DIE RPG: When I roll A 1

I’ve been meaning to put this here for a while, but as the DIE RPG quickstart has been lobbed on Drivethru and Itch, it seems a good time. This is a tweaked version of something I wrote over on my newsletter, when I finished my long playtest campaign of DIE RPG.

I often think of this bit of Red Dwarf.

It’s where Rimmer is describing his great victories in Risk, much to Lister’s annoyance. An endless string of “And then I rolled a 6!” The joke being, that no-one is interested in hearing about people’s gaming adventures.

I spent fifteen years of my life trying to prove that wrong, and get people excited about that time I rolled a 6.

Or a 1.

It was December 2020, and I was still developing DIE. The campaign I was running ended. It’s been one of the backbones of the lockdown year. It was thirty-five sessions, which was the longest game of my adult life. The DIE rules released at that point had primarily been for a single-scenario game, lasting a handful of sessions. Sure, you can stretch it further if you like, but there’s nothing like – say – Actual Character Advancement, and it’s much more about a repeatable shorter experience than marching off into the horizon.

But I wanted DIE to be able to march into the horizon, and decided the best way to do that was to just run a campaign with my rough concepts in place, and then try and build in front of the players as the game continued, making notes about what was working and what wasn’t, reach the end, and use the experience as the core of what I write up.

Mainly, I was hoping that it would work. The surprise was that it worked so well.

I think that last session may have been my favourite game of all time. This is partially because of emotional investment  – you live with players and characters for a year, and it becomes something else. It’s also partially as the end just landed.

It’s everything I could have hoped for.

DIE’s concept is the same as the comic which it was developed alongside. You play a group of real world people who get dragged into a fantasy world when playing a creepy RPG. The fantasy world throws back their trauma and faded hopes back at them, and the group has to decide whether to stay or leave – the vote must be unanimous and dead people don’t get votes. So you all make your messed up real world people (Persona), then role-play them getting together to generate characters for a game, facilitated by the GM’s persona and get dragged in. Yes, it’s meta, but it’s heartfelt – it’s about what people come to fantasy for.

The persona were all people with went to the University of East Anglia, and were in a writing group together, ran by a somewhat distant Professor with an interest in parocosms. A decade later, with a mixture of successes and failures, they’re gathered together by my persona, Alice – the somewhat bitter gothic children’s literature obsessive (“I always loved Wonderland. She even had my name.”). She convinced them to play this old 1990s RPG connected to a weird urban myth, and soon they’re dragged into a world and understand exactly how fucked up our Alice is.

As they explore further, the larger picture is revealed. Their Professor is also in the game – lover of two of the persona, clearly immoral, and the absent father of Alice. He had been manipulating everyone as part of some awful research into this urban myth – he’d already lost a previous group of research students to DIE. He was clearly terrible, and his failures – as a teacher, as a lover, as a father – were all too visible in the world DIE had offered them.

When she arrived, Alice’s form had been shattered into aspects of her personality – the Rage of Red Alice betrayed by everyone, Blue Alice’s crushing depression, the Sleeping Alice who lay in stasis there as a potential of what she could be and so on. Alice’s various aspects of personalities hunted them (or mourned for them, or helped them).

After a certain point, the persona realised the math of the game meant they could leave… if they left Alice behind. They decided to stay and fight for their friend, who was clearly in an awful place. This is the whole last third of the campaign and, eventually, in the final session they manage to merge the strands of Alice, teach her, improve her, heal her. They help themselves too – I’ll spare you the mile-high constructs made of Shane’s Shame, the HMH Steven Fletcher’s AI-brother, the Somme-Wraiths and Optimo, Crayon-Wizard, Lord of Hell. It was a time.

But now the end is here. DIE is falling apart. Time is ticking.

They’re expecting an epic battle when they arrive for the final confrontation with the cornered, gagged Professor. Instead, it’s quieter. Alice has captured the Professor. He is tied up, defenceless. They can go home, if they all just say the magic words: the Game Is Over.

