If you’ve played or watched people play a tabletop RPG like Dungeons and Dragons you were bound to witness a player character’s death. You saw the real emotion behind the players and the DM at the table when it was time for the character to go away. If you’ve watched a real play show like Critical Role you’ve seen the same from the players, and even from the live chat. So, why these deaths hit so much harder than they seem to do in other entertianment?
For a lot of players it stems from the fact that they were the one who birthed the idea for their character. They created the charater, named it, and slowly in the process of playing got to create the aspects for the character in a way that it doesn’t hit for other mediums. For movies and tv shows you are watching a character that someone else named and had the backstory for. An actor is giving them their opinions on the world, their viewpoints, and their history. When they die in that show it’s someone else’s creation that is no longer alive. In video games you might create the look of the character, and in some situations get to dictate points of how they interact with the world. RPG games like Mass Effect allow you to be an aggressive “renagade” character or a as a moral “paragon” character that basically gives you a red or blue trigger. These actions might shape a small bit of the narrative for some actions or lines that your character might say. However when a character in a video game it still doesn’t hit the same as a tabletop RPG character death.
For a tabletop RPG character you as the player get to set all the paramaters. You set their race(human, elf, gnome, etc), class (wizard, fighter, cleric, etc), set their stats, and then create a backstory for the character. Much of these are also in the character creator of most good RPG video games. However the differences, and reasons for how close most players get to the creation is that they control exactly how their character responds to others, reacts to events in the game world, and does it without a script.
If you are a decent enough actor in general you can create a character that is such a departure from you as possible. In the real world you might be a meek accountant, but in the game you are the brave, noble, and powerful wizard who is on a quest to save your lands. In the real world a person who is a strong jock type person can take on a role of a small and really old gnome rogue who is cursed to turn into a wearwolf on full moons. You shape the world with the help from your DM. The DM is the story teller, but they aren’t the one who controls the world. Players shape the game world, and the DM is the one who has to shift to what happens. If you look at a D&D game like “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” the players are the members of the fellowship of the ring who set out to take the ring of power to Mt Doom to cast it into the fires that created it. The DM is much like J.R.R. Tolkien, but he can’t control the actions of the players.
For the players, they can try to seduce anyone in the game’s world. If they do to another player, then they can choose to play out any romantic feelings, or even rebuff them. For the NPCs (non player charcacters) the DM can use dice rolls to see how events play out. If you have a player trying to sneak around to be stealthy and attempt to steal the plans from the evil army then there is a dice roll to see how stealthy the player is. Then DM can then have the enemy NPCs roll to see if they can see the person, and it’s typically depended on which side scored the highest ability score. The dice are like fates. Sometimes they are on your side, and other times they forsake you. Then it comes to the time when a dice roll affects your character’s ability to stay alive. Maybe they fell in battle and couldn’t be revived, maybe they fell a great distance to be impaled on spikes, or they made a heroic sacrifice play so that their friends and teammates could escape a dangerous encounter.
When these types of plays happen you start to see the emotions. Not from just the player who died, but also from the other players, and even at times from the DM. While the DM isn’t fighting for the players (unless the party has a NPC helping) they aren’t exactly against the players either. The DM is the driving force for the story. They might hint that the battle you are in is too danterous at your current player level. Maybe they suggest that it’s not a good idea to try and freehand climb the oily wall over an abyss, or maybe they even call out something like, “If you fall, you/your character will die.” Most good DMs do not want to kill the player characters. Sometimes though they have to. Sometimes a player feels like their character’s story was wrapped up, sometimes they might have to be removed from a campaign story for reasons, and while it might sting for the campaign the character could be quickly repalced. Tho at times a character might die unexpectly after horrible unlucky dice rolls in combat, and is outright killed, or they are attempting death saves (a series of checks that sees if a KOed player can be revived, or if they outright die) and fail the 3rd and final save. At that point the character is shuffled off the mortal plane. They are dead, and they can’t be resurrected. At this point the table can start to feel bad for the character’s death. Sometimes in the next session the remaining players can hold an in game serivce for their dead friend, and start to look around for someone else to fill the empty spot. Perhaps the player creates a new character that has been on a parallel story that leads to them meeting the group and joining. Sometimes the player has to leave the game group (maybe they were not a good fit at the table, friendships ended, or they have to move away from where the games are played), and sometimes the group continues with a new player or are just one person down.
So, why do player deaths in RPS hit harder. It’s because the person playing the character created that character from scratch and has breathed life into them. When that player character dies it feels like they lost a small part of them. It can feel like when someone loses a pet or a beloved family members. Because to them the character they created was their friend, or it was a part of them that they wanted to explore. Some people create their character as a way to see how their friends might react if they “came out of the closet” to them. When that character dies they can feel like that part of them is now dead. Sadly when one doesn’t create a character in this manner when on dies it doesn’t hit quite as hard.
The Randomness of Random 