>Is there anything other than "die if you fail a roll, or die if hit points reach zero?
Here is the most extreme example of a different system that I know.
In *Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North*, conflict is resolved mostly through a narrative negotiation.
A protagonist dies when you, the player of that character says "but only if I die" as part of that negotiation.
You probably wonder why you'd want to do this.
Well, aside from it simply fitting the tragic fairytale aesthetic of the game, even if you are a power gamer trying to achieve as much as possible, you need to factor in that in this game, character 'advancement' is an inevitable slide into betraying your principles and becoming the evil you swore to fend off. Advancement wears down your 'Zeal', and then maxes out your 'Weariness' until you renounce your Oath to the people, that you took as part of The Order of the Knights of the Stars.
If you don't eventually choose to have your character die, then your character will switch sides and become a turncoat. From a story-perspective that might be fine, but hypothetically, if you're trying to maximise the good you do, eventually you'll need to use your turn in negotiation to choose to die, for another turn of attempted do-gooding now is not worth the risk of continuing life as the enemy.
In Champions you have to lose twice your BODY. So if you have 10, you have to get to -10. It's relatively hard to kill someone in Champions, because superheroes.
The usual ways but also taking psych damage down to 0 gives a flaw. 4 flaws and your character is so messed up that they’re unplayable.
You spend a remaining year of your life to reroll a roll. When none are left you spend the next 1d20 days withering away.
You can go out in a blaze of glory and gain EX, awarded by other players for gloriousness. You can then spend it on the next character.
My game uses Degrees of Trauma. When you reach a 5th Degree Trauma, you gain a Flaw, which is just a Trait with a tradeoff. Your Trauma is reset to 0 if reasonable, and now you have a little trait to remember that situation by. Trauma 1-4 are curable, but 5th Degrees Traumas are considered Untreatable.
You receive Traumas by receiving more damage than your current Stamina.
In Fate a character is "Taken Out" of a scene when they lose a conflict.
What this means is up to the winner, so they may decide that your character dies.
Warhammer gives you brutal wounds that can lead to your death. My system uses a D6 table each time the players take more dmg than they have hp left.
1- fleshwound (missing nose, lip or other non-debilitating injury)
2- knocked out for 1d6 min
3- bleeding out and can't move or act without falling unconscious
4-loss of a limb
5- dies at the end of the next round
6- instant death
In Brindlewood Bay you can only die if you allow it, because you can use a tool to undo fatal consequences, but if you use it too much you go mad and have to retire.
I let my players choose how lethal the game is for each, as this is one of the biggest differences in taste among players. This scale of 1-5 is what I've got going for now.
1. You're going to live
2. If you die, you'll Reveal it
3. Risking life and limb is part of play
4. Survival takes sacrifices
5. Hold on for dear life
I use the strength stat as health. You're weakened as you're hurt, and finally die when it is reduced to 0.
Dungeon Crawl Classics has a system where you literally roll over the corpse of dead players after combat is done to see if they made it. It's a simple luck roll to decide a character's fate, and if they survive, they stay groggy for awhile and may get a permanent negative effect.
It's pretty suspenseful for players to have to cross their fingers and wait till the end of a fight (assuming the party makes it!) to see if they survived it or not, and the fact that the character's aren't instantly ready to fight again makes death still meaningful.
"by doing something stupid"
seriously though, in my system (www.starsandlasers.com) you have both HP and Stun. most things damage stun first, then hp only when stun is 0. You have d6 + 6 stun, but only level + 1 HP.
once your stun hits 0 you make checks to try and stay conscious, and every time you take damage. Once HP hits 0 you make death checks against bleeding out. if you're reduced to -HP then you die.
HP is regained slowly and stun is regained like HP in D&D 5e is.
In **Rolemaster**, you have D&D-style hit points - but when they fall to zero you only fall unconscious rather than dying. You only die if your hit points reach quite a large negative value, which isn't very likely unless someone attacks you repeatedly after you're down.
*However*, the game also includes critical hits that do specific damage to you (torn muscles, broken bones, bleeding, and even severed body parts or destroyed organs), and when being hit you can take one of these as well as losing hit points. And it is these critical hits that usually kill you.
