This Feature is part of my ongoing True Campaign Managery course. If you ain’t been following from the start or don’t even know what that means, use The True Campaign Managery Course Index to fix that.

This particular lesson is part of a module called True Mechanical Managery. It’s all about how campaign-managing Game Masters set policies and make plans to deal with tricky game issues before they come up.

If you’d prefer listening to me stammer and stutter my way through proofreading this Feature out loud instead of reading it yourself — for some insane reason — The True Mechanical Managery: When Death Comes Calling II Proofreadaloud is what you’re looking for.

When Death Comes Calling… Again

Welcome back, ladies and gentlebeings. I’m finishing up the discussion I started last… month? Holy mother of crap, it’s been a month. Damn it all!

Well, whatever…

I’m finishing up the lesson I started last month about preparing for Character Death like a True Campaign Manager. This is probably stupidly wishful thinking, but I hope you remember what I covered last time. If not, the last lesson is still there. Go back and reread it.

Recall that your goal as a True Campaign Manager is to feel like you’re equipped to handle it when one of your dumbass players gets their character killed. True Campaign Managers are always ready to handle any predictable thing that can totally disrupt the hell out of a campaign and Character Death is both of those things. Characters can die; it’s in the rules. When characters die, it shocks and upsets the players, it derails the in-game situation, it leaves the group without a plan, and it leaves a player unable to play the game.

Note, though, that I’m not using the words policy or plan here. Instead, I’m using the fluffy-ass vaguery equipped to handle. Sometimes, you can’t have a policy or a plan. Sometimes, the best you can have is a strategy.

Strategy vs. Plan

Remember ten frigging months ago when I started this crap and I told you it’s impossible to plan for every contingency and it’s stupid to try? Well, that’s the reason why roleplaying games need Game Masters instead of rules and computers. It’s also the reason why campaigns need Campaign Managers instead of policy binders. You need a flexible, adaptable human brain with good judgment. Rules and procedures can’t cover everything.

True Campaign Managers know when a situation needs a Policy, Procedure, or Plan and they know when the best they can do is have a Strategy to guide their good judgment. They also know when to break the Policies, Procedures, and Plans, as I noted in that long-ass screed about not being a Behavioral Engineer.

Experience and Advancement? That’s great for Procedures and Plans. Scheduling and Attendance? Mostly Policies and Procedures, but with some good judgment thrown in as necessary. You can’t forget to Remember to Be Human, right?

Unfortunately, Character Death doesn’t lend itself to Procedures and Plans. There are too many unknowns and too many variables. Every Character Death is unique. If a character dies in the climactic encounter of an adventure right before the party returns to town for two sessions of downtime, that’s a pretty trivial disruption. It’s easy to pick up the pieces and move the game along. Now imagine a character dies early in session two of a five-session adventure which sees the party trapped Abranaxanor’s Labyrinth in the heart of the Negative Energy Plane with no companion NPCs. That’s a tough corner to paint your game out of.

Remember, resurrection magic doesn’t work in the Negative Energy Plane. At least, it shouldn’t. Don’t be a dumbass.

The point is that True Campaign Managers don’t have Character Death Policies so much as they have Character Death Strategies. True Campaign Managers know what their goals are for recovering from Character Death and they have a good understanding of the situation so that, when a character does die, they can make the best decisions possible given the situation to keep the game on track.

Unfortunately, best decision possible isn’t the same as perfectly accomplish every goal every time.

You Can’t Have It All

This is going to be a tough potion for some of y’all to swallow. Fortunately, I only write about pretend elf games. This ain’t a life lesson. If it were, some of you would break under the cognitive dissonance of it all.

You can’t actually solve every problem in pretend elf games, let alone solve every problem perfectly. You can’t even mitigate every problem. Sometimes, all you can do is recognize that a problem’s gonna suck and grit your teeth and bow your head and power on through. Sometimes, you can do everything right and still end up with a disaster.

