The Dice That Will Kill You

A very short one today. I've been continuing with my open table sandbox in The Black Hack, and wanted to share my process for handling death and dismemberment when characters drop to 0hp, because I think it's been working really well at the table. I'll first explain the ritual very briefly, then explain why it works, and why I think it finds a good middle ground between the old and new schools.

🕷

First, allow me to introduce The Dice That Will Kill You.

The Dice That Will Kill You
My brother bought me these as a Christmas present - they are cast in metal, and very heavy, like little angry sea mines. They have already scored and dented our dining-room table. Note the skull, barely visible, on the bag.

The Dice That Will Kill You are what give the procedure its special ritual tone. These are the special dice that only come out when a character is near death. On such occasions, I hand their player the bag, and recite the exact words: "<Character name>, these are The Dice That Will Kill You. Roll the d6 for me, and don't roll a 6."

The d6, of course, is used for the OofA table below - if the character survives, we move on to test for grievous injuries.

TBH already includes the addition of an Out of Action or OofA table - a name I absolutely adore, since it sounds just like the noise everyone at the table makes when your character gets hit and has to roll on it. The OofA table is a simple d6 table, as follows (transcribed on an index card for easy reference):

OofA, that's got to hurt

The nice thing about this table is how brutally simple it is. Your character's been dropped, probably either by combat or a trap of some sort; maybe it's your own fault, maybe it's an unlucky roll in a deadly situation. Either way, you're entirely in the hands of fate now (as reinforced by the fact that you're not rolling your own dice). You could be fine, or you could be dead, but there are some options in between.

(Another thing I absolutely love: The deadpan explanation "Dead: Not alive any more.", taken from the original TBH rulebook.)

The other thing I have my players do is save against a grievous wound. Dropping to 0hp isn't the only time I do this - characters also save when an enemy gets a critical hit, and when some fate befalls them where simple hitpoint deduction doesn't seem harsh enough (e.g.: long falls, certain monster effects). Whatever the situation, the character makes a CON save - in TBH, a d20 roll under their CON score. On a failure, we break out the special dice, and roll on this table (from The Black Hack 2e, effectively my Dungeon Master's Guide) using the damage die for whatever hurt them:

This is supposed to be a drop table, which is a really nice idea, although undermined by the fact that the Black Hack 2e rulebook doesn't lie flat - I use a d6 to randomise body parts, rerolling results of "Head" if they're wearing a helmet.

🕷

What's the point of all this?

I'll start with the ritual element. The point of The Dice That Will Kill You is to refocus the session on the player whose character is in a tight spot. With the announcement and the little ceremony, everyone at the table stops what they're doing and pays attention. And everyone's rooting for your character to make it through - it creates one of those moments where everyone cheers or commiserates at the result, which is exactly what you want for a potential character death.

In my experience, this is something that games often do poorly. D&D 5th Edition is a particular culprit, since it puts characters who are near death in a sort of limbo-state, paradoxically putting the character about to die in the background of the scene - I once had a character I'd played for three years in a 5e campaign die in combat, and no-one noticed (by which I mean no-one noticed that I had tallied up three failed "death saves", since characters who get knocked out are so far out of the picture). This ignominy is the worst possible way to lose a character, and a bit of ritual helps to combat it by getting everyone else focused and being supportive.

At the other extreme, classic and OSR systems (OD&D, OSE, Basic Fantasy Roleplaying) can be too perfunctory in their treatment of death - straightforward death at 0hp often comes out of nowhere, especially at lower levels, meaning the table isn't prepared for the death to occur, which is very deflating for the player who loses a character. I think this leads to a disconnect between players and their characters, since those characters could effectively die at any moment, at least early on.

It's worth noting also that the ritual of The Dice That Will Kill You puts a player in the spotlight, but in a way that less outgoing players won't necessarily find off-putting. This is because, while there is a lot of ceremony going on, the player is only actually being asked to roll some dice, not make any decisions. This is often a good way to give quieter players some more airtime generally, i.e.: By (gently) putting them on the spot with some dice to roll or mechanics to execute, but without necessarily demanding that they supply decisions or RP.

The construct of The Dice That Will Kill You is important. They're not your dice, they're not even the GM's dice, in the sense that the GM never rolls them - your survival depends neither on your abilities nor even on the GM's ruling, but purely on chance. They are the physical embodiment of the OSR credo "Divest yourself of their fate", and players absolutely pick up on this.

Would that we could all be relaxed about GMing as this chap

There's also a certain amount of inevitability there: It's not just that these dice are what's used to kill characters, it's that if you keep adventuring long enough, eventually these dice will kill you - it's only a matter of time before you get unlucky, and when you do, they'll be there. They're weighty and a bit dangerous, just like the situation, and they always get a reaction, in particular from a new player who hasn't seen the ritual before, which as a GM is delightful to watch. And, in between, they sit on the table biding their time as a visual reminder that the world, though fantastical and wondrous, also has the potential to f*ck you up.