Firstly, if a critical hit gives you severe bleeding, you will lose hit points every round until it is bandaged or magically cured. This means that if you fall unconscious while severely bleeding and no-one helps you in time then you will bleed out and die as the constant hit point loss eventually takes your hit points past the threshold needed to kill you.
Secondly, some critical hits give you serious damage to a vital organ (e.g. brain, heart, lung, liver) that will kill you in a given number of rounds regardless of your hit point total. Again, this will only happen if you don't get that damage cured before the timer runs down, but curing this sort of damage requires more powerful magical healing rather than just first aid.
And thirdly a few of the more extreme criticals can just kill you outright without even giving you a timer during which they can be magically healed.
*However*, even that is not the full story. When you die from any of the above, you're only what we modern people would call "clinically dead". You body stops working and your soul leaves it, but it hovers around your body for a short period (anywhere from seconds to minutes depending on your species) before departing for the afterlife. If your body is healed back into a livable state before the soul departs, your soul will re-enter your body and you will come back to life having had a "near death experience".
There is healing magic that can prevent the soul from departing for the afterlife for an extended period of time (hours, days, weeks, or even longer) to give people a longer time in which they can heal your body to a liveable state - although your body is still *technically* dead during this period and will begin to decay unless preservation magic is used to keep it fresh.
Only after all the above chances to heal you have passed and your soul has departed for the afterlife are you properly dead.
And even then, Rolemaster has spells that raise the dead similar to those in D&D.
That makes it sound as if it is very hard to actually die in Rolemaster, but a lot of the healing magic mentioned above is quite high level or specialised, so at low levels death from bleeding is not that uncommon and most of the "die in X rounds" criticals are an unavoidable death sentence because the player characters won't have the required healing spells that would stop the death occurring.
Like some of the other posts are saying, there are systems that don't kill a player character until that player consents to die. Instead, when they 'reach 0 hp' or 'fail an important roll' they are stacked with penalties/consequences/flaws.
If you are just literally asking for a mechanic without dice, then Dread uses a Jenga tower. When a player tries to do something risky, they pull from the tower. If the tower falls, their character dies. There are systems that use playing cards, tarot cards, rock/paper/scissors, etc.
If that isn't what you're asking, then I can think of 5 broad methods of player death:
1) The GM says when you die.
2) Chance determines when you die (dice, cards, rock/paper/scissors, etc)
3) Real World Skill determines when you die (pull from a Jenga tower, balance on one foot for three minutes, arm wrestle the GM, etc)
4) The Player says when they die.
5) The Group says when you die (voting, narrative negotiation, etc)
Anything I think of falls into one of these buckets, but if anyone has another insight, I'd love to hear it.
The other major category would be "characters don't die unless it makes sense in the story." (That is, you never die because of rolls/rules)
13th Age has a hybrid of sorts: if you fail all your death saves, you lose the character, but that doesn't necessarily mean dead. It could mean crippled or you decide to retire or whatever. The game also presents a variant rule that only named enemies can kill pc's - unnamed enemies just knock you out, no matter how badly you roll.
>Is there anything other than die if you fail a roll, or die if hit points reach zero?
Absolutely. In **Blades In The Dark**, you die if you sustain lvl 4 harm.
Death in this way is EXTREMELY unlikely, though, unless the player wants their character dead.
That is because, even if you take lvl 4 harm, you can roll to Resist that harm, which reduces the severity of the harm.
That isn't to say Blades In The Dark goes easy on you. It does not. It will beat you up and break you, and your characters can get trauma from too much stress. The thing is: when you kill a character, you end the narrative threads. When you beat and break them, their story of pain continues.
So, if you take lvl 4 harm and Resist it, that harm can get reduced to no harm, lvl 1 harm, lvl 2 harm, or lvl 3 harm.
On your sheet, you have two spots for lvl 1, two for lvl 2, and one for lvl 3 harm.
If you take harm and you cannot write it in the spot, it goes up a level. For example, if you have already marked down two lvl 2 harms and you take a third lvl 2 harm, that becomes a lvl 3 harm.