I say this now because, below, I’m going to say, “This problem that I identified and analyzed to death last time? Yeah, it is what it is. Be ready to suck it up because you can’t really, actually fix it in any good way,” and some of y’all are so steeped in Utopian Thinking and the Perfect Solution Fallacy and are so scared of conflict and negative outcomes that I’m hoping a warning sign might prevent a few aneurysms.

Part of management — part of leadership — is knowing when the ideal solution is beyond you or when a problem can’t be practically solved and not wasting resources fighting that. That’s when it’s your job to lead by example and inspiration. To tell your people, flat out, “This is gonna suck and all we can do is power through it. Hold my hand and follow me and I’ll get you through it. We’ll suffer together.”

In pretend elf games. Because that’s all I ever write about.

Bending and Breaking the Game

Eventually, every True Campaign Manager ends up with a Character Death that forces them to decide just how far they’re willing to bend the game to recover it from the Character Death.

Eventually, every gamer on the Internet will encounter a mouthbreathing Game Mastering advice dumbass screaming about how there’s a correct, moral, just answer to that question. Fortunately, we don’t listen to those people here in this classroom, do we? There’s only one screaming dumbass we listen to.

Consider, for instance, the party trapped in the Negative Energy Labyrinth with a player who can’t play the game anymore. In the fictional reality of the game world, it’s literally impossible to drop a replacement character into the group. As long as the party’s trapped in that dungeon, the dead character’s player is out of the game. That’s how it be. That’s how it worked out.

So what do you do?

Do you tell the player to stay home for a month? Do you rewrite things so resurrection magic works? Do you add a resurrection artifact to the dungeon two rooms away and act like it was always there? Do you have the player create a new character and invent a backstory about how they got trapped in the same labyrinth a year ago? Do you pull some magical physics explanation out of your ass that the character’s soul can’t escape because of the Negative Energy Plane so they can play their own animated corpse until they leave the dungeon and die forever? Or let them play as a ghost and give them ghost abilities while limiting their ability to interact with the physical world? Do you tell the players they have no choice but to retreat back to the real world and consider the adventure a loss because the single-use ritual they used to access the dungeon really is single-use? Do you take pity on them and say you’ll let the single-use ritual work again just so they can pop out to replace their dead buddy? Do you go online and talk about this situation so people can tell you you’re a horrible Game Master for even creating a situation where this was a possibility and demanding you give the player a new character immediately and retcon the game to make it work because if you can imagine dragons, you can imagine anything?

Some of you probably think there’s a right answer up there. Some of you probably think one of those answers is absolutely wrong and bad Game Mastering and probably unjust and unfair and evil and illegal. Some of you might think some of those answers are so cool you should totally rewrite the death rules in your system to make them the standard. Some of you just ain’t cut out to be True Campaign Managers.

My point ain’t about right and wrong answers. It ain’t about how all it takes to make Character Death a complete non-issue is to be as brilliantly creative as a sexy gaming genius so you can pull solutions like those out of your ass in the heat of the moment when you’re staring down at a character’s corpse. My point is that it’s on you to decide — for yourself, your table, your game, and your group — how much of your game you’re willing to retcon, revise, or rewrite to circumvent the problems of Character Death. It’s totally your call and it’s part of building your Character Death Strategy. There’s no right or wrong about it.

Does that mean it’s literally okay for you — or any Campaign Manager — to say “Sometimes, players have to sit out for a session or two after their character dies if that’s how long I need to work in a replacement?” Yes. It’s fine. I say it myself.

Oh crap… here it comes…

But Angry! Isn’t that punishing a player for their character dying? Didn’t you tell us not to ever punish anyone for anything!? Argleblarglewarglewaaaaaggggghhhhhhh!”

Punishment is a State of Mind

Ever since I told all y’all to stop thinking in terms of punishment, some of you are thinking I told you to never visit any costs, consequences, setbacks, or losses on your players. In other words, some of you learned the wrong frigging lesson.

