Dungeons & Dragons: Should We Lose?

I've been thinking about Fifth Edition (5e, D&D Next, whatever) lately. Specifically how well the game is designed to allow characters to avoid death. This new design principle seems to be in accord with the  concept of character death as inherently bad and almost always to be avoided. Why has this single aspect of the game been allowed to so clearly depart from earlier versions of the game?

Games have increasingly created mechanics to allow players and DMs to make character death almost an impossibility. The games that have born the name D&D through the last half century have retained certain verities that people automatically associate with the name. Alignment, Ability Scores, Saving Throws, d20s, Armor Class, Classes and the like have all remained with the game. But, death. Oh Death. Where is thy sting in D&D? Much like the save or die mechanic, it has been rendered stingerless. Or at least the poison sacs have been excised. 

Thus the question presents itself. Should we lose? I mean if we equate character death as equivalent to losing--for let's be honest, you can't really lose in D&D--is this something we should cultivate as a part of our game? The PC answer these days is "it depends". "If your players like that then yeah incorporate it. But if not, don't be a d*ck and kill the characters. And in the rarest of cases when it does happen, the death should be amazingly memorable and preferably cinematic." Poppycock. Which in case you didn't know is euphemism for soft sh*t. 

Yes, death should be a part of the game--and not just because that is the way they did it in the old days. I would venture as much to say death should happen at least 50% of the time. I mean if adventurers were as by-the-gawds-all-mighty as powerful as they are in 5e there wouldn't be any monsters left--especially as weak as the monsters are in today's monster manuals. Monsters should be as commensurably powerful as the characters themselves if the ecology is to make sense at all. But this is not about fantasy ecology.

Long ago, before RPGs even were, the soon to be creators of RPGs played wargames. In wargames you pitted two or more people against each other in a military campaign or scenario. The play sessions were adjudicated by a referee or moderator who decided the results of the actions of each side. The referee was best as an impartial judge, preferably a knowledgeable one. The referee needed to know the rules of the games well, military tactics and strategies, as well as the histories surrounding the time period, forces and battle in question. Being able to have all this at their fingertips made them a better judge of whether one player could push his Prussian troops through the river and up the hill before being ambushed by the opposing player. Calls were often made on the fly, as rules didn't cover every eventuality. In other words the referee made tons of rulings without consulting the rules. Some of it was simply a judgment call. And both sides expected the judge to be fair, impartial and they usually accepted the referee's call, but of course there were rules lawyers then too. 

The end result of such games was that someone always lost. A battle is like that. Both sides generally had clear objectives, and even when they didn't, they measured victory in generally military terms. Body counts, land controlled, resources preserved and the like. Early RPGs came out of such an environment. However, things began to shift. What can best be described as LARPing began to take place in David Wesley's Braunstein game where roleplaying became critical and objectives were less militaristic and more strategic and political. And a critical shift in this type of gaming was that you were clearly playing not just against other players, but the referee as well. Thus as the two strains of play began to merge, what evolved was a strange mix of cooperative-competitive roleplaying.

Though there was an understood tension between players, the primary tension existed between the foes and environment and the players. It wasn't much of a leap to realize that those foes and the environment were controlled by the referee. The Braunstein gestalt of getting info gradually revealed from the referee was taken to a whole new level here. Figuring out this new social contract went through some strange phases, like some referees running the game behind a full body screen. I imagine this idea came from those Braunstein type games where the referee was often in a different room. The point of all this is that there evolved in the game the idea that, in a very real way the referee was the enemy.

 

Diplomacy, the 1959 game that inspired Braunstein

Sure we talk all about impartiality, fairness, being a neutral arbiter, simply dispensing what the scenario and the dice say. But let's face it, the early Dungeon Master Guide and Players Handbook is rife with subtext and out right plain spoken text that enforces this concept of player against DM. However, there is a different subtext that reminds players and DMs alike that we are all at the table to have fun. And if players keep coming back then they are having fun. These are not new ideas either, it is simply the case that old school games also retain the understanding that creating tough environments and critters to outwit, and defeat the players is a part of the DMs job. 

