Is Death Necessary?

As you might know, I LARP. And our LARP group tends to have pretty soft rules on death. After all, you don't want all your work on a character to completely get ruined because of bad luck.

As a result, there was a HUGE debate. Is death necessary to keep the stakes important?

I personally think that while death is an easy way to amp stakes, it is not the only way, and is not needed for an enjoyable/risky experience, in a book or a roleplay.

What do y'all think?

They don't have to add death to raise the stakes. The character could risk something like their job or their reputation instead.

There are probably many other things that a character could risk to raise the stakes, too.

edited 10th Jun '12 12:12:53 PM by BlackElephant

No. There are very few things in fiction that are always necessary; character death is not among them.

That said, if the characters repeatedly risk their lives and get away unscathed, the tension can lower somewhat. I have no idea how much this applies to your LARP, though.

In addition to njrxll's commentary that if placed in a seriously life-threatening situation enough and nobody ever dies it begins to feel less real, there is the roleplaying setting. If nobody dies, there is a risk they will instead obtain gamebreaking levels of power eventually, or learn how to manipulate their existing abilities too well for the good of the game and the other players. (I've seen, and done, both things.)

As an interactive game the rules must be changed sometimes to prevent easy manipulation. Changing the rules by changing the characters is easier than going to a new system.

I'm thinking about this from a more literary point of view (since I don't have any LARP experience), but no. There can be plenty of things at stake without bringing a threat of death into the story. Having your partner leave you, or finding out they've been cheating. Being disowned by your parents. Losing a good friend. Being rejected from the army/space programme/university/other career you wanted. Having your manuscript sent back. Losing a big sports game. Getting passed up by the will of a deceased relative. The list is pretty much endless.

Yeah, I agree. I think some occasional level of 'risk' might be necessary to keep things interesting, even in the fluffiest Slice of Life, but death doesn't need to have anything to do with it. However, you do need to make the risk feel authentic, and it's very difficult to do that without occasionally having someone 'lose' the gamble and have to make a sacrifice. If the risk is supposed to be life-and-death, and you never get the latter, yeah, it can feel a bit thin. Plot Armor is one of the most fundamental tropes though so it's clearly something you can get away with.

I generally prefer things (R Ps especially) where instead of death the character gets punished in some other way, like the antagonists getting a major win, losing redshirts, territory or the macguffin, family/love interest getting kidnapped, some kind of crippling injury which may or may not be healed later, etc. That way you can turn the defeat into a hook that builds on the character's motivation and increases the drama, rather than just wiping the slate of everything they've built up, which is wasteful and can ruin the fun.

Of course people do get tired of characters or leave the game so in R Ps it can be good to make the plot armour optional and let those so inclined have the opportunity to make a heroic sacrifice.

edited 20th Jun '12 7:48:42 AM by Kesteven

No, it's not, but the death of others is always a nice way to keep tension up. Things like "If we don't stop this dragon, thousands of people will die," or "If I don't solve this mystery, an innocent man is going to jail."

There's worse things than death, especially if a character has a particular Serious Business or something where "losing" that business would wreck them.