Costs and consequences and setbacks and losses aren’t punishments. Negative outcomes aren’t punishments by their nature. They are just negative outcomes. Negative outcomes are part of any well-designed game with actual stakes. They don’t feel good and some people whine that they feel punishing, but they are not punishments.

What makes something a punishment is whether it’s designed, purposely, to teach someone a lesson or arrest a specific behavior. If someone’s character dies and they end up sitting out the game, that ain’t to teach them a lesson about not getting their character killed, but rather it’s just the logical result of the game’s outcomes. Characters can die. Players need characters to play. Roleplaying games need continuity, consistency, and consequences. The end result is the player’s out of play for a little while and the party has to survive for a little while without the resources the dead member brought to the fold.

The same is true of losing experience levels, losing progress in an adventure, or even losing an entire adventure as a result of Character Death. Those aren’t punishments — even if they feel bad — they’re just outcomes. They’re part of the stakes, continuity, and consequences of the game.

My point was that you shouldn’t design mechanics — or policies — expressly to teach players a lesson or change their behaviors. If your only justification for a policy or a mechanic is, “The player deserves it for what they did,” you’re bad and you’re wrong and you should feel bad. Likewise, you shouldn’t label every setback and cost and consequence and loss a punishment just because it sucks.

Just stop using the word punishment at all ever. Keep the word out of your mouth and out of your brain. It’s a stupid word and it makes you sound like a frigging moron.

Posthumous Planning

Enough conceptual horseshit; let me walk you through planning your postmortem game. Or strategizing. Whatever. I ain’t going to apologize for choosing consonance over correctness.

Basically, what you want to do is step through each of those Character Death problems I laid out and decide what you’re gonna do about each when they arise. Or, given that you can’t always know exactly what you’re gonna do, identify your goals in dealing with each issue and spell out some of your options. When you do come up with an actual at-the-table policy or procedure for a given problem, you need to make a note of it so you can tell your players about it at the start of the campaign. If it’s something they need to know.

Let me show you how this works…

Problem 1: Character Death is Upsetting

Character Death invites a lot of potential game disruptions. The first such disruption I noted last month is that Character Death is an emotional bummer. It’s shocking and it’s upsetting. At least, it can be.

Unfortunately, this is one of those impossible to predict issues. People’s emotional responses vary widely and they’re highly situational. It’s also one of those impossible to mitigate or avoid issues. You have no idea which players are gonna feel some kinda way when a character dies. You have no idea how big that feeling’s gonna be. You don’t even know when you, yourself, are gonna have emotions. Some Character Deaths still hit me hard; others just get a shrug.

No matter what, your goal is — as always — to keep the game moving. But if one or more of your players — or you — fixate on the Character Death that just happened, that might be hard. All you can do is be vigilant and know your options. If the dead character’s player is having a hard time, you can suggest they take a break from the table. If several players are struggling, you can call for a five-minute break. If you need a break, you can take one. If that ain’t enough, you can call the session early and then talk it out between sessions. If someone’s angry or pitching a fit, you can pull out your Conflict Resolution toolbox.

Either way, you don’t want to stop the game unless you absolutely have to. You want to power through. Fortunately, most players don’t get that emotional so there’s often no problem to solve. Which is why, by the way, you don’t spell this shit out and you don’t offer a break until it’s clear that it’s really needed. It’s down to a thing called Priming. If you put it in people’s heads that something is likely to be a problem or it should be a problem, they’ll make it one. You don’t want a written policy that reads, “When a character dies, we can take a break if you’re upset” because it primes people to expect to be upset and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Do you see how this works, though? Strategizing, I mean? You identify the issue, you identify your goal, and you list a couple of tools you can use depending on how the actual situation plays out. It ain’t any more complicated than that and don’t let anyone tell you it should be.

