Toppling the pillars of the OSR: against lethality

 

One of the accepted wisdoms in the OSR (as codified in e.g. the Principia Apocrypha), as well at the NSR (as defined by Yochai Gal or Pandatheist) is that lethality is good, and a core component of OSR/NSR play, because it means that player choice has real consequence.

I do not entirely disagree with this, but I also do not entirely agree. My opinion aligns more with Pandatheist's follow-up post, arguing that "consequential" would be a better term.

Perhaps my brain is poisoned with modern "trad" ideology, but when playing longer campaigns rather than one-shots, I find that the characters tend to evolve beyond vehicle's for the players' problem solving, developing interesting quirks and personalities that it would be a shame to lose because of an unlucky dice-roll (because that is one OSR tenet I do still believe in - the sanctity of the dice result).

A dramatic death because of calculated risk gone wrong, or a heroic last stand against an ogre while the rest of the party escapes are fun, interesting deaths. A stray arrow from a random encounter with bandits is less so.

A slightly lower lethality can also encourage players to engage more freely with the game, rather than enveloping their characters in bubble wrap, with only their ten foot pole sticking out. As Yochai often asks on Between Two Cairns, "why wouldn't the player characters just leave?" if the dungeon is so deadly.

Of course, I do not believe that the most fun solution to this is to make the characters big strong heroes that dodge death every time, at least not entirely. My preferred solution is to reduce the chance of death, but up the chance of interesting complications. Cairn goes part of the way here with its scars mechanic, triggering only when a character is reduced to exactly 0 hp. Not a common event compared to death. Songbirds 3e gets even closer with its Massive Damage table. At the end of the day, I want interesting consequences, ideally both diegetic and gameable, where death would otherwise be the only outcome.

In my home game of Songbirds, a PC got into an altercation with a Roc because he was trying to sneak off with an egg. He escaped with his life, but one arm lighter. This is definitely a consequence, but rather than just rolling up a new character and continuing from there, the group's goal now became dealing with his new armlessness. This led to them fist having to find a magician who could replace the arm, then adventuring for coin to pay of the mountainous debt incurred by the procedure, and finally he is now learning to use his new demonic arm.

Of course, we all have different goals and ideas of what is fun, but I find this much more rewarding than a quick "you died", followed by rolling up a new character. It can be done in a thousand different ways as well, perhaps you died, but you continue as a ghost, urging the party to find a way to bring you back? Perhaps your body is hurt enough that it becomes a challenge for the party to drag you out of the dungeon?

These things all add to the rich tapestry of the character, and the party's list of achievements, and this is a large part of my enjoyment of RPGs.

PS: For those interested, I wrote a replacement for the Massive Damage and Death mechanics of Songbirds, which could probably be adapted to any other OSR-adjacent system without too much work. It is available on itch.