That last is actually a serious point: The existence of grievous wounds and especially the OofA table do something that neither modern nor older editions of D&D do very well, which is to threaten long-lasting consequences for combat, other than death. These consequences are fairly severe, many being more or less permanent, and this is a good thing. Players know that when they get into a fight nothing is certain, and they may have to live with the consequences of a slip up or a spot of bad luck for a long time. In older systems, played closer to the original rules, it's still true that nothing is certain once initiative is rolled, but those slip-ups tend to lead straight to unceremonious death. This either leads to extreme caution (as opposed to a merely healthy degree of caution), or an extreme rate of character-turnover, neither of which is ideal.

Again, by contrast, combat in 5e is designed to be extremely predictable, to the point where actual character death is usually a result of a GM badly misinterpreting the power level of the enemies they set up against the party. Given that 5e effectively mandates multiple encounters per day before the party starts breaking a sweat, there doesn't really exist the possibility of a single encounter with really any direct consequences for the characters, let alone long-term ones.

🕷

I'll illustrate with a little example before closing. My most recent session saw the party scouting a particular hill, surrounded by dead forest infested with Landsharks, whose tunnels had cratered the landscape and uprooted the trees. The way towards the hill was a bit rough, with the party just about outrunning the monsters - the way back was significantly worse. The party encountered two of the beasts, and reacted in a fascinating variety of ways. Some people climbed up dead trees to try to hide from the Landsharks' tremorsense; others simply ran, attempting to lose them in the cratered woods; still others attempted to engage the monsters using a variety of tactics and ruses.

In particular, Baldo the Hobbit and Bertha the Dwarf attacked the first landshark. Baldo managed, at great personal risk, to slide underneath it and stab the weak, unarmoured belly, landing enough good hits to kill it (and somehow managing to pull himself out from under the huge corpse). This done, he scampered up a tree, while Bertha bravely charged the second creature... and got swatted with a maximum damage roll for her trouble.

"Bertha, these are The Dice That Will Kill You. Roll the d6 for me, and don't roll a 6."

As it turns out, Bertha survived, although an unlikely slash from the creature's claws left her disfigured and with some of her ribs exposed... Yikes. The rest of the party (those who hadn't run) managed to distract and confuse the second creature with a diversion just long enough to retrieve her unconscious body and leg it out of the dead forest to relative safety.

One of the really lovely things about playing in person is that you can tell when the party really feels lucky to be alive - when they know they got out by the skin of their teeth. This was one of those times. Bertha's player, more (I think) than being downhearted about the injuries Bertha had sustained, was awash with relief that she had survived at all. Baldo's player was genuinely surprised that he had got away with such a dangerous course of action (an appropriate response - I didn't go easy on him, he got lucky). Even the ones who ran away, although a little sheepish, felt justified in retreating by the danger the encounter projected. The whole party felt pretty relieved and satisfied (according to my impression at least) at having faced a terrible threat that was, for now, over - and nobody even died.

This is the stuff War Stories are made of.

I really don't believe that that same reaction could have been produced by either 5e or OSE (to take an example from both "ends"). My 5e group would have just charged in, confident in their own powers and the intrinsic cushioning of the system, and using the same attacks and tactics we always use. While an OSE party might have reacted in a similar way to my players, the relative fragility of the characters in that system, and death at 0hp, would surely have dampened the sort of experimentation I saw in the actual event, as well as most likely producing a much higher death toll (which is to say any deaths at all) - from my limited experience GMing OSE, if you want there to be a space for heroics that doesn't just feel like suicide, then you have to really pull your punches. In either case, I think it would have been much more difficult to convince the party that they escaped through sheer luck (with a sprinkle of strategy) - I think they would have been suspicious that they had simply escaped because the encounter was never really that dangerous.

🕷

I'm usually very pragmatic about games. I don't like Fog Machine Immersion. I don't think little tricks like this will be the difference between a good game and a bad game - if the play at the table is broken, it takes examining the broken game-structures, not introducing new gimmicks, to fix it. However, I think that a bit of ritual surrounding character death goes a long way to helping to reinforce the sorts of OSR game structures that I find so valuable, in this case, that every encounter with something (creature, trap, or what-have-you) that the fiction of the game tells you is dangerous really is dangerous. The ability to convey this to players without having to kill off characters left and right is why I think The Dice That Will Kill You are a valuable construct - I would love to hear if other people implement this or similar procedures, and their attendant rituals, in their games, and whether you notice it affecting the players' engagement and enjoyment.

Thanks for reading.