Death and Conquest
It is important that the players have the ability to lose. Without having failure be a reasonable possibility, the tactical choices a player makes become meaningless. The die rolls lose their drama and their importance. Truly, you do the
players no service when you make defeat impossible. And yet, it is also important that the game not actually
end when the players are defeated, because otherwise there's no
campaign. And really, there are three ways to handle that:
- Have the players lose without their characters actually dying.
- Have the players make new characters and continue playing.
- Allow dead characters to return to life.
The final one is the most problematic, but it has to be addressed in a fantasy game. There
are vampires and shades and stuff, so things
do come from beyond the grave on a regular basis. So having dead people actually resurrected is fairly expected. And it is in many ways worse for the game if resurrection is more time consuming or difficult – because it translates directly into the player of the dead character having to sit out for longer periods of the actual game. However, the degree to which death is a revolving door actually
harms the game world in equal measure: when death is established to not be “the end” in any meaningful sense of the term, a lot of the drama just can't be replicated. If the princess getting fed to the dragon is a minor annoyance, there isn't a lot of reason to go on the quest to save her in the first place.
And you can see how there is relatively little room for making it up as you go along on this issue. Any decision you make will have far reaching implications as to what rational behavior looks like, as well as what stories are even possible. These assumptions therefore go in early in the definitions of rules, and have cascading effects throughout the system. If people at an individual table decide to house rule these issues, they will have to change many parts of the system in ways varying from subtle to substantial. So here we go, and let's walk through the knock-down effects:
Mostly Dead and Beyond the Grave
The first conceit being introduced is the idea of being “mostly dead” (like in
The Princess Bride). The idea is that a character can be fatally injured but still have some life in their body somewhere that can be magically healed. This has some background in modern medical understanding as tissue does not all die at once, and people really can be brought back from what used to be classified as “death” through the intervention of CPR (although the window on that is pretty narrow). Once a person passes to “all dead” they will not return to life, though they may come back as some sort of undead creature. A weak or unimportant character (that is to say one with a “low power level”) that becomes undead comes back as a rampaging monster, while someone of real power and destiny can come back and still be in control of themselves. Thus it is that players who play for a long time earn themselves an “extra life” as a vampire or wight or something. And powerful major villains may have to be taken down twice. And perhaps most importantly of all: the players can find someone who has “been murdered” and have that be a big deal, while at the same time a player can get eviscerated by a manticore and still not have the game end.
And that of course has knock-down effects on the rest of the game. When you introduce the possibility of bringing dropped characters back from Death's door, you equally introduce the very real possibility of the victors repeatedly smashing the heads of their defeated opponents between cobblestones and their own Gallagher hammers until that window of possibility is closed. Which means that if the whole “mostly dead” window is to have any
actual meaning, it has to be that taking enemies prisoner rather than simply pulping their skulls, is a
rational thing to do. And that means in turn that several criteria have to be met:
- The portrayal of the enemy has to be something less than “ultimate evil.” When you face off against the Serpent People, the assumption needs to be that these guys are people that you are at war with rather than pitiless monsters with which there is no possibility of parlay.
- A captured enemy needs to be worth more than a dead one. Not merely the same amount, but actually more, because of course dealing with captives is a pain in the ass. The most obvious way to do this is to have a final war accounting in which soldiers who are “lost” count the same regardless of whether they are captured or killed, plus trading prisoners back or sacrificing them to dark gods on the next full moon has an additional value on top of that. So in the war against the Intulo Palatinate it would be better to capture 6 Intulo Warriors than to slaughter them, because at the negotiation stage you would get some concessions for having taken out such and such number of soldiers and in addition be able to get more concessions be ransoming the still living warriors back to their families.
- Slaughtering downed enemies has to be portrayed as something that is evil and “just isn't done.” To the point that the players can rely upon being captured and ransomed back if they fall in battle themselves, rather than summarily coup de graced or eaten.
Now as to coming back from beyond the grave, this should only be possible if the character is not actually
in a grave at the time. And the reason for this is fairly simple: it is desirable that villagers should put corpses into grave yards and then get pissed off if people monkey with the corpses. And that really only makes sense if graveyards are somehow protective against zombie uprisings.
' or 'That guard contingent was more hardcore than we thought and we still have to battle Killfuck Soulshitter and his Dragon Assassins. Let's just go back home. Fuck the princess. 
'
