The OSR is strongly associated with high-lethality. Many lists of OSR principles directly reference deadliness, or include game attributes / play aesthetics which correlate with high-lethality. For example, the GM as “impartial arbiter” over “being a fan of the characters”, foregrounding strong “consequences”, “violence is a fail state”, and “forget game balance”, all push games toward deadliness. Many OSR campaigns have no character death, but it’s still considered a core aspect of the OSR style. 

But this preference for deadliness can come into conflict with countervailing preferences or table dynamics.

Troupe-Style Play

I would argue that a fully troupe-style campaign can mitigate the countervailing factors that conflict with high-lethality (described below). In troupe-style campaigns there is a roster of characters (x2-3 as many PCs as players). Players rotate between PCs on each mission or dungeon delve, ultimately playing every PC. “Fully” here means all PCs are shared, unlike Ars Magica or the more recent Band of Blades where only some PCs are rotated while others are still exclusive to one player.

I ran a three-year long, fully troupe-style campaign which ended last year, run in GURPS. That game was a high-lethality game, and since then I’ve wondered why troupe-play is not more popular in the OSR. I will write about the OSR and troupe-play more generally in a future post, for example I think troupe-play solves many of the issues Westmarch campaigns are designed to solve. But for now I will focus on why troupe-play aligns with the OSR’s tendency toward high-lethality games. 

Based on the assumption that OSR players have a general preference for high-lethality games (or playstyles which correlate with high-lethality), let’s build a (non-exhaustive) list of the countervailing factors that conflict with running high-lethality games, and how troupe-play mitigates those factors.

Factors That Conflict with High-Lethality Games

(1) Strong Attachment to Existing Characters: OSR playstyles tend toward challenging the players and focus less on the characters’ themselves. Often the narrative substance of a character, such as their backstories and motivations, are something you “play to find out.” Yet strong attachment can develop over time, even when baseline player attachment to their PC is low compared to more story-focused TTRPGs. This creates conflict because it occurs slowly overtime, and usually for a subset of players, in a context where the GM and other players are still expecting high-lethality. This induces overly cautious and boring character choices as the player’s focus becomes avoiding the death of their PC. This can slow the story, reduce the fun of the newly cautious player, and everyone else, and cause above-the-table conflict.

How Troupe-Play Mitigates Strong Attachment: First, troupe-play disperses attachment across multiple characters. It’s hard for players to become strongly attached to any PC because they’re only playing them for a short period of time. They also have to watch as other players start roleplaying PCs they’ve played, potentially taking the character in a new direction, mitigating strong attachment. Second, because players only have a PC for a short period of time, this encourages them to make risky and interesting choices. Third, troupe-play encourages attachment to the troupe, whatever that may be in the fiction (a squad of soldiers, a ship’s crew, a cool faction, and group of desperate outcasts forced to raid dungeons to make a living, etc.). And by its nature, attachment to the troupe is resilient to individual character death.

(2) Anticipatory Detachment: This is the opposite side of the strong attachment coin. Some players respond to high-lethality games by actively avoiding even modest levels of attachment. This is not inherently an issue when the initial campaign conditions are low-attachment / high-lethality. The issue is that active, anticipatory detachment can lead players to be reckless and often farcical with their characters. Active detachment leads to treating PCs like pawns on a chessboard rather than rational people responding to the game world. Active detachment from a character can morph into active detachment from the social contract of the game itself. The serious / darker story tone many players wish for in high-lethality games is then sabotaged by the detached player carelessly getting their PC killed for laughs.

How Troupe-Play Mitigates Anticipatory Detachment: Troupe-play can risk creating anticipatory detachment even absent high-lethality. A critical component of getting player buy-in for a troupe-style campaign is acknowledging this, and building attachment to the troupe. Players should make all the PCs together and be allowed to create or define core qualities of the troupe. This engenders a sense of group identity that is then reflected in the sense of shared responsibility for the troupe. Even if troupe-play induces some anticipatory detachment, that sense of shared responsibility is a strong mechanism against players acting recklessly with PCs. You are playing a character that another player created most of the time in troupe-play. There is a real feeling of “playing with someone else’s toys” that mitigates being reckless with a PC that a player might otherwise not be attached to.

(3) Disrupted Character Arcs: The desire for a compelling  and dynamic character arc is a preference many players have independent of emotional attachment to a character. The appeal of the “play to find out” approach to character development reflects the excitement that comes with the spontaneous way that story consequences can change characters. That experience is hard to have when characters are frequently dying. This leads players who want compelling character arcs to avoid high-lethality games all together, even if they like the idea of high-lethality.

How Troupe-Play Mitigates Disrupted Character Arcs: Like with characters, troupe-play disperses much of the desire for a “long arc” onto the troupe. And because there’s a shared troupe identity, the question of “will this character survive” becomes a more compelling one because it’s now in relation to a superordinate group identity. Have you ever had a PC die in an OSR style game and felt like they were immediately forgotten? That doesn’t happen in troupe-play. That now-deceased character has been played by most (possibly all) players at the table, and everyone has a shared sense of their place within the troupe. Their death changes the troupe, and that’s the start of an arc all players can share in. 

(4) Sunk Costs: Depending on the system, the time and effort it takes to make a character and master their mechanics can be high. Many players enjoy this part of the game of course, but no one enjoys feeling like their time has been wasted. You’re playing a wizard, you’ve put a lot of effort into learning the mechanics behind all your spells. You purchased third-party spell cards so you don’t have to constantly look up their details. You spent almost an hour on Pinterest finding a drawing that captures your wizard’s vibe, or maybe you drew them yourself. Then in the third session you have a few bad rolls and a random orc murks your glass cannon. All that effort now feels wasted, and you have to start again with a new character.

How Troupe-Play Mitigates Sunk Costs: I mentioned above that it is best in a troupe-style campaign to have all the players make all the PCs together in session zero. This means the sunk costs are spread out between all players. If your PC dies, you don’t need to make a new character, you just need to pick up one of the 5-10 characters in the troupe who are not being played at that moment. And guess what, you’ve probably played that character before. 

GMs Don’t Want to Feel Adversarial: Everything above largely relates to players, but GMs too have concerns that can conflict with high-lethality games. Most (good) GMs don’t want to be adversarial or unfair. OSR playstyles privilege being “impartial” over being “a fan of the characters,” but if that’s a spectrum then the opposite end of it is “being a dick to your players.” And for GMs concerned that they might be unfair and/or uncaring toward the players, few concerns loom larger than character death. Beyond just upsetting players, GMs can often anticipate, accurately or not, that the four issues above may arise. This can lead GMs to pull their punches, even when they have committed to running a high-lethality game.

How Troupe-Play Mitigates GM Deadliness Hesitations: All the reasons listed above also apply to GMs and the issues they anticipate from killing a PC. GMs don’t have to be worried about killing a player’s prized PC because no one has a prized PC. They don’t have to worry about creating a table culture of story detachment because all players are invested in the troupe. They can lean into deadliness as a narrative mechanism for creating rather than merely ending story arcs. And they know that killing a PC won’t force players to create new PCs or learn (too many) new mechanics. Troupe-play frees GMs to lean into deadliness without worrying about harming player engagement and fun. 

Troupe-play is not without its flaws and frictions. It needs a lot of homebrewing (though I’m currently working on a troupe-play manual I hope will fix that), and its underlying philosophy does conflict with some OSR principles. I plan to write a future blog post about running a troupe-style campaign with OSR games more generally. But hopefully I’ve convinced you that troupe-play is one avenue for realizing the OSR ideal of games where dangers are real, consequences for characters are high, and death is on the table.