Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth…

...where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal…

So Courtney Campbell wrote a piece on D&D as shamanic vision quest that I’m pretty sure I’m too stoned on flu meds to really understand just yet, but I do want to revisit when I’m lucid. Jacob “Swordfish Islands” Hurst was inspired by it to discuss the difficulties of PC death at the table. He’s got a serious point there, but I’m not going to address it directly. Instead, I’m going to discuss something that would seem to be a natural reaction to the issues Mr. Hurst raises but that we don’t see much of, except from the sorts of players I consider the best and most fun to play with.

The first of his “big potential post-death failure points” is:

The player has personally invested hours creating their character. The death has wasted that time.

Fully wasted that time? Depends on what that time was spent on.

Ok, sure, pretty much every number on the character sheet is gone. The other PCs can divide any unspent treasure and salvageable gear, but skills and stats and special abilities are, of course, gone.

That said, let me take an example from one of my games. The bard in the group is the daughter of a prostitute in a high-class pleasure house catering to the rich and powerful. This is far from the most original background I’ve received as a DM; I’m sure we’ve all seen variations on this theme, possibly many times before.

That said, the PCs have, as a group, met this mom. They’ve used her room (naturally warded against divinations and similar spying magics) to plot their moves, dropped her name to smooth their way through high society, and used her to verify what they’ve heard about the character of certain nobles. No matter what happens, Phoebe of the House of Thorns and Roses is now a fixture in the setting. If the bard should die, Phoebe and the House will still be there. They might be enemies of the PCs if she blames them for her daughter’s death, or she might manipulate them into securing vengeance against those she does blame. Or the relationship might be stronger and more stable for the loss.

In any event, the time spent by the player creating Phoebe and the House of Thorns and Roses was not wasted. Nor was the time spent in creating the bard’s mentor, the halfling troubadour Pyle Brandywine. The fact that the bard’s player and the sorceress’ player took the time to entangle their backstories means that these creations exist even more strongly in the setting because they now have links to two different PCs.

Now, I understand that, for some folks, this isn’t what the game is supposed to be about. This sort of working outside the rules feels like cheating to some, or a distraction from the real fun at best. I understand, but I don’t agree, and if this sort of thing is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

The thing that separates D&D from CRPGs, board games, and (most) war games is the ability to play with the entire setting, in all its many facets. This type of play brings the aspects of the character that are not quantifiable to the fore. And these aspects linger, their impact lasting long, long beyond the lifespan of any single character. The world is richer for it, and the game is more fun because a richer world creates more opportunities for entertainment.

Art by Gustave Léonard de Jonghe.