In those wargame days of old, everyone at the table knew there would be a loser. And it was usually a 50/50 proposition that it would be you. Chess, checkers, wargames all retain the idea that there is a winner and a loser. Sure, you sometimes got upset when you lost, disappointed, defeated -- literally. But that was part of the game, part of the fun of the game. Ask any old grognard and they'll tell you they died in their first game or two, sometimes within the first half hour of the game. I did. And we came back with a vengeance. We had to get back in there! We were hooked. Here was a cool new challenge that we knew could be beat, mastered, and in ways we had never experienced before! This challenge had the added thrill of never being the same! You couldn't crack just one code, there were literally an infinite variety of combinations in this game that could be "defeated"! Luckily for us, rolling up characters back in the day could be done in five minutes or less. I even had one friend who showed up at like our fourth game with a whole three ring binder of characters he had rolled up to sub in if one of the others died. (As an aside this kind of play is, I imagine, the inspiration for DCC RPG's Zero level Funnel concept. Which is brilliant by the way.)

Now, is it possible to play another way. Yes, of course it is. Such a playstyle as described above can go wrong. DMs can lose sight of some of the subtext and become outright unfair. The early books addressed this too--natural attrition would deprive those DMs from players when their players realized playing with that DM was no fun. The other end of the extreme were the DMs that forgot the other subtext and became Monty Hall DMs. They removed or made challenges far too easy and rewarded players far too much. The old books also assert that players will find such games boring and of no challenge, and eventually leave. Sadly, this last assertion proved much less true than the first.

And note, I have italicized of no challenge. This is because I want to highlight the idea that the early creators of D&D expected players of the game to want a challenge. They expected things to be difficult. This is reiterated in the words of Tim Kask when he pointed out that when they heard of groups with level twenty something characters they were floored. They couldn't see the challenge in such high levels. They got a character to 6th, 7th level and retired them in a castle somewhere. There was just no challenge in such play. This was the old wargaming ethos. And it was the ethos that filled early D&D. 

But that was not enough for some people. Evidently enough players wanted play that was, if not Monty Hall, that at least allowed them to enjoy seeing their character heroically overcome all challenges and not die. They wanted to be a hero! Thus they wanted to engineer into the game the impossibility of such "killer" DMs from occurring. Rules which made it more and more difficult to die if you played right. You only died if you didn't know the rules well enough. And when it did occur when players were "playing right" it could be laid at the feet of DMs "making it too hard by not following the rules". Encounters should be balanced and rolls should be fudged to keep the story going. And of course we could always make PCs so powerful that they could obliterate most obstacles. It allowed players to stride out of character creation as heroes already--able and willing to tackle whatever carefully balanced encounter the DM threw at them. Sure, they liked a challenge, and one in which if they didn't play right they might have a chance of dying. Might.

Are we talking about the dragon here or the player?

The game became something different. It became a story telling game. It wasn't even really a game so much as storytelling mechanism. Is such play wrong? No, of course not. It is just very different from old school play. But that is not my question. My question is -- Should we lose in 5e? I think the answer to that is no. It's not that kind of game. The point of todays D&D has become to tell a story, not to play a game. I mean do we die? Sure we do. We just had a death in a third level campaign last Sunday. Full on death. It was kind of a quirky situation, but the 3rd level monk died. I will say we have lots less death than in my 3.5, Pathfinder and 4e games, but again, the development of D&D has been towards avoiding death if it all possible. Death in 5e is more akin to death in a superhero game--rarely if at all happens. And if it does it should be memorable, part of the ongoing story. It is, I think, a default assumption of the game. Optional rules besides, there has a been a plethora of old school 5e hacks to try and make the game more like old school play, but my experience with such mods is that they seem somehow ill-suited to the character driven storytelling experience that is 5e. 

Do I like this style of play? Well, the answer to that is not really. I mean I do participate in 5e and we have some fun times--you should have fun with whatever past-time you engage in. But it is not my "thing". I actually like game. And frankly I also like stories. But I much preferred the story that developed through playing D&D the old way than in the new way where someone thinks up a story beforehand that I participate in. I prefer the old school way of playing where losing may not be the point of playing, but it is certainly a part of the fun that keeps me coming back. In my opinion it makes coming back all that much more of an imperative. 

Rising from the ashes!