We had a TPK in the last Saturday Night session in Fellmyr – that is, a Total Party Kill. It was one of those seemingly meaningless events – arising as it did from a wandering monster roll in the exploration procedure – but it became deeply meaningful to the campaign.

I don’t think there are any meaningless deaths in fantasy roleplaying games played in this old-school open world style.

While I’ve heard the criticism in the past, you know, how if my Hero dies in some meaningless random encounter with some Goblins then it ruins the payoff for the story we are telling… I’ve come to see this as an inversion of what I am doing.

In the Open World of Fellmyr, there is no story that I am telling. There is no uberplot, no big bad per se. There is the world and there are characters within that world. Characters, whether played by the Players or run by me as the GM, are assumed to have goals.

Certainly, dying in the pursuit of your goals is tragic – but it’s not meaningless. How could it be meaningless? You failed to achieve your goal with that character – that is inherently meaningful. And that failure has consequences, just as the potential success would have had different consequences.

In the actual moment of combat, the fact that the characters could die established the meaning of that combat. If they were always going to win, why fight it out? It’s just wasted time when we could be pushing towards their goal. But, in this case, their goal lay beyond that encounter.

They came up with a good strategy – it was not poor play from the players. What deserted them was Fate – the roll of the dice – and the particular interactions between their choices and my own decisions on behalf of the monsters. But all of it was meaningful.

That is why it became so much fun. We were laughing all the way to the grave.

Game on!