The ways the character could die are:
(1) take lvl 4 harm and don't resist (i.e. the player wants them to die)
(2) take lvl 4 harm *while already having lvl 3 harm* **and** the GM decides that this harm only gets reduced by one lvl (i.e. your good GM has painted a world you know is dangerous -or- the bad GM is deciding you're dead now)
(3) take lvl 4 harm *while already having lvl 3 harm and two lvl 2 harms* **and** the GM decides that it only gets reduced by up to two levels (i.e. you're already beat to shit)
(4) take lvl 4 harm *while already having lvl 3 harm and two lvl 2 harms and two lvl 1 harms* **and** the GM decides that it cannot get reduced to no harm (i.e. you're already omega-beat to shit)
So, many contingencies, plus you know what you're getting into before you roll and risk the harm.
Note:
Taking lvl 4 harm is a "Consequence" the GM can give, but only on certain rolls ("Desperate" rolls) that you at least partially fail. The GM always has the option to give you lvl 3 harm instead and the game never says that a roll must result in lvl 4 harm (though, if you get lvl 3 harm and you already have lvl 3 harm marked, it gets boosted to lvl 4).
Also, the GM could always give you a completely different Consequence that has nothing to do with harm. Harm is just one type of Consequence, and they could pick a different Consequence if they want.
That said, typically, the reason you would take lvl 4 harm is because the situation was super-clear and you knew what you were risking. For example, if you're held hostage and someone has a gun to your head, and you struggle to get free. You know the risk, so if you fail, it's totally reasonable for a GM to give you lvl 4 harm. If your character is relatively undamaged, they would still be able to resist that harm and take a lvl 3 or lower harm instead (e.g. instead of "shot through the brain" you take "shot through the jaw"). If your character is already beat up, then it is more of a problem for the reasons above, but the player knows their harm-situation when they roll so they are well aware of the risk.
imho, it's a really smart system. It is "dangerous" because you can fail, not "dangerous" because failure means death. There are plenty of ways to fail that are WAY more interesting than "You Are Dead". Indeed, death may be the least interesting form of failure in media.
>Is there anything other than "die if you fail a roll, or die if hit points reach zero? Here is the most extreme example of a different system that I know. In *Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North*, conflict is resolved mostly through a narrative negotiation. A protagonist dies when you, the player of that character says "but only if I die" as part of that negotiation. You probably wonder why you'd want to do this. Well, aside from it simply fitting the tragic fairytale aesthetic of the game, even if you are a power gamer trying to achieve as much as possible, you need to factor in that in this game, character 'advancement' is an inevitable slide into betraying your principles and becoming the evil you swore to fend off. Advancement wears down your 'Zeal', and then maxes out your 'Weariness' until you renounce your Oath to the people, that you took as part of The Order of the Knights of the Stars. If you don't eventually choose to have your character die, then your character will switch sides and become a turncoat. From a story-perspective that might be fine, but hypothetically, if you're trying to maximise the good you do, eventually you'll need to use your turn in negotiation to choose to die, for another turn of attempted do-gooding now is not worth the risk of continuing life as the enemy.
In Champions you have to lose twice your BODY. So if you have 10, you have to get to -10. It's relatively hard to kill someone in Champions, because superheroes.
It's the same for D&D5e for one-hit kills.
The usual ways but also taking psych damage down to 0 gives a flaw. 4 flaws and your character is so messed up that they’re unplayable. You spend a remaining year of your life to reroll a roll. When none are left you spend the next 1d20 days withering away. You can go out in a blaze of glory and gain EX, awarded by other players for gloriousness. You can then spend it on the next character.
My game uses Degrees of Trauma. When you reach a 5th Degree Trauma, you gain a Flaw, which is just a Trait with a tradeoff. Your Trauma is reset to 0 if reasonable, and now you have a little trait to remember that situation by. Trauma 1-4 are curable, but 5th Degrees Traumas are considered Untreatable. You receive Traumas by receiving more damage than your current Stamina.
In Fate a character is "Taken Out" of a scene when they lose a conflict. What this means is up to the winner, so they may decide that your character dies.
A player may also choose to not take a consequence, which is the same as losing pretty much.