Now, there’s one problem. One of the players has died, and is a Fallen. If the players leave, all the Fallen remain behind in undeath. A Fallen has to kill another Persona to live again. It’s an awful zero-sum game at the heart of DIE, the sharpest edged version of the games’ core “what will you do to get what you want?”

The Fallen was, until recently, Shane. Resentful Shane would absolutely murder the Professor to live again. They’d dated when she was a student, and she knew him all too well, and if someone is going to get payback for dragging them all into this, it should be him. The players were thinking that’s how it’d go – they’d beat the professor in a fight, Shane would feed on him as the final blow, and then they’d go home and leave the undead Professor. The shit really deserved it.

They weren’t expecting it to be this cold. A man, tied up is different from a setpiece at the end of a movie

There was a bigger problem.  For reasons connected to the aforementioned mile-high shame construct, Shane had recently fed upon Will, who was hopelessly in-love-with-Shane.  Now Will was Fallen.

Will was a sweetheart. He was the group’s Fool, but rather than the monster that is Chuck from the comic, Will was basically a nerdy Bertie Wooster.

He couldn’t kill the professor. He couldn’t kill anyone. If they left, he’d be staying behind.

It stretches out with some frankly painfully brilliant role-play from the group. Trying to talk Will into doing it. Will just not being able to do it. He’d rather stay here. He can’t be a murderer. Just go. They refuse. The world crumbles around them…

Eventually, Will asks Alice if there’s anything else they can do.

Alice says that there is another option. She’s a Master. Her most powerful ability means that she can cheat and bend the rules of the game. She could try to cheat so that rules mean that Fallen go home to Earth too.

Everyone knows how this kind of Master cheating works by now. The Master player (i.e. me) puts the dice in one hand, close them both and hold them out. One hand is empty, the other has the dice. Another player picks a hand. If they don’t find the dice, the Master gets away with it. If the dice is in that hand, the forces of reality has noticed the cheating, The cheat happens, sure, but then there’s consequences proportionate to the level of cheating.

Cheating the fundamental rules of the game is one of the worst things as Master can do. It would be awful for Alice. She would be better off dead.

Cue more heartfelt arguments as reality collapses. Will doesn’t want Alice to do this for her. Alice understands, but notes it’s not his call. He makes his decision not to kill the Professor. She will make hers. And she will not leave him after everything he and everyone else did to save her.

“The problem with changing to be a better person is having to be a better person,” she says, “It’s most annoying.”

The ritual begins.

I hold out my hands, one containing the D20. Will’s player volunteers to make the pick. I ask the player if they’re sure. This is already deeply emotionally charged. They don’t have to, if it’s too much. The player wants to do it – it has to be them. Will has to pick. It’s appropriate.

They pick a hand.

If it’s the dice, Alice is doomed. If it’s empty, they’re all going home.

I don’t open my hand.

Everyone does the ritual, and the chant around the circle. The Game Is Over, the Game is over…

They’re all back in reality.

I open the picked hand.

It’s the dice.

They’re back in reality, but Alice is slumped in her chair, eyes wide open, stone cold dead.

I call a break, as everyone is clearly shattered, me included. We come back and do the epilogue. I  soften the awfulness of that moment a little in a final image, but that moment of the return to Earth was a moment of absolute horror born of a year of effort and what amounted to a flip of a coin.

Hell of a medium, RPGs. Especially when you roll a 1.

As an afternote to that, we did segue into basically a geek Christmas, with presents and celebrations for everyone. Here I am in my Optimo, Crayon Wizard Lord Of Hell T-shirt. Bless the players.

Of course, being me, the day after I made a playlist to remember the campaign. Here it is. You won’t get half the references, and that’s very much the point.

Readers of my comic may notice I liked Alice’s last line enough to use it when a certain character sacrifices themselves in my recent work at Marvel. It was a fun, awful time.