Do Fear the Reaper
In my preferred playstyle, where player choices have real consequences, death is on the table. This is a well-trod subject in the OSR and adjacent communities, and the “deadliness” is somewhat overblown. All it really means is that the referee, whose job is to play the world, doesn’t pull punches. If the players choose to eat the deadly mushroom, death naturally follows. (Although I always eat the mushroom, baby.)
Me, eating unidentified dungeon objects: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Me, dying of dysentery: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
However, not all death is so linear between cause and effect. Death comes for us all, except that one lich-ass billionaire who takes 100+ pills a day to keep his body youthful (and, inshallah, him too). An adventurer who is lucky enough to not die of mushrooms or dragons or falling rocks may live to die peacefully, surrounded by hirelings looking to inherit their stuff. But is there a way to determine when a player character’s time to shuffle off the mortal coil is upon them, other than player- or referee-fiat? There is now. Frankly, this is a stunning oversight from Mr. Gygax, an early figure in the hobby, who worked as an actuary, the profession most likely to ask “how should we price this half-elf’s life insurance based on their mortality statistics?”
We Live
First, how old are you? I know it is never polite to ask an adventurer their age, but it is necessary if you want to insert the looming threat of natural death into your campaign. There are a few systems that concern themselves with your starting age, primarily for aesthetic reasons. In the Cloud Empress setting, those old enough to no longer have their wisdom teeth can’t use magic; there are no old magicians (as an aside, my mouth is actually big enough that my wisdom teeth grew in, no problem. I would rule the world in that setting; put me in, coach). For me, death is largely aesthetic, but I think it makes sense to correspond somewhat with character ability. A way I’ve seen this done that I’m not overly fond of is modifiers based on age. Old characters reduce their Strength by 2 and increase their Wisdom by 2, or something of the like. It just feels clunky to me (besides being overly simplistic, but that complaint isn’t as concerning since ability scores are, by their very nature, highly simplistic abstractions). And for those systems, do you choose your character’s age or do you roll separately for it? A lot of work is going into something that is mostly just aesthetic!
What if, instead, your ability scores, which you are already rolling for, also determine your age. Prismatic Wasteland uses 4 ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Charisma. The scores start somewhere between 3 to 18, with a bell curve distribution (iykyk). Below is how characters of each ancestry (the list below reflects the common ancestries of Prismatic Wasteland that broadly falls into 4 buckets) calculate their starting age based on their starting ability scores.
Prismatic Wasteland Starting Ages:
| Ancestry | Starting Age |
|---|---|
| Humans (and Orcs and Kobolds) | Intelligence + 6 (Average of 16.5 years old) |
| Halflings (and Lizardfolk) | Intelligence + Charisma (Average of 21 years old) |
| Dwarves (and Dryads) | Intelligence + Charisma + Strength (Average of 31.5 years old) |
| Elves (and Dungeonborn and Hellions) | Intelligence + Charisma + Strength + Dexterity (Average of 42 years old) |
This is quick, in that you are just adding numbers you already have to roll, but also makes some sense conceptually. For instance, if you roll a 6 Intelligence as a human and are thus playing a 12 year old, your low intelligence can be attributed to your youth. But I also wanted to see if this lined up generally with expectations others had. Helpfully, Errant, a system that tends to have a little rule for most things you might wonder about, also divides ancestry types into 4 categories and has you roll to determine your starting age. As pure happenstance, these lined up nearly to a tee, as shown below.
Errant Starting Ages:
| Ancestry | Starting Age |
|---|---|
| Adaptable Ancestries (e.g., humans) | 1d10+10 (Average of 15.5 years old) |
| Cunning Ancestries (e.g., halflings) | 1d20+10 (Average of 20.5 years old) |
| Tough Ancestries (e.g., dwarves) | 2d20+10 (Average of 31 years old) |
| Arcane Ancestries (e.g., elves) | 3d20+10 (Average of 41.5 years old) |
I was actually taken aback by the similarity. The difference, of course, is the curve. Errant elves may start anywhere between 13 and 70 years of age, whereas while it is theoretically possible for a 12- or 72- year old elf in Prismatic Wasteland, it is a practical impossibility (but please, tell me about your character that started with all 18 stats in the comments). Taking only odds that have at least a 1% chance, the ranges are more like 25 to 58 for Errant and 31 to 53 for Prismatic Wasteland. A slight but meaningful difference.
But I digress. Where were we? I’m getting forgetful in my old age of 30 (too old to be a starting adventurer in Errant or Prismatic Wasteland). Perhaps I shall die soon. Oh right, I was talking about death.
We Die
To clarify at the start, this is not necessarily a system of dying of old age per se. It is a system for dying of natural causes. Technically the same killer that can cause a person to die “of old age” so to speak, can be the culprit in the death of a much younger person, although such instances are more rare. Save versus gum disease.
Every player-character has a death tracker, their mortal coil. The mortal coil has three (3) little bubbles that they fill in. When the 3rd bubble is filled in (3 strikes and you’re out), it is that character’s time to go. It may not happen immediately, but it must happen within the next year of in-game time. The player should confer with the referee on how they would like to see their character pass beyond to the next life.
Every player character has a birthday. They pick a date on the fictional, in-world calendar that is their birthday. (This is a great practice in general–you would be surprised how much more invested players become in the tracking and passage of time when their character has a birthday to look forward to.) On their birthday, in addition to any celebrating (or sulking that no one is celebrating), the player picks one of the character’s ability scores and rolls dice. They roll 2d10 for a short-lived ancestries (e.g., humans), 2d12 for middling-lived ancestries (e.g., halflings), 2d20 for long-lived ancestries (e.g., dwarves), or 3d12 for undying ancestries (e.g., elves).
