Hypothetical question for GMs here:
There’s a fairly common trope in caper movies: a character seemingly dies but later revealed to have survived and it actually was a part of the plan to fool the antagonist.
Would you allow your players to “resurrect” an NPC (or even a PC) in that fashion through a flashback for sufficiently high amount of stress and appropriate roll?
I think it could be fun, but also lessen the stakes. The consequence needs to be pretty big. Perhaps 10 stress (auto trauma).
I mean… Doskvol has ghosts, so… death isn’t the end of the line in this world. That said, I would be much more willing to pull this trope with an NPC than a PC, if only because I like my nightmare underworld to have weightier consequences.
How dead are we talking here? Are you going into this plan pretending to be dead or is the character actually deceased? Bells tolled, etc?
Let’s say my pc takes lethal harm. I don’t resist it. I die. Later on I want to come back at an opportune moment like Lou Diamond Phillips in The Big Hit. Maybe I pay flashback stress and get that resistance roll then!
Yes!
In my Glow in the Dark game, one playbook has a special ability for exactly this purpose. Spend special armor, appear to die, and then come back later in a time and place of your choosing.
My rule of thumb would be, can you bring back the character without contradicting the existing fiction? You can’t rewrite what happened–but you can append to it. So if we saw him fall, but not land, then if you can think of a way he survived and why we haven’t heard until now, fine.
If he fell into the grinder and we saw his paste spray out, you’re going to have to tap-dance pretty fast, but creative players might pull it off.
Replace a grinder’s teeth with frangible fakes filled with fake gore. 🙂
“You thought ahead of time that I would get shoved into that grinder? How incompetent do you think I am!?”
“One, you did get shoved into that grinder. Two, don’t be silly. I replaced all of them.”
We were constantly binding enemies so they couldn’t squeal. Our big mistake was not binding the Cop we shot.
Of course they could dramatically return! Because it’s dramatic!
My concerns would be about the type of gameplay and whether the death was a consequence of players decisions.
If the game is about “trying to survive” and the PC dies then we hand wave that they return, it makes all the players risk taking and decisions about the best way to survive pretty meaningless.
But if the game is about the crazy heist, and the story of how they pull it off despite the odds, then the character dramatically returning enhances that gameplay and I’d totally allow it.
In most of our games, we don’t actually kill off PCs without the players agreeing. So our default assumption is that the PC that fell off the roof will survive somehow and return, unless the player thinks the death is cool. So when the other PCs run to the ledge, the GM won’t describe the mangled body and instead would probably look to the player who might describe the mangled body. Or might say there’s no body, but it looks like they couldn’t have survived, or might describe their PC hanging by fingertips, etc.
If the GM doesn’t want to do that, they just say in advance. “That rooftop is crazy high and crazy slippery. If you fail the roll your PC will die. Did you still want to go out there?”
If it’s cool and fits the fiction, absolutely. In fact, I’ve intentionally described a few deaths leaving that window open. Of course my game has turned out less Peaky Blinders and more Ocean’s Eleven, so it fits the tone.
The whole idea of Trauma is “I survived somehow.”