DIE is the RPG the 1980s was afraid of
Every game you play is a little bit about you; this one REALLY is
Last week in this newsletter I talked about how much I love storytelling that operates with multiple aims, specifically citing the comic book Phonogram by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, which is both a deeply personal tale of identity and a history of Britpop. What else should I have expected from Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ new RPG DIE, then, except the ultimate example of a game that plays via various strata of meaning?
Here is about as broadly as I can explain the premise of DIE: you and your tablemates play a group of people who all worked together on some project that never reached its full potential — an independent movie, a school drama production, an RPG campaign or a political one. These people are known as Personas in the language of the game. One day, the Personas (re)unite because someone on their project has suggested playing a strange roleplaying game, an artifact from the 1990s called DIE. As soon as the game begins, every Persona is transported into a world based on their project — the land of their first RPG campaign or their indie comic book, say; generally just a place where the thing they worked on exists for real. But it’s a fantasy world, populated with echoes of things the Personas recognize from reality: their school bully becomes the generic orc, their crush the Queen of the elves. Here, the Personas become Paragons, characters who have mega-powerful abilities that manipulate the game, each powered by a different die (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12). The GM Paragon, powered by a d20 (the GM plays the game too) has brought everyone together due to some deep-seeded need to live in this fantasy, and through the course of their time playing in DIE, the Paragons will have to vote on whether they want to stay in a world literally constructed for them or return home. But all living Paragons have to vote unanimously — including the GM who trapped them there in the first place — or the fantasy world will crumble, leaving the Personas stranded in the void forever.
This game is meta as hell, and I love it. If you’ll pardon this turn of phrase, even the way it functions on two levels functions on two levels. The text of the game asks you to create a character navigating the real world (the Persona) who then creates a character navigating the fantasy world (the Paragon). But in doing that, you’re tasked with embodying someone whose real-life circumstances didn’t rise to meet their dreams, and to throw the pain of that dissonance full force into how the Persona is played. See, the fantasy world of DIE is constructed based on what the game calls core lacks — the thing each Persona most longs for in their real life. In the fantasy world, each Paragon will face encounters that remind them why their real-life existence is less-than, and why the fantasy might be better. It’s not hard to see where the inspiration to roleplay those Paragons’ lacks could come from. I’ve never seen an RPG rulebook explicitly refer to what happens during play sessions as potentially therapeutic before this one.
While I was reading DIE, every homebrew scenario running through my head was just straight-up biographical.1 The comedy group that collapsed due to inflexibility, the restaurant project that fell apart because of a terror in management — these are the kinds of things DIE invites you and your players to embody, and they’re also the kinds of things I need to talk over with a professional instead of making my friends play through a fantasy world based on them. Right?
The DIE book is generous enough to supply five prewritten scenarios to play so you don’t have to bring your actual biography to the game. And those scenarios are awesome. DIE includes:
Total Party Kill: Years later, a roleplaying group finds themselves trapped in a sequel to the megadungeon that wiped their entire party as teens.
Video Nasty: A group of indie horror filmmakers get stuck in a world based on their most ambitious project that never came to be — as the bad guys.
Con Quest: Years after a hit indie comic got optioned for a TV show but then died in development, the books’ creative team reunites to play a game at a con for old times’ sake. They’re transported to a world where the TV show based on their book became everyone’s favorite, and their fans are just dying to show them how much they care.
Do You Remember the First Time (We Killed a Kobold and Took Its Stuff): A group’s first RPG campaign has trapped them in it, but it was so long ago that their memories of what went down there aren’t very reliable, and they find themselves in an unbelievable realm that reconstructs how the RPG felt.
Development Hell: Beset with QA issues, an indie game dev team struggles to release their project. The project lead downloads a PDF of a wild RPG from the 90s as a “teambuilding exercise,” and it takes the team to a world where the game comes out flawlessly and becomes a huge hit. Too bad it’s a facsimile.
You can see by these scenarios what kind of creative energies DIE is channeling, the premise of which is almost always — “your group failed at what you wanted to do, but you’ve found a fantastical means of making it happen. Do you live in that fantasy or return to indifferent reality?”
No matter the specific scenario you play, you’re going to be drawing on your own experiences of failure, inadequacy, and anxiety as you embody your Persona. DIE is a game about people who had ambitions that reality didn’t embrace. I don’t think I know a single person who couldn’t immediately construct this kind of scenario from their real life.