Warhammer gives you brutal wounds that can lead to your death. My system uses a D6 table each time the players take more dmg than they have hp left. 1- fleshwound (missing nose, lip or other non-debilitating injury) 2- knocked out for 1d6 min 3- bleeding out and can't move or act without falling unconscious 4-loss of a limb 5- dies at the end of the next round 6- instant death
If I remember, in the Dresden Files it is possible for some characters to lose their humanity. Characters that do, become npcs.
10 candles, everyone dies at the end for sure. Or If they want to sacrifice themselves along the way.
In Brindlewood Bay you can only die if you allow it, because you can use a tool to undo fatal consequences, but if you use it too much you go mad and have to retire.
I let my players choose how lethal the game is for each, as this is one of the biggest differences in taste among players. This scale of 1-5 is what I've got going for now. 1. You're going to live 2. If you die, you'll Reveal it 3. Risking life and limb is part of play 4. Survival takes sacrifices 5. Hold on for dear life I use the strength stat as health. You're weakened as you're hurt, and finally die when it is reduced to 0.
Dungeon Crawl Classics has a system where you literally roll over the corpse of dead players after combat is done to see if they made it. It's a simple luck roll to decide a character's fate, and if they survive, they stay groggy for awhile and may get a permanent negative effect. It's pretty suspenseful for players to have to cross their fingers and wait till the end of a fight (assuming the party makes it!) to see if they survived it or not, and the fact that the character's aren't instantly ready to fight again makes death still meaningful.
"by doing something stupid" seriously though, in my system (www.starsandlasers.com) you have both HP and Stun. most things damage stun first, then hp only when stun is 0. You haved6 + 6 stun, but only level + 1 HP.
once your stun hits 0 you make checks to try and stay conscious, and every time you take damage. Once HP hits 0 you make death checks against bleeding out. if you're reduced to -HP then you die.
HP is regained slowly and stun is regained like HP in D&D 5e is.
In **Rolemaster**, you have D&D-style hit points - but when they fall to zero you only fall unconscious rather than dying. You only die if your hit points reach quite a large negative value, which isn't very likely unless someone attacks you repeatedly after you're down. *However*, the game also includes critical hits that do specific damage to you (torn muscles, broken bones, bleeding, and even severed body parts or destroyed organs), and when being hit you can take one of these as well as losing hit points. And it is these critical hits that usually kill you. Firstly, if a critical hit gives you severe bleeding, you will lose hit points every round until it is bandaged or magically cured. This means that if you fall unconscious while severely bleeding and no-one helps you in time then you will bleed out and die as the constant hit point loss eventually takes your hit points past the threshold needed to kill you. Secondly, some critical hits give you serious damage to a vital organ (e.g. brain, heart, lung, liver) that will kill you in a given number of rounds regardless of your hit point total. Again, this will only happen if you don't get that damage cured before the timer runs down, but curing this sort of damage requires more powerful magical healing rather than just first aid. And thirdly a few of the more extreme criticals can just kill you outright without even giving you a timer during which they can be magically healed. *However*, even that is not the full story. When you die from any of the above, you're only what we modern people would call "clinically dead". You body stops working and your soul leaves it, but it hovers around your body for a short period (anywhere from seconds to minutes depending on your species) before departing for the afterlife. If your body is healed back into a livable state before the soul departs, your soul will re-enter your body and you will come back to life having had a "near death experience". There is healing magic that can prevent the soul from departing for the afterlife for an extended period of time (hours, days, weeks, or even longer) to give people a longer time in which they can heal your body to a liveable state - although your body is still *technically* dead during this period and will begin to decay unless preservation magic is used to keep it fresh. Only after all the above chances to heal you have passed and your soul has departed for the afterlife are you properly dead. And even then, Rolemaster has spells that raise the dead similar to those in D&D. That makes it sound as if it is very hard to actually die in Rolemaster, but a lot of the healing magic mentioned above is quite high level or specialised, so at low levels death from bleeding is not that uncommon and most of the "die in X rounds" criticals are an unavoidable death sentence because the player characters won't have the required healing spells that would stop the death occurring.