Problem 2: Character Death Wrecks the Current Encounter

Last month, I pointed out that characters rarely have the good grace to drop dead only when it’s convenient. In fact, most character deaths happen when the party’s already in the middle of a combat or crisis… for obvious reasons. Thus, there’s usually an in-game emergency to deal with before the characters — and the players — can start thinking about what to do about their ally’s sudden demotion from character to object.

Once again, your goal is to keep the game moving. You want the survivors’ players to focus on getting out of their current predicament and then moving themselves — and the game — somewhere the characters can pause, breathe, and think about what to do.

You should be old hat at this, right? Just keep narrating the situation and inviting the players to act and if they get distracted, remind them firmly that they’ll have plenty of time to deal with the death once the fight is over and the party’s safely barricaded in a safe room or whatever. Don’t let the characters leave the corpse behind though. Once you get the players to put a problem off until later, they can get weirdly forgetful.

The point is, you’re just running the game here. No big deal. That said, if the players are so hyper-focused on what to do about their loss that they literally can’t function, then you may need to break for five minutes or whatever. If that ain’t enough, you might need to break the session in the middle of the fight and come back to it another night. That’s not ideal, though, so you should at least do your level best to get the players to resolve the current encounter before you break the action. It’s okay to take a firm stance on that; emotional pain is real but this is still just pretend elves.

Again, you’ve got to use your best judgment.

Problems 3 Through Whatever: The What Next? Discussion

Once you’ve gotten the game to a natural breakpoint so the characters — and the players — have time to talk shit out, the players have to decide what comes next. That is, they’ve got to determine their plan concerning the current adventure and they’ve got to determine how they’re gonna refill the hole in the roster.

Last month, I noted that the What’s Next? discussion has a heavy metagame component and, as a result, some of my Discordians went completely frigging bonkers and decided to solve that problem by letting players play their characters’ ghosts so they could participate. That ain’t the brilliant solve you think it is and it’s totally unnecessary. First, because there’s nothing wrong with a metagame discussion, and second, because there’s no way this can’t be a metagame discussion.

As a Game Master, you need to know a few things. You need to know what the survivors are gonna do next, obviously, because you always need to know what the players are gonna do next. You also need to figure out how you’re gonna get the eliminated player back into the game. Permanently. I ain’t talking about temporary fixes like letting someone play the party’s pet dog or something.

There are really only two options to get an eliminated player back into the game. Either their character comes back to life or they make a new character who then joins the party. Generally, neither of those options is quick or easy. That means there’s going to be some in-game repercussions. If the party stops to either bring their fallen ally back to life or else recruit a new member, it might mean temporarily or permanently abandoning the current adventure. If they don’t stop to do either of those things, it leaves the eliminated player sitting out of the game and it may also take resurrection options off the table if there’s a magical expiration date on souls in your system do jury.

You just can’t work that shit out in character. Not even with a ghost. Thus, following a Character Death and once the game can be safely paused, you — the Game Master — and your players are going to start working out a plan for how the game’s going to continue. While you are doing that in the real world, you can assume the characters are also discussing shit in the imaginary game world, and they will eventually come up with whatever plan you all agree they do, even if it’s not for the same reasons.

This is where your priorities and goals and willingness or unwillingness to break your game come into play. That means you’ve got to think them out in advance. How long is it okay for a player to sit out the game? Is it okay for the survivors to try to finish out the current adventure before they fill the spot in their roster? How much agency do the survivors have? How much of a say does the eliminated player get? Is it okay, for example, for the survivors to decide not to pay the cost to bring the corpse back from the dead even if the eliminated player wants their character back?

Obviously, you also have to know what options are available in your game both generally and given the specific situation in which the characters find themselves. What do those options cost? What do they entail? How available are they?

See how complicated this gets? See how every Game Master is going to have different answers? See how one Game Master might have different answers for different groups in different campaigns? This is the stuff of True Campaign Managery. There’s no instruction manual, no procedure, no real guidelines. You have to identify your goals, set your priorities, then work out a solution. You have to use your best judgment in every situation, being as firm as you have to be and as flexible as you need to be.

