Monday 7 November 2016

The Personification of Death

I saw Meet Joe Black last night. This is what happens when you stay at home with some beers and a Chinese and cycle back through everything you've Sky-plussed over the last three years. At some point, either the missus or I had apparently recorded Meet Joe Black to watch it at a later date.

It's a curate's egg of a film. There were elements of it that were stunningly well done: the scene in which Death makes his first physical appearance was particularly good - spooky but very understated. It was also very well-written and well-acted in the main; I felt like it was a bit of a throw-back to an era in which screenwriters actually wrote good scripts for grownups and actors weren't just there to emote in front of green screens. 

It's also quite refreshing to see a film-maker have a decent stab at a concept (Death comes to visit and falls in love) which seems on its face to be unflilmable. 

And yet Brad Pitt, an actor who I despise, delivers a performance which is a deep, black pit of ill-judgement that comes very close to pulling the entire film into disaster, like somebody constantly tugging at a tablecloth on a table covered in very expensive crockery, dragging it all closer and closer to the edge. You can almost see Anthony Hopkins suppressing the urge to slap him in some scenes. (Pitt almost pulled a similar trick in 12 Years A Slave but was thankfully restricted to just one scene in that.) The scenes which involve him speaking in a Jamaican patois, or is it an Irish lilt? are snigger-inducingly terrible. Genuinely some of the worst acting ever committed to celluloid. And his personification of Death, it has to be said, doesn't quite make sense: would Death really have never heard the expression "Death and taxes"? Would Death really not know what a doctor does at a hospital? Would Death really not know how to hold a conversation?

In any event, though, it got me thinking about the personification of Death. It's a common motif in legends around the world and also in fairy tales and fables, but not one that I've ever seen appear in an RPG (unless you want to count Wraith: The Oblivion, or my own [WARNING: PLUG ALERT] "Black Dream of the Dying" in Issue #1 of The Peridot, available from all good online RPG PDF stores). 

What would it mean to D&D-ize Death? You couldn't simply have Death appearing at random to take people away. (I suppose you could, but it would be a bit of a 'fuck you' to the players.) Nor could you have him appearing as a monster who can be fought, because that's ridiculous. 

Death probably works best as a source of plot threads: a figure who appears from time to time when a PC dies and offers a bargain - to allow the PC to live in return for fulfilling some sort of geas. But I also wonder if there might be some mileage in using Death (sparingly) as an early warning system if the players are going to do something, or go somewhere, where there is a very high risk of death through no fault of their own.

Let me make clear: I am a big fan of consequences, and PC death. I don't believe in fudging or letting people off the hook. But there are always (rare) circumstances in a genuine sandbox or dungeon where PCs face near-certain death by sheer fluke or by blundering into a situation where death is extremely likely because you, the DM, have accidentally constructed it to be so. Could the figure of Death be played as a joker card in those circumstances? A way for the DM to admit to himself that, oops, what I just did, or what I planned, is actually genuinely not fair and the players need a warning? A dark figure in a cloak with a scythe glimpsed in the distance or disappearing round a corner, to signal obliquely to the players (if they are quick on the uptake) that what they are about to do might have dire consequences? 

19 comments:

  1. Fritz Leiber's version of Death in the Nehwon series was rather akin to a killer DM : throwing maliciuosly different perils to te Twain in order to bring their demise: sometimes subtly, sometimes more randomly, but able to accept defeat when they did escape his traps.

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  2. A personification of (a god of) Death features in Caverns of Thracia. The presentation is pretty sparse: if you get wounded in the dungeon, the aspect appears to you and beckons for you to join it in oblivion. If this happens enough times, it just attacks you. Once it attacks, it's just another monster. I'm sure some group somewhere ran with the concept and did it proper justice.

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  3. I've always very much liked Pratchett's characterization of the Reaper as an implacable but kindly figure.

    I'm utterly tickled by the idea of some kind of avatar of Death being a DM controlled NPC. I wouldn't use it as a warning to living PC's so much as a more interesting way of negotiating what happens when they hit 0 HP. Especially if Resurrections and Reincarnations are available.

    Instead of "Your character dies, start rolling a new one." it becomes a chance to role play, or toss out some plot hooks. Maybe add in some cleric or MU spells that allow them to see and interact with the Reaper when it comes around for their comrades. At the very least you could have a quasi-literal "Post-mortem" where maybe the PC's can glean some useful info.

    Death as a patron or a hook generator is so much more interesting than Death as a monster to fight.

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    1. Yeah, I like Death as a source of plot hooks - but that could get old fairly quickly I think. You wouldn't want every PC death being handled that way.

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    2. It might be more interesting when the players level up to the point where death is a revolving door. A cleric with Raise Dead or better is already kinda messing up the Reaper's ledgers as it is. The Ferryman's probably gonna start to argue every time some soul's pulled off his boat just as he's ready to cast off.

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  4. It seems logical, if you want Death to appear in the game as more than a plot device, to first figure out what Death's actual function, powers, and agenda are in the world you're running. Is Death a killer, stalking victims? Is Death merely the messenger or first responder of an unavoidable fate? Does Death want people to die for personal reasons, or does it simply act according to some plan beyond its control?

