2. Getting to do nothing as a player and then dying sucks.

Remember when I said these posts might be a little rough? I am starting to write this draft after a couple of whiskey sours, courtesy of a early Christmas gift I got so here we go. 

MCDM, at the time that this was written, put out a fresh video on the current iteration of their death and dying mechanics in their upcoming RPG, which started the gears whirring in me regarding the fun of death mechanics in TTRPGs. For context in their system you don't go unconscious when you hit zero. The player character instead can go negative in their HP up to half their maximum HP (I think), at which point they meet their ultimate end. They can spend their "maneuver" action, which I think is like a move action,  on whatever they want while not at that doom point, but if they take a big main action like attacking, they take some damage. The result is that the player character can grit their teeth and keep heroing until they die instead of just passing out or rolling on the ground gripping their knees in agony.

I like the MCDM RPG death mechanics for one main reason. You skip the unfun turn where the player isn't doing anything except maybe rolling a death save or something similar. They can keep playing the game instead of being bored for the 10 minutes (a great time to check out and get on their phones) it takes to come back to their turn, which again, they are not doing anything on. With their system the player characters can push themselves, approaching the acts of heroism they are probably imagining their characters pursuing.

The MCDM death mechanic pushes the tone of the game toward heroic fantasy, which may not be every groups cup of tea, but regardless I think it directly addresses a part of many RPGs which I think is universally seen as unfun by players. As I continue to read other systems and develop my own gamemastering style, I think that is something I am becoming more sensitive to-whether or not a mechanic, penalty, or condition is fun for players or not. Often this comes down to whether the player character gets to make an interesting choice (here's looking at you ghoul paralysis, side note: check out The Monster Overhaul for some ghoul paralysis alternatives ). It doesn't mean that they should not experience negative things like death in game, but it does mean that if they get slapped with something bad the best case scenario, in my opinion, is that they have to make some agonizing AND interesting choice.

I don't think you have to read any father, hence the image break, but from this point on, I am going to think about how to incorporate this into the systems I am running. I think I can slot this into Worlds Without Number (Free!), which I have been running the most of, so I'll be talking about it in that context. I think I can keep the MCDM system mostly intact. They can go negative up to half their maximum HP. You have a move action and a main action on your turn in Worlds Without Number, which is the case in a lot of other TTRPGs. I think you can take the Move action without issue while negative and you take 1d6 of damage if you take your main action while in that state. The baddies will be supplying any additional damage and I think 1d6 each main action (essential 1HD) should be plenty especially when the players will die if they go up to half their maximum HP while negative.

I think I still would want to keep the frail condition in Worlds Without Number (die immediately if you go to zero HP or lower) which you would normally gain if you hit zero. I think you would have to do a physical save (essentially a constitution save) or something similar after combat in my iteration to figure out whether you get the frail condition or not. The other solution is to remove the frail condition completely, though I think this makes healer player characters much more valuable. I would say in either case you can't heal yourself, except through potions. The system already has a mechanic to keep healing from being an infinite resource called System Strain. Essentially each player character has a limited amount of system strain they can incur through healing before healing is ineffective, so maybe that balances things out.

Worlds Without Number is a OSR-like system so something similar could be worked out for systems that work on a similar framework.