means you roll a D20 and if you roll less than 10 you get a failure. Roll a 1, and that counts as two failures. Roll three failures total and your character is dead. The hope is once you go down, your characters make it to your body and fix you up before you get three failures.
But that couldn’t happen in this instance.
Once Grattix was unconscious, the bad guy stepped on Grattix’s back and told the rest of the players they needed to surrender or else. While the two parties were negotiating this surrender, Grattix still had to make death saves. His first roll was a failure so everyone is getting a little nervous. After another bit of talking and Tara’s failed attempt at rescuing her brother, I ask David to make another death save.
I still remember this moment very vividly. David was sitting on my left we were sitting right he rolled the dice and only he and I could see it. Everyone was yelling for what the number was, but David and I were too shocked to speak.
He’d rolled a 1.
I remember his eyes were like, “does that mean what I think it means” because I had just gotten him into D&D, and we hadn't experienced this problem yet.
I just looked at him and I said “What are your last words?”
The way David tells it now, that’s the moment when everything became very real. Very final. And I remember we all started going through the stages of grief. We were in disbelief that this character we’d quickly grown to love could be taken from us.
Of course he used his last breath to tell his sister everything was going to be okay.
I've had death happen in many games. Gail's had several characters die and I've killed David several times since. It's rarely fun. And we all get a little emotional. We’re theatre people after all.
After his death, the rest of group was able to take out the main bad guy, but it was a bitter sweet victory.
The next session we started by just talking about our memories of Grattix. It was like we were at a funeral. We weren't in character, we were just ourselves, lamenting the loss of this hero that we loved. Like he was a real guy.
I realized that night death is an absolute gift in role playing games.
In Our Memories
Something that I kept thinking about during Dael's video, was this article that I had read about the parts of our brain that light up whenever we're playing a role playing game. They’re supposedly the same parts of our brain that light up whenever we're forming real life memories. The theory being that we form memories while we're playing role playing games as if the events happening in the game are actually happening to us.
I was thinking about that article, and it reminded me of a story that David and Dana told me about a conversation they had on a road trip.
One of them said something like “Hey, do you remember that time we were asking Tara to flirt with a guy at a bar to get us free drinks? What were we doing?”
And the other responded, “I don't know, that doesn't sound like us. We wouldn’t do that, but I do I know what you're talking about. It sounds so familiar.”
After a while they realized they weren't remembering something that they actually did in a bar in Chicago. What they were remembering was this gnomish bar this time they were telling Tara to flirt with this other gnome to score free drinks. They were remembering something from Dungeons & Dragons like it really happened.
I think about that all the time.
Grattix wasn’t a real person. But our brains can make him just real enough that we can feel emotions for him. Real honest emotions in a safe place among friends. And if you ask me, that’s fucking magic.
Absolute magic.
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