Which is wonderful and magical (the game gives us a space to grapple with our worst bits!), but also certainly something to be careful of. As the snappy title of this post says, I kept thinking while reading the rulebook that DIE is the game parents were worried Dungeons & Dragons was in the 1980s. It really feels like, if you aren’t a careful person who’s examined yourself, you might literally trap your friends in a world haunted by your fears and demons, at least emotionally. But why I think DIE has incredible value — and why I find the temptation it offers really tasty — is because it forces you to ask yourself whether that’s what you’re doing every time you play a tabletop roleplaying game anyway.
What Does It All Mean?
DIE isn’t just a rad tabletop RPG — it’s a fantastic example of a tabletop RPG rulebook. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but the D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide sucks pretty hard. Charlie Hall wrote about that very thing over on Polygon last week — why is it that the first chapter in the most iconic book on how to run a game spends 30 pages going into granular detail about how to build a world (gods, money, maps, etc.), instead of teaching you how to tell a story? My most oft-repeated refrain about TTRPG writing is that way too many books just assume you know how to create a good story with your table, which is such a huge miss because 1) creating an engaging collaborative story is hard and not a natural thing at all to most folks and 2) this is literally the backbone of what it means to play a TTRPG.
DIE’s meta nature allows it to give incredibly simple yet complete top-level advice for creating that collaborative story. It does in four pages what the Dungeon Master’s Guide struggles to do in 300, for instance with a very clear breakdown of Elements of an Adventure2:
Gates
Vaults
Keys
Signposts
Smoke Machines
Menus
I feel like my understanding of how to structure a TTRPG campaign leveled up (😉) more from the GM material in DIE than maybe any other rulebook I’ve read; it’s just such a concise breakdown of how to shepherd a story with your players.
But to me the most clear home run in DIE is the bestiary. This thing is incredible. First, its monsters were assembled by metastatistical analysis — creatures made the cut if they appeared in over 50% of the bestiaries of 50 fantasy RPGs. Second, in addition to and more important than the stats and abilities for each monster, it includes two sections that I never again want to see a bestiary without: 1) what general facts (or “truths”) about these creatures exist to be amplified or twisted in your world and 2) what each creature makes a good real-world echo for.
It’s that “echo” bit in particular that wows me, because essentially what we have here is a monster manual that’s spelling out the subtext of what it means to battle each creature. I’m being completely earnest when I say that, while it’s nice to know a chimera’s armor class is 14, I’d just as soon be keyed into the fact that chimeras make a good fantasy stand-in for “any relationship that takes constant, misplaced effort to maintain,” or that, say, cockatrices embody toxic masculinity.
There’s been a push in modern game design — rightly — to ask why specific monsters can be found in a location (in contrast to the dungeons of yore, which seemed to randomly distribute bestiaries across 20x20 rooms). DIE takes this one step farther, I think necessarily, by asking what does it mean that a specific monster has holed up in a dungeon? Like, yes, if you’ve got an eldritch underground temple subject to volcanic pressures, maybe the lava magically animates into fire elemental guardians — that’s cool. But it’s also cool to realize that those fire elementals hold up a mirror to anyone in your adventuring party who’s prone to violent emotional outbursts. And maybe, I don’t know, one of your players sees a nasty part of themselves in those elementals as well, and defeating them can make for a nice little symbolic victory for that person.
This might seem a bit like gilding the lily or being “meta for meta’s sake”, but I would counter that the truest value any art has is the meanings it elicits in its audiences. When it comes to TTRPGs, a collaborative medium where audience and creator are the same, the potential to construct and experience meaning reaches an incredible peak. And the DIE book is there to help a GM encourage those meaningful connections in all aspects of play. This is the real power of RPGs, and this is what our most conservative parents were afraid of.
And as I think about inviting my friends to play DIE — a pitch, I think, that would go something like “hey, do you want to play this game where you’re a person who failed at something important to them, and then you get trapped in a fantasy world based on that thing?” — I’m realizing that there isn’t a way to describe this act of play that doesn’t sound at least a little bit eldritch, and that maybe our parents were right to be a little afraid.
~~The Plugs Section~~
The Kickstarter pre-launch page for my next big TTRPG publishing adventure, Rock & Roll Greatest Hits, is live now. As it happens, DIE author Kieron Gillen is contributing a few fun bits to the book (which is too wild; I’m still over the moon about it tbh). It would really help me with the algorithms if you “followed” it (even if you don’t want to back the thing! This is a no-commitment follow!)
Mortified Chicago, the live lit/comedy show I coproduce (in association with WBEZ!), has its next show at the historic Studebaker Theater on Saturday, September 23 and it’s gonna be cool. Tickets are available now.
Okay, this isn’t entirely true; I did think up one DIE scenario not at all related to my own life that I’ll share on here next week!
For further explanation, obviously, you’ll have to read the book. It’s worth it! Here’s that link again.