Death by Misadventure

Barrett's Raiders, the Twilight: 2000 campaign I am currently refereeing, is just a little shy of two years old, our first session having been December 6, 2021. Like my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, now in the middle of its ninth year, we play more or less weekly. That's possible in part because there are seven (down from eight originally) regular players, which means that, even accounting for real life interruptions, it's rare that we don't have enough people to play each week. 

Sometime toward the end of summer, one of the campaign's stalwarts undertook some new responsibilities that prevented his playing for an extended period of time. Fortunately, there were six other players to pick up the slack and we've soldiered on – pun intended – without him. Nevertheless, his presence is very much missed, both because we enjoy the company of the player and because the character he plays (Sgt. Tom Cody) is an important part of the unit under the command of Lt. Col. J.D. Orlowski. 

Indeed, Sgt. Cody is so important to the unit that, even in the absence of his player, he's continued to participate in – and lead – military operations in eastern Poland. Recently, for example, the characters received intelligence suggesting that one or more NATO soldiers were being held captive in Kraśnik, a town not far from their current position. Orlowski tasked a small number of his men, under the command of Cody, to engage in reconnaissance near Kraśnik to determine if the intelligence was accurate and, if so, to assess the difficulty in liberating the NATO captives.

Since Cody's player was still unavailable, one of the other players, whose character was not assigned to the mission, took over playing him for the next few sessions. That's when I joked, "It'll be a shame when [Cody's player] returns and you'll have to tell him that Cody died bravely defending his comrades." We all laughed, because I clearly meant it as a joke. At the same time, combat is Twilight: 2000 can be unpredictable and there was no guarantee that Cody wouldn't die, even if the likelihood was small. Likewise, the player who took him over for those sessions is thoughtful and clearheaded, so he wasn't the sort to do anything too foolish.

The funny thing is that, in my youth, it was not at all an infrequent occurrence for someone's character to die while they weren't present – and it was rarely funny. In those days, we played RPGs a lot and there was an unspoken pact that we'd always be in attendance for every session of every game. To not be there, even for a perfectly legitimate reason, was seen as a rejection of the game or campaign being played, an acknowledgement that it just didn't matter all that much. What can I say? We were young and, as adolescent boys often are, prone to finding any excuse to haze one another.

One of the forms such hazing would take is killing off someone's character when they didn't show up for a game. "Sorry, dude, your fighter died last night, but, don't worry: he died covering our escape from a horde of ghouls." That sort of thing. Of course, as we played D&D in those days, there were innumerable ways to return a dead character to life and we rarely hesitated to make use of them. I think that was a big part of why no one ever hesitated to kill the characters of absent players – we all understood that death wasn't permanent. Thus, the proper response to learning that your character died while you were visiting your grandparents or on vacation at Disney World was not whine and moan, but rather "Oh yeah? That's cool. Have you raised him yet or is that our next adventure?"

While I don't advocate for the killing off of absent players' characters, let alone allow it in games I referee, I still make jokes about it. I wonder why that is? I suppose it's that, as puerile as it was, it was part of my earliest memories of roleplaying games. Those were days of wild-eyed, reckless adventure, when we first began to understand that RPGs gave us the ability to "do" anything we wanted – and a lot of what we wanted was foolish and occasionally cruel. We grew out of that initial childishness in time, but I almost feel as if it were a necessary stage in our development as roleplayers. To become more "serious" as gamers, we first had to indulge our unbridled ids a bit.

Maybe I'm wrong and this isn't a phase that everyone goes through when they're first introduced to this amazing hobby. All I know is that my friends and I did more than four decades ago and, try as I might, I can't say it wasn't fun, after a fashion. Good thing I outgrew it, eh?