Towards a better understanding of consequences in TTRPGs

THERE SEEMS TO BE a consensus in certain TTRPG circles that character death is the only consequence that truly matters. That's a provocative and no doubt controversial statement, but bear with me: I do not make this observation lightly.

I'm sure you've all heard the extreme version of this a number of times: the game is meaningless, some say, if the DM fudges dice rolls, or goes easy on characters on death's door, or doesn't enforce the falling rules to their fullest extent and so on and so forth. It takes away the pleasure of a hard earned victory, if you know that failure was never an option.

I agree with that sentiment. Somewhat. I just think that failure should not be equated to death.

It doesn't escape me that many proponents of the lethal systems that "let the rolls decide" the fate of characters do in fact know that failure can mean lots of things, and not just death. Dismemberment tables are a neat idea, for example! Yet those too are so closely tied to the character's body, force the price of recklessness to be paid in flesh and gore.

I postulate that the reason this attitude is so firmly established is because character death impacts the player. I don't just mean it in terms of the time and effort you have to spend to make a new character - though there definitely is that too. If you play as a character, if you try to embody them in the fiction, then consequences that impact your character naturally impact you as a player. It's a form of bleed, and it's natural. Expected. Exploitable.

But the focus on the body and the flesh, on mortality, on lethal consequences, is a byproduct of the frankly excessive focus on the dungeon as the adventure location. It is natural to default to physical consequences if your understanding of the hobby is through the lens of 6 feet square rooms and 6 miles wide hexes. It is, by and large, the only thing your players will care about.

I don't care if village #3 in hex 13.A is destroyed by the rat plague. Why would I? Why would anybody? If you play as adventurers with little to no ties to the world, frontier-bound, with more greed than common sense and the narrative support of a disinterested super-partes DM who made a sandbox for you to play with and then took a step back, then this is the default. Can you care about stuff in such a world? Sure. Is that supported? Expected? Rewarded? Debatable.

Have I ruffled enough feathers yet? Let's keep going: plot based adventures have greater breadth of stakes and thus better support player expression. The idea that player skill should be rewarded has been somewhat tied up with the idea that you shouldn't prep plots, and let characters run wild in a scenario where you limit yourself to enforcing the rules and portraying a realistic world. This in turn limits character involvement in the setting and thus limits the DM to a handful of possible consequences, such as death. It is natural then to feel like taking away such a big consequence would let the game spiral out of control.

I am here to tell you that if your players buy into the world more, if you work to establish a coherent narrative and put forward reasonable stakes, then it is possible to run a campaign that is just as interested in player expression and enforcing terrible consequences than if you run a highly lethal dungeon crawling campaign. In fact, it's easier: there are so many more levers you can pull and so many more interesting rewards and punishments you can use. You don't need to kill a character to make them suffer; it's ridiculous to even think that. Letting them live, knowing full well that the ambush that killed their little sister was something they stumbled into because of their carelessness, works just as well if not better. If a player is properly bought in to your shared world, then death might be the least worrying consequence of all.

Of course this requires a degree of tolerance for narrative based mechanics - aka dissociated mechanics. It is possible to run a campaign with fully diegetic non-deadly consequences, but imagining the mechanical support for such a thing makes my head spin. There is space for a system that keeps the narrative components behind the DM screen and fronts only realistic outcomes to the players, but that's a fine line to walk and one I'm ultimately disinterested in - mostly because I cannot for the life of me comprehend how one can look at a fictional world and not see the seams. I digress.

The point is, I am not claiming that the perfectly coherent dungeon-heavy hexcrawling POSR mode is ineffective at what it does. I am merely saying that consequence-heavy games that prioritise player skill don't need to be sandboxes. They can be narrativist games about prepared plots, with planned story beats and involved character backstories. All you need for that to be possible is to make sure players care about the world beyond their own body.

So go forth, and play a campaign where you invest yourself in the characters' fate, flat out disallow character death, plan setpieces and dastardly plots... but still reward ingenuity, build rocks and hard places, and let the dice kill their relatives, their friends, their wards and mentors, their favorite barkeep, their dignity, their honor, their will to live.