If the player rolls below the chosen ability score, that score increases by 1. However, they must also fill in one bubble on their mortal coil. If they roll equal to or above the ability score, they “bubble” the ability score, which is one step toward increasing it (for an explanation of this, see my previous post about my method for ability score increases). Either way, they get another year older.
This pairs well with the above-described system for determining starting age. A character with a lower starting age is more likely to have lower ability scores, and a character with lower ability scores will be less likely on future birthdays to fill in a bubble on their mortal coil.
A perceptive reader may worry “wait, so my character could die of natural causes in just 3 calendar years”? Potentially (if you are unlucky), but because the player gets the choice of which ability score to roll under, they also have control over how quickly their character shuffles along their mortal coil. If they consistently pick their lowest score, the odds of filling in those bubbles is low. If they consistently pick their highest score, the odds are higher. But it is also a bit of a risk reward–in Prismatic Wasteland, it is typically harder to increase higher ability scores than lower ones, so this presents a rare opportunity where the opposite is true. But at a cost.
Even then, what are the odds of filling in a bubble of the mortal coil? Below are the odds for each ancestry type based on average (11), low (6) and high (16) scores. As you can see, the player has a great deal of control over how fast they trend toward their untimely death based on whether they roll under their highest ability score or their lowest.
| Ancestry | Low Score | Average Score | High Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Human-type | 10% | 45% | 85% |
| Halfling-type | 6.94% | 31.25% | 68.75% |
| Dwarf-type | 2.5% | 11.25% | 26.25% |
| Elf-type | 0.58% | 6.94% | 26.16% |
I am not an actuary nor am I at all proficient at statistics, but I think I can predict when you will die. Not you the flesh and blood person reading this, but you the paper and ink character using the system I outlined above. Assuming each ancestry-type selects their lowest score each year and starts at the average starting ages above (and assuming I’m even doing this back-of-a-napkin math half-right), a human will die at 46.5, a halfling will die at 64, a dwarf will die at 151, and an elf will die at the ripe old age of 559. Gary Gygax himself would be proud of these statistics. The don’t represent the full potential of these species lifespans (the all-mighty search engine tells me humans can expect to live to be 73, halflings 150, dwarfs 250, and elves 750). Instead, these are rules for the player-characters, adventurers on the road living hardscrabble lives. Adventuring takes a toll on the body. Although I do note that, given the near-medieval level of technology in Prismatic Wasteland (and most D&Ds), the 46.5 year lifespan isn’t far off the mark, accounting for those who survive infancy (Wikipedia tells me that life expectancy for the late medieval English peerage for those who reached age ten was 42 and a whopping 48 if they reached 25). But adventurers are more likely to roll under higher scores when tempted to get a boost to that ability, representing the hazards to one’s health of adventuring, dying even sooner as a result.
There are two reasons it may be fun to implement this mechanic into your games. The first is simply that it can generate interesting situations for characters. Maybe without even trying you fill in the first two bubbles of the mortal coil in your first two years of adventuring, with just a single bubble remaining. Suddenly you realize, oh my character must have some terminal disease. They may be aware they are at death’s door and have to make their final few years (or less) count. This is reminiscent [Warning: Red Dead Redemption (2018) Spoilers. Skip the remainder of this paragraph if you wish to avoid spoilers for a 6-year old game] of the fate of the protagonist, Arthur Morgan. In the back half of the game, Arthur is diagnosed with tuberculosis. It isn’t the end of his adventuring, but it does bring things into perspective as he is forced to confront his mortality and maybe make things right during his remaining time on this earth. Dying slowly (in a game) can be fun!
This method also emphasizes time, that most precious of resources. It literally introduces a (very, very long) countdown for players, and nothing makes decisions feel more visceral than having to make them while sand suddenly drains from your hourglass. But more importantly, it incentivizes the tracking of time. Although time tracking is typically a chore for the referee, the easily way to unburden the already overtaxed mind of the referee is to have players track it instead. But why does the referee usually track time? Because players don’t want to.
If players desire the passage of time, they are more likely to give a damn about tracking it, and if they are more likely to thus give a damn, they are more likely to assist the referee in doing so. This follows from an excellent post from my colleague at the Trilemma Adventures blog, where the author states a few maxims: (1) The player who needs to use a quantity should be the one tracking it; (2) The player who desires the outcome of a mechanic should be responsible for invoking it; and (2.b) Mechanics which produce only negative or positive outcomes are especially important to give to the proper player. The reason the referee typically tracks time is because it is usually a constraint (negative) for the players. But this turns it into more of a positive.
As I said in my first post about the importance of calendars in games, an easy way to get players invested in the fictional calendar is to let them pick a birthday for their character and put it on that calendar. Historicity of birthday celebrations be damned. But this is only amped up if there is something for them to do (other than celebrate with fiction [or, even better, non-fictional] cake) when that date does arrive on the calendar, especially if it is something positive. That is why birthdays come with either an ability score increase or at least some improvement (originally there was no upside if you didn’t roll above your ability score. Now there is a little treat no matter what). Just as the character looks forward to their birthday, so too does the player.
We all must be born, grow up, and die, players and characters alike. We might as well have some fun and roll some dice while we’re at it.
