GM Philosophy: A Deeper Dive on Death

[This post contains minor spoilers for Critical Role and another show that I don’t even name explicitly, so you’re probably okay to read it even so.  But, still: you have been warned.  This is a post about characters dying in D&D games, with historical examples for context.  I try to avoid being too obvious, and the vast majority of what I discuss has been beaten to death on the Internet, but I can’t guarantee you won’t see something you can’t unsee.  Caveat emptor.]

I’ve already written once before about character death in D&D.  But recently there was an arc on Critical Role that some described as “breaking the Internet” by killing not one, but three player characters (although, to be fair, two of them didn’t stay dead very long).  This spawned yet another round of arguments about whether character death in D&D should be on the table (pun intended).  I’ve already stated my position: I don’t kill characters.  Whereas a lot of D&D luminaries are firmly in the opposite camp.  Perennial DM B. Dave Walters is quite fond of saying that he’s a monster and he will kill your characters (he even said this about the cast of Stranger Things, for whom he DMed a game after season 4).  As for Critical Role’s superstar DM Matt Mer Mercer, he once said about character death:

For me it’s hard to have high stakes in a game like Dungeons & Dragons if the threat isn’t there.

Not to mention doing a whole video giving advice on how to do it.

And yet, when all was said and done with the latest furor, I started to wonder if we really were on opposite sides.

Because my pledge not to kill your character (when you play D&D with me) is a little more nuanced than just “I don’t kill characters.” Specifically, I promise that I will not

• permanently
• kill
• a character that you created
• without your permission.

Each one of those qualifications is important.  So, will I temporarily kill your character?  Absolutely.  Will I give them permament consequences other than death?  In a heartbeat.  Will I kill a character you’ve grown fond of that it just so happens was created by me instead of you, such as a family member or mentor or henchman?  You betcha.  Will I obliterate your character if you ask me to, perhaps because you’re ready to move on to a new character and want your old one to go out in a blaze of glory?  Oh, yes: with wild abandon and sheer delight.

So I’m very clear that only permanent, non-consensual death is off the table: everything else is fair game.  And how about those staunch defenders of the right to kill characters?  Well, across 296 episodes of Critical Role—over a thousand hours of gameplay as of this writing¹—as near as I can tell Mercer has only ever permanently killed a character twice, and in both cases the players are on record as saying they were on board with the death.²  As for Walters, he always says he’s going to kill the characters, but as far as I know he’s only ever permanently done so once, and, considering the death in question took hours to play out on the screen, I can’t help but feel that the player was complicit.

So are we really saying things so differently?

What I’m saying is, if a character dies, I ask the player: What do you want to do?  Do you want to try another character? or figure out how to bring this one back?  And, whatever they choose, I will find a way to make it work.  And I actually know for a fact that Matt Mercer would agree with these words.  How can I possibly know that?  Because they’re almost exactly his words: I was just paraphrasing a Twitter thread that he posted after this most recent episode of killing a character.  Which, I might add, wasn’t, in the end, permanent.  Because the player (Marisha Ray) said she wasn’t ready to let that character go.  So now she’s back.  Which is exactly how I would have done it too.³

I’m actually starting to think we’re all saying the same thing.  It’s just a matter of where we place the emphasis.  Mercer and Walters and oh so many others put the emphasis on the death, and the possibility that it might not be permanent is an afterthought.  Whereas I feel more comfortable placing the emphasis on you as a player feeling safe, and the possibility for temporary death (or permanent maiming) is in the fine print.

Now, you might not agree with my point of view here, but at least you have to grant me that it’s an interesting perspective to consider.  And, granting that, why the difference in how the two positions (which are, possibly, really the same position) are stated?  Well, “stakes” is the magic word that most proponents of character death as a possibility bring up (you see it right in the Mercer quote at the very beginning of this piece).  Your game has to have stakes ... and how can there be stakes without death?  But, as my last foray into this topic shows, or as many other articles on the Internet attest, there are plenty of ways to provide stakes that aren’t irreversible death without consent.

And more importantly, from the perspective that roleplaying is storytelling, I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with unilaterally killing off someone else’s character with no hope of reversal.  I found that Adventure Zone’s non-GM⁴ Justin McElroy said it best (talking about his brother Griffin, who was the GM at the time):

This is a distinction between playing an RPG with your friends, and playing an RPG as a method of storytelling ...  Griffin ... is not going to unilaterally decide to kill one of our other creations. We are telling this story collaboratively, right?  ...  But, if Griffin ... is gonna take a player off the table, it is going to, like, be a discussion beforehand.

When I heard this, I realized that Justin (ever the practical McElroy) had put into words exactly what I was thinking but couldn’t quite formulate.  The only part I disagree with is that I don’t think this is something that should be different from using D&D for a show like The Adventure Zone or Critical Role.  Even when you’re just playing with your friends, you should treat their characters like their intellectual property, and you don’t really have the right to just decide to kill them off.  Unless you have a damn good idea how to bring them back, if that’s what they want.  At the end of the day, it’s their character, and you have to respect how they want to see that character’s story told.  You can influence it—that’s what the “collaborative” part of collaborative storytelling means, after all—but you can’t just single-handedly decide for them.

So I no longer believe that all those famous GMs and I are on opposite sides of this conundrum.  Rather, I think that we’re just looking at two sides of the same coin: heads, you die, but you can live again later; tails, you live, but only after you die first.  It’s all in how you look at it.

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1 Thank you, CritRoleStats.

2 And, honestly, even one of those didn’t stick, in the end.

3 Well, to be fair, I would have never made a player completely leave the table for as long as Matt made Marisha do so.  I would have either brought about the resurrection faster, or come up with some other thing for the player to do at the table in the meantime.  But Marisha seemed okay with the way Matt—who is, you know, her husband—handled it, so I consider that more of a nitpick than a true disagreement in philosophy.

4 At least at the time he said this; he’s since taken up the mantle.