Let me use myself as an example. Here’s where my goals and priorities lie.

First, I’m willing to tell a playey they’ve got to sit an entire game session out. That’s in addition to the half-session they lose when they die and any portion of a session they lose waiting in the wings for the party to meet up with them. I might maybe push it up to two if I’m running super regular, reliable weekly games. Within that framework, I don’t force the survivors’ hands. They can choose whatever they want. If their choices are going to leave the player sidelined beyond what I consider a reasonable limit, I’ll veto their plans and tell them what they have to do.

Second, I don’t bend my game to make death easy to stomach. I’m not inclined to replace a character with a convenient chance meeting in the wilderness or to place a random prisoner in a place I didn’t already have prisoners planned. If there’s an easy opportunity to replace a character — in my opinion — I’ll take it, but otherwise, the party’s usually got to take some kind of direct, deliberate action to fill their roster. Like returning to civilization or doing a ritual to raise the dead. Death is a setback and it should cost the party, not just the player.

Beyond that, I don’t mess with player agency. I’ll veto an action if it’s going to leave a player sidelined for what I consider to be an unacceptable length of time, but I don’t get involved in any other decisions. If the survivors don’t want to revive their ally — no matter the reason — or they want to spend an entire session continuing the adventure before they recruit a replacement, I respect that and we play it out. If the fallen character’s player gives the survivors’ players any grief over that shit, we’re gonna have words.

That’s me, though. Those are my goals and my priorities. I’ve deliberately thought through them, I’m willing to defend them, and I’m okay with losing a player over them. Those goals and priorities empower me to figure out what to do when I’m faced with a Character Death. I don’t know exactly how I’ll handle any given Character Death, but I know I’ll be able to figure it out.

Your New Character Policy

And so ends the great Character Death Policy lesson. Was it everything you hoped for? Was it… wait… do you think I forgot something? Well, I didn’t, but there is a big, gaping hole in this lesson. I did not address at all how the eliminated player should create a new character if necessary. That means I didn’t weigh in on important topics like what experience level replacement characters should have and how many magical items they should get. Those are excellent questions, but they don’t belong in this lesson.

Why not?

Character Death ain’t the only reason you’d need a player to make a new character in the middle of the campaign, is it? Sometimes, new players join existing campaigns. They need to make characters, don’t they? Sometimes players want to retire their characters and play something new. They also need to make characters in the middle of the campaign. So, True Campaign Managers don’t develop policies and procedures for replacing dead characters. Instead, they develop a single, unified policy for creating characters in the middle of the campaign for any reason ever.

The New Character Creation Policy will be the subject of my next lesson and it will also provide a nice segue into a big module about how True Campaign Managers handle Character Creation in general.

Meanwhile, I want to stress again that this course ain’t about my handing you policies and procedures and strategies and rules that work for every game. I shared my own Character Death Policy not because it’s the best way to handle Character Death in fantasy adventure roleplaying games — even though it totally is because I made a conscious choice long ago to only do things in the best possible ways — but rather, I wanted to show you how important it is to think through your goals and priorities so they’re available to inform your Campaign Management decisions.

Obviously, your goals, your priorities, and your decisions won’t be as good as mine, but they’ll be the right fit for you.

You’re all welcome to discuss your priorities and goals and policies and procedures here in the comment section and also in the Angry Article Discussion channel in the Angry Supporter Discord but do keep in mind that debating why your priorities and goals are the best is totally missing the fucking point. It’ll just call you out as a Mere Mouthbreathing Campaign Supervisor. As will telling anyone else they’ve got the wrong goals or priorities.

Of course, trying to tell me my goals and priorities are wrong is especially fraught because mine are axiomatically the best for all fantasy adventure roleplaying games. I know some of you would never play at my table because of my rules, policies, and procedures — I’ve read your comments and e-mails — but frankly, most of you wouldn’t be invited to play at my table anyway, so I’m not losing any sleep over it.

Sorry.