158. PC Death in Apocalypse World

​Just a short post inspired by another early blog post by Vincent, this one from March of 2004, called “A Small Thing About Character Death plus a mini-manifesto” (http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html -- specifically, look at the 6th post on that page).
 
Vincent begins by noting that “[w]hen a character dies in a novel or a movie, it’s a) to establish what’s at stake, b) to escalate the conflict, or c) to make a final statement.”  Of these, the death of a PC can only satisfy that final object: to make a final statement.  Moreover, that final statement is about dramatizing what the cost to the PC to fight for what they believe in. The death should never be meaningless in an RPG.  Or at least it shouldn’t be meaningless if you are designing the kind of RPG in which PCs don’t have meaningless deaths.  “In fiction, you never die for something you haven’t staked your life on,” as he says.
 
Then he quotes himself from Dogs in the Vineyard:

Also, occasionally, your character will get killed.  The conflict resolution rules will keep it from being pointless or arbitrary: it’ll happen only when you’ve chosen to stake your character’s life on something.  Staking your character’s life means risking it, is all

​So all of that put me in mind of when and how PCs die in Apocalypse World.  In AW 2e, when your harm clock fills up, your “life becomes untenable.”  Then of course you have four choices: come back with -1hard, come back with +1weird, change to a new playbook, and die.  So you can never die by accident in AW, and I always thought of that as simply a matter of giving the player a choice of when they want to let the character go, but in the context of Vincent’s other work, I am now thinking of it in context of making the death meaningful.
 
If your character dies from something dumb, you can bring them back free of charge.  In fact, you get one free character improvement via that +1weird.  It of course makes for great fiction, that +1weird improvement, because you came back odder for your near-death experience.  And when you bring your character to a point that they know they are in danger and they go into it anyway, hoping for the best but laying it all on the line, if they then fill their harm clock, you might think, no, that’s the perfect way for them to go out, dying for something that means something to them.  What makes this method an even better one than in Dogs is that the player never has to be willing to stake their character’s life, which some players might not have the will to do.  But they can push things knowing that they have options, and they can figure out when that time comes if it’s the right time or not.  You get the same power, the same effect, without any such determination by the player or any such heavy-handedness by the rules.  The game offers an opportunity, and it’s in your power to take it or not.
 
Better yet, even when you don’t choose death, your brush with death itself becomes meaningful through the options provided.  Whether you come back less hard, more weird, or entirely changed in who you are, you come back different.  Death and not-death are both meaningful through this construction.
 
Oh, and how fantastic that you “come back” at all! That could have easily been “erase all harm and give yourself a -1hard.”  No, no, though, the language itself forces you to understand that your character has “come back” from death, scarred, gifted, or altered.  And now that I think about it, that “come back” also means that when you choose death, you are choosing NOT to come back, to lay it all down, sword and shield, and rest—to be done.