    I'm kind of partial to Neil Gaiman's version of Death, but you have the option to present anything from a demonic adversary hunting the party out of spite, to a kindly figure enlisting the party's aid in arcane quests such as helping the souls of the dead to move on like they're supposed to. Something like the search for Mad Hettie's heart shown in Death: the High Cost of Living would be an amazing quest - you've got to help Death do something important and linked to a bunch of local weirdness while it's in human form and therefore vulnerable.

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  5. If I recall, one of the results of the Deck of Many Things was that Death would appear to take you and you'd have To fight it.

    Later editons changed it to an *avatar* of Death or some such. Anyhow, not a very intresting way to use the Grim Reaper, but I guess that's at least an appearance in the official stuff.

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    1. Interesting. That passed me by. I'll have to dig out my old DM's guides.

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  6. I'm a huge fan of psychopomps, harvesting worthy souls for some inscrutable purpose. Death then gives the PCs bargaining power - especially if different psychopomps can profit from different manners of death.

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    1. You could get mileage out of that from something similar to the Warhammer chaos gods. The psychopomp of Nurgle collects the dead from disease, Khorne those killed violently, etc. It breaks down a bit with Slaanesh - maybe his psychopomp collects those killed by addiction or greed? Tzeentch would be those who die from magical causes.

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  7. To put in yet another plug for Dungeon World...

    "When you’re dying you catch a glimpse of what lies beyond the Black Gates of Death’s Kingdom (the GM will describe it). Then roll (just roll, +nothing—yeah, Death doesn’t care how tough or cool you are).
    ✴On a 10+, you’ve cheated Death—you’re in a bad spot but you’re still alive.
    ✴On a 7–9, Death himself will offer you a bargain. Take it and stabilize or refuse and pass beyond the Black Gates into whatever fate awaits you.
    ✴On 6-, your fate is sealed. You’re marked as Death’s own and you’ll cross the threshold soon. The GM will tell you when."

    That's the "Last Breath" move, used for when a PC dies. You have the (potential) intervention of Death, a chance for one last roleplaying scene, and a (potential) bargain to be made.

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    1. That is an interesting idea, although like I said above I'm not sure I'd want every PC death being treated that way. Sometimes death is just death. I like Death appearing to grant a bargain only on special occasions.

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  8. I once had the dubious privilege of seeing a pride of lions killing a buffalo up close and so for me Death is a lioness, with blazing yellow eyes.
    BTW, I think Brad Pitt has improved over the years: he was surprisingly good as a stern 50s dad in Tree of Life (not that I'd watch it again).

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    1. He has got a bit better since those days. I can just never take him seriously. Whether he's Joe Black, Tyler Durdan, Jesse James or Achilles, he's just Brad Pitt at the end of the day. He never seems to actually inhabit the role at all.

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    2. In Meet Joe Black it's just sheer bad acting though. It is a really awful performance.

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  9. The best manifestation of Death in an RPG that I've seen is in the introductory scenario for Heroquest Glorantha.

    [SPOILER]

    To enter the underworld, one of the PCs has to fight the death god (or his avatar). The neat twist is that it doesn't really matter who dies: the quest will continue even if the avatar kills the PC - with that PC still involved. The only problem is that at the end of the adventure, that PC will be a ghost, trapped in the underworld ...

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    1. Hmm. I quite like that. I am going to have to get into Glorantha at some point.

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  10. I've always been a fan of Death as a fundamental force who just happens to not mind interacting with the little guys. Death is there to take you away when you die, along with dragons and gods and snails and Cthulhuian horrors and artichokes - we just get this little cross-section of it while it swoops around doing Death stuff.

    Death doesn't care if you die today or tomorrow or whenever because it's not collecting anything, it's just doing a job, like the wind blows and the moon shines and gravity pulls. It doesn't matter if the universe operates on free will or determinism, on Death's timescale where epochs are like days it doesn't matter when you die, so if it's somehow amusing to prop you up for another couple of moments then so be it. Who knows why Death does the things it does? Maybe it's bored, maybe it's got an unknowable sense of humor, maybe it just has a soft spot or profound hatred for adventurers. So when that old and impeccably dressed man comes shuffling out of the dark, dank corridors of the dungeon, sandwiched in between the vampires and the umber hulks, and he wants to play chess or checkers or parcheesi, you say 'yes please', because saying no leads to even scarier outcomes.

    I suppose I figure if Death is showing up at all, you can really do whatever you want with him. He can harbinge or make deals or just arbitrarily kill off things because he has to be in the Poconos for a few days and he's not going to be back through in time for the scheduled demise. I like the idea that Death will play Craps with a party to get around a TPK. Or that if you amuse him with jokes, he'll kill that unkillable thing in the next room for you.

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  11. Surprised no one's mentioned Piers Anthony's "On a Pale Horse" yet. It and the next book in the series, "Bearing an Hourglass" are solid attempts to personify and experience highly abstract concepts. It's been decades since I read either, but I recall them being some of his finer work.

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