The Lethality Trick

I’ve written a lot about miniatures games in particular recently, and so I want to dip over to a more general game design subject subject today: how does a game tell you that you’re dead, and why does the means by which it delivers this message matter?

All The Ways Death May Find You

Much like its digital predecessor, the card game adaptation hands out death randomly and without recourse, like some twisted Candyland with dysentery.

Obviously, not all games involve one’s character dying (and hopefully no games involve the player dying). But if a game is going to kill characters, whether it be a video game, a tabletop RPG, or a miniatures game, the way that death is delivered is an important choice for the designer – more important, I believe, than the actual probability of death.

Let’s go through a concrete example from tabletop roleplaying games. Here are two RPGs with very different relationships with lethality: One is Dark Heresy, a notoriously grim and gritty game of Inquisitorial Acolytes woefully unprepared for the horrors of the galaxy they must face. The other is Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, a game about epic heroes fighting monsters, getting loot, and rolling to seduce dragons winning glory.

In Dark Heresy, death works like this: Characters suffer damage, and when their wounds reach 0, they begin to suffer critical damage. This involves rolling on big, splattery tables of critical damage results which send limbs flying, spray gouts of blood everywhere, and are even sometimes merciful enough to kill the character outright. Based on the way damage works, powerful weapons, like a lascannon or the cursed blade of a Daemon Prince, can easily kill a character in one shot on a high roll. Even low-damage weapons can, in theory, deliver a fatal blow to most characters with a sufficiently good set of rolls. Characters do have one last line of defense, however: if they are about to be killed, a character can permanently expend one of their Fate points (representing divine fortune or dumb luck) to miraculously avoid certain death. A blade slices through their hair instead of their neck, or a slug embeds in their Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer instead of piercing their heart. Each Fate point burned away puts a character one step closer to their eventual doom.

In Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, death works a bit differently. Characters have hit points, and when those hit points reach 0, they become incapacitated. Most characters can shrug off a few hits before their HP starts to dip toward 0. Once it is 0, they must make successive death saving throws each turn, each one a 50% chance to remain stable or check off one more mark towards demise. If they fail three times, they die. This counter refreshes each time they rest a full night. Characters can also be killed by “massive damage,” a damage roll that deals an exceptionally large hit to them, but only a few things do enough damage to reach this threshold.

So, which game feels more lethal? Dark Heresy, unquestionably. With tables full of grisly things that can happen to your Acolyte (gory details included), numerous weapons that can (in theory) reduce an Acolyte to paste in one shot, and a general atmosphere of darkness and doom, Dark Heresy makes it feel like death is stalking you around every corner. Even weak foes can get a lucky hit that might put your character in their grave!

And yet, D&D is definitely more likely to kill your character in an unceremonious twist to make George RR Martin proud. Why? Because of Fate points. Barring some strange circumstances of character creation, a character always starts with at least one Fate point. And that Fate point is a get-out-of-death-free card. In D&D, no such safety net exists. If your character gets dropped to 0 HP in the fray of battle and rolls poorly before their allies can reach them, they just die. If an enemy wizard catches them in a Fireball and rolls high, massive damage might instantly incinerate them. These events are, independently, less likely than having to burn a Fate point in Dark Heresy. But the probability of a character’s survival in Dark Heresy (the first time they would die) is 100%. The game makes you forget by telling you that your character explodes into a red mist… and then reminding you to burn your Fate point to have your unlucky NPC comrade suffer that demise instead. In D&D, there’s no such safety net. Obviously at higher levels, D&D has cheap and easy resurrection, but until you hit a certain level and income threshold, dead is actually fairly dead. And if you play enough, over the long term, you’ll start to see the shocking twist deaths pile up in D&D. A fighter Disintegrated here, a thief bleeding out surrounded by skeletons there. And the GM is often as surprised by it as the players. A trend emerges that characters tend to either live forever or die without recourse by their player. In Dark Heresy, because of the sense of progression Fate points create and the weight of choices around them, death rarely comes as a surprise.

Show, Don’t Fell

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice telegraphs particularly dangerous attacks with a clear warning sign, so that you know an attack could have killed you without having to go through the trouble of running back from the last sculptor’s idol. Courtesy my friend Kory, who is actually good at video games.

So does Dark Heresy feel more lethal despite players actually having much more control over the incoming lethality than D&D? I would say it actually feels more lethal because of the control players have over lethality through Fate points. The system presents damage and death as a series of actions and reactions. After damage is rolled, after you see the critical damage that will kill your character, you have a chance to burn a Fate point to keep them alive. Death flashes before your eyes, and then is averted. By giving the player information and giving them a chance to act on that information, their attention is focused on the act of survival. The mechanics reinforce the lethality of the setting by making the act of survival part of the gameplay, and the game shows you the death your character is trying to narrowly avoid at each step.

So let’s jump to a theoretical example: How would I make X-Wing feel more lethal just by changing its presentation of damage and death?

In X-Wing, when one ship attacks another, it rolls attack dice against that ship, trying to get hit and critical hit results. The defender then rolls defense dice, hoping to evade results that cancel the attacker’s dice results. Players can spend certain resources to modify the dice. Then, any hits are turned into facedown damage cards, and any critical hits are turned into faceup damage cards.

This already has some effect of drawing the defender into the act of their pilot’s survival, as they must choose whether to spend resources to improve their defense results. You see the laser cannon bolt that will hit your ship, then see it swerve away at the last moment.

But just for the sake of the experiment, let’s push it further. What if damage cards were drawn, revealed (when dealt faceup), and put in front of the player (but not yet dealt to the ship), after attack dice were rolled, but before defense dice were rolled? The defender would now be operating with more information about the doom coming toward their ship. Suddenly, that critical hit on the die wouldn’t be an uncertain critical hit from the deck, but a specific critical hit right in front of you. A decent portion of the time, it would even be the dreaded Direct Hit, which simply deals two damage cards – often the difference between being shot down and surviving.

Setting aside any impacts it had on the outcome, this would make the game feel quite a bit more lethal, as certain death would be sitting on the board in front of your ship much more often than it does in the current iteration of the game. The defense dice would weigh heavier because they were truly the last layer of defense - you couldn’t envision the possible good fortune of the damage deck passing you a Panicked Pilot even after the dice were cast.

The takeaway here isn’t that I think X-Wing should actually do this. X-Wing is almost certainly better off as it is. Putting aside that this mechanic would bog down play, the uncertainty of critical hits fits with the heroic vision of Star Wars: sometimes R2 gets hit instead of the fuselage, and Luke manages to swoop in, damaged but alive, to deliver the torpedoes that destroy the Death Star. Whether it is chance or the inscrutable will of the Force, sometimes the heroes are lucky.

Instead, the takeaway is that where you put player agency in the game matters, because that tells your player what the game is about. If lethality is an important theme in in your game, then survival needs to also be important. So, oddly, to make a game feel more lethal, let people struggle that much harder to survive. If you can’t see death coming and you can’t do anything about it, you’re playing Oregon Trail.