Death isn’t the Worst Outcome
One of the biggest threats to a TTRPG player is character death. In some games, like D&D, it is possible to bring a character back from the dead, especially if the magic is applied quickly enough. With particularly merciful DMs, death doesn’t even seem like a possible outcome, it loses all meaning. It’s like that quote from Team Four Star’s Dragonball Z Abridged:
Yamcha: You make it sound like death has no consequence.
Tien: It really doesn’t. We’re literally waiting to go back. Hell, this is Choutzu’s second time.
Choutzu: Next time I get a free sunday!
It actually becomes a running joke in some campaigns just how often a character dies. If you’ve never seen it, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising (free to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9gkWC1kJIw) has a whole bit where the guy who plays the bard dies in just about every encounter. Even social ones. To the point where a villain kills him and the monk just looks up at him and says: “As if killing the bard impresses us!”
So if death loses all meaning, where does the threat come in for players of a TTRPG? I mean, certainly there are deathless games out there. Edge of the Empire, a great Star Wars game made by Fantasy Flight Games, actually has a strain system that allows for characters to just lose consciousness instead of ever dying, so death can be taken completely off the table (like it was in that whole abomination of a Disney sequel series, which I sincerely hope they’re removing from canon like was suggested). But there are still stakes, still threats, right?
Of course there are.
A great game, and one that I do want to go back and replay, is Dishonored. I know there are sequel games, but I’m only going to touch on the first here as it’s the only one I’ve played. The game has you playing as an assassin who had been betrayed and marked for death by your government for a crime you didn’t commit. To clear your name, and take revenge on those who abused you, you begin working with a group of rebels trying to take down the corrupt members of your society. You are given options on how to do this. You can hunt them down and slaughter them, killing everyone in your path, you can slink about, finish them quick and quiet like, sneaking away before anyone notices what happened, or you can go my preferred route… non-lethal.
See, the country is currently under the threat of plague, and the more bodies you pile up, the worse that plague. In fact, if you murder-hobo your way through the whole game, you actually get the worst possible outcome. However, if you kill nobody, they get the worst possible outcome. It seems a bit counter intuitive, but killing the slavers and murderers isn’t always the best option. See, and there are spoilers incoming for a game released in 2008, so beware, I find it much more satisfying to have the slavers kidnapped, shaved bald, have their tongues cut out, and sent to work as slaves in their own salt mines than to just slip a dagger between their ribs. Death is a permanent solution to impermanent problems. And it can only be suffered once.
These same rules, to a much lesser degree, can be used to up the stakes in your own games. I wouldn’t go so far as to take the Dishonored route with your play group, but even villains can escape death. It's much harder to escape having their souls removed and placed into an object that is then placed in a brick and mortared into a wall with a million other identical bricks. (Yes, this was a plan one of my characters had to deal with a particularly slippery necromancer).
For the players themselves, making them suffer differently is also a great way to both drive investment in the game as well as motivate better roleplay. Take something or threaten something they love, harm their pride rather than destroy their bodies. Keep giving the villain political or social power that makes them practically untouchable and even more infuriating to the player until they have to get just as creative in how they take them down. One of the things I loved and hated about BG3 was how Gortash was handled. As a villain, he was exactly the “fate worse than death” option for certain characters. He didn’t kill them, just gave them unsolvable problems. I loved that about his character, but I hated how you find so much evidence about his plots and schemes in the world, but can never fully discredit him publicly. Part of me wishes there was an option to reveal all this information, turn the people against him, and have him locked away in his tower, hiding from the people who want to topple the tyrant. Killing him just seems so… simple, compared to ruining his reputation, which he values more than his own life.
Death is final. It's a short prison sentence that only terrifies someone until it happens, then it's over. If you want real threats in your world, find the pressure point for your players, and push it. Push it from different angles and make sure that while they get their victories, they know that there are threats out there that swords and spells can’t solve. There are threats out there that sometimes make death the preferable option.