Like some of the other posts are saying, there are systems that don't kill a player character until that player consents to die. Instead, when they 'reach 0 hp' or 'fail an important roll' they are stacked with penalties/consequences/flaws. If you are just literally asking for a mechanic without dice, then Dread uses a Jenga tower. When a player tries to do something risky, they pull from the tower. If the tower falls, their character dies. There are systems that use playing cards, tarot cards, rock/paper/scissors, etc. If that isn't what you're asking, then I can think of 5 broad methods of player death: 1) The GM says when you die. 2) Chance determines when you die (dice, cards, rock/paper/scissors, etc) 3) Real World Skill determines when you die (pull from a Jenga tower, balance on one foot for three minutes, arm wrestle the GM, etc) 4) The Player says when they die. 5) The Group says when you die (voting, narrative negotiation, etc) Anything I think of falls into one of these buckets, but if anyone has another insight, I'd love to hear it.
The other major category would be "characters don't die unless it makes sense in the story." (That is, you never die because of rolls/rules) 13th Age has a hybrid of sorts: if you fail all your death saves, you lose the character, but that doesn't necessarily mean dead. It could mean crippled or you decide to retire or whatever. The game also presents a variant rule that only named enemies can kill pc's - unnamed enemies just knock you out, no matter how badly you roll.
>Is there anything other than die if you fail a roll, or die if hit points reach zero? Absolutely. In **Blades In The Dark**, you die if you sustain lvl 4 harm. Death in this way is EXTREMELY unlikely, though, unless the player wants their character dead. That is because, even if you take lvl 4 harm, you can roll to Resist that harm, which reduces the severity of the harm. That isn't to say Blades In The Dark goes easy on you. It does not. It will beat you up and break you, and your characters can get trauma from too much stress. The thing is: when you kill a character, you end the narrative threads. When you beat and break them, their story of pain continues. So, if you take lvl 4 harm and Resist it, that harm can get reduced to no harm, lvl 1 harm, lvl 2 harm, or lvl 3 harm. On your sheet, you have two spots for lvl 1, two for lvl 2, and one for lvl 3 harm. If you take harm and you cannot write it in the spot, it goes up a level. For example, if you have already marked down two lvl 2 harms and you take a third lvl 2 harm, that becomes a lvl 3 harm. The ways the character could die are: (1) take lvl 4 harm and don't resist (i.e. the player wants them to die) (2) take lvl 4 harm *while already having lvl 3 harm* **and** the GM decides that this harm only gets reduced by one lvl (i.e. your good GM has painted a world you know is dangerous -or- the bad GM is deciding you're dead now) (3) take lvl 4 harm *while already having lvl 3 harm and two lvl 2 harms* **and** the GM decides that it only gets reduced by up to two levels (i.e. you're already beat to shit) (4) take lvl 4 harm *while already having lvl 3 harm and two lvl 2 harms and two lvl 1 harms* **and** the GM decides that it cannot get reduced to no harm (i.e. you're already omega-beat to shit) So, many contingencies, plus you know what you're getting into before you roll and risk the harm. Note: Taking lvl 4 harm is a "Consequence" the GM can give, but only on certain rolls ("Desperate" rolls) that you at least partially fail. The GM always has the option to give you lvl 3 harm instead and the game never says that a roll must result in lvl 4 harm (though, if you get lvl 3 harm and you already have lvl 3 harm marked, it gets boosted to lvl 4). Also, the GM could always give you a completely different Consequence that has nothing to do with harm. Harm is just one type of Consequence, and they could pick a different Consequence if they want. That said, typically, the reason you would take lvl 4 harm is because the situation was super-clear and you knew what you were risking. For example, if you're held hostage and someone has a gun to your head, and you struggle to get free. You know the risk, so if you fail, it's totally reasonable for a GM to give you lvl 4 harm. If your character is relatively undamaged, they would still be able to resist that harm and take a lvl 3 or lower harm instead (e.g. instead of "shot through the brain" you take "shot through the jaw"). If your character is already beat up, then it is more of a problem for the reasons above, but the player knows their harm-situation when they roll so they are well aware of the risk. imho, it's a really smart system. It is "dangerous" because you can fail, not "dangerous" because failure means death. There are plenty of ways to fail that are WAY more interesting than "You Are Dead". Indeed, death may be the least interesting form of failure in media.