Christopher Robichaud
The first edition of the Player’s Handbook (1978). Page 23. Know what’s on it? If you’re an old school guy like me, you surely do: David Sutherland’s famous illustration, “A Paladin in Hell.” We see a holy warrior, wearing full plate mail, standing atop a precipice, swinging his sword into the shoulder of a devil. Blood flies. But more devils line up to attack the paladin. And no doubt more will come after them. And then more. It is hell, after all. There is an endless supply of devils.
The paladin is going to die.
Oh, I know. This is Dungeons & Dragons. A magic-user might come to save the day with a potent spell. A cleric’s prayers might lead to the intervention of a god. Perhaps the sword the paladin is wielding is an artifact with a get the hell out of hell power.
Maybe. But I can’t shake the feeling that we’re witnessing the paladin’s last stand. He (or she; we’ll never really know) won’t go down without a fight, of course. What paladin would? And believe it or not, the devils aren’t going to lay a finger on him thanks to his protection from evil aura, which in this first edition of the game (ah, yes, here comes some good ’ol game-breakage) emanates perpetually from the paladin no matter what he does. Eventually, though, the paladin is going to starve, or fall to his death, or stumble upon one of those nasty arch-devils in the Monster Manual who are just going to throw some high-level magic the paladin’s way that will surely ruin his plans for level advancement.
In other words, the paladin is going to die.
“So what?” you might ask. He gets to go out in a blaze of glory fit for a holy warrior. Except not really. The paladin is in hell. He can kill a thousand devils before dying and it’s not going to make a dent in the population. He’s not going to make this plane any better by sword or prayer or charity. If anything, he’ll amuse the greater powers who call this lawful evil domain their home until one way or the other, he drops. Then they’ll eat his corpse, after desecrating it. That’s it.
Whoever’s character this is, the player is about to confront one of the uglier parts of the game: the unsatisfying death of a PC.
Ugly? Yes. For some D&D players, the death of a beloved character, especially if that death isn’t heroic, is like losing a dear friend. That might make some people squirm and worry about us gamers, but hear me out. In D&D, unlike video games, it typically takes years and years to advance your character to levels of significance. At least that’s the case with the older editions. If your character managed to survive those early levels, where you had him work very hard at avoiding most combat encounters, stealing – excuse me, acquiring – gold for experience points, then you had much to be proud of. Later levels brought better treasure, greater power, and more opportunity for heroics – at high risk.
And it’s the risk that will eventually do most PCs in. I’m not talking about calculated risks, like a group of adventurers deciding that it’s better to enter the dragon’s lair by day rather than by night, after spending some time in the accompanying towns gaining insight into the dragon’s hunting habits. I’m talking about the inevitable risks that the game brings with it, those moments when despite the best strategy, you find yourself rolling a saving throw for your character that’s going to be the difference between him soaking up that acid breath weapon damage or him being liquefied. And sometimes, no matter what the odds are, you just get unlucky. In D&D, no matter how powerful you are, most every time you roll that D20, you have at least a 5 percent chance of things going very badly for a beloved character.
It’s one of the reasons why I love the game.
No, really, it’s true. I miss earlier editions. Later editions got rid of, or at least significantly nerfed, the save vs. something awful rolls. These are the all-or-nothing moments in the game. Your character turned a corner and found himself staring at a medusa. Bummer. It doesn’t much matter that he’s 15th level, does it? Save vs. petrification or now he’s a 15th-level piece of stone. You made that save? Good. Oh, look at that. Lucky roll by the Dungeon Master. The medusa has managed to hit your character with her tail. Save vs. poison or he dies.
In Plato’s (c.429–c.347 bce) Phaedo, the character Socrates tells us that there is no better preparation for death than living the life of a philosopher. Happily, I’ve got that base covered. But the thing is, I think Socrates was wrong, though he couldn’t have known it at the time. Turns out there is no better preparation for thinking about death – or just as importantly, for thinking about many of the important features of life – than regularly playing D&D.
Before I get to that, though, let’s at least briefly hear Socrates out.
In Phaedo, Socrates has already been found guilty of corrupting the youth and teaching people not to believe in the gods. His punishment: death by drinking hemlock. During his final hours, Socrates tells his friends why he doesn’t fear death, but rather, looks forward to it. Moreover, he thinks this is the only reasonable attitude a philosopher can have, since philosophy prepares us for death.
According to Socrates, the life of philosophy is a life of the mind. Or as he would likely put it, a life of the soul. The philosopher, on his view, goes out of his way to eschew physical pleasures and materialistic pursuits. He works hard at not indulging in pleasures of the flesh, rich diets, or luxuries of any sort. And he does this for a reason. True knowledge is knowledge of the Forms – Justice, Beauty, Truth – you know, the big stuff. Our ability to gain knowledge of this sort is thwarted by the distractions of the body and of materialistic goods. Philosophers, therefore, cultivate a practice of pursuing knowledge of the Forms through disengagement from the physical, to the extent that’s possible.
What does this have to do with death, though? Death, according to Socrates, is “separation of the soul from the body.”1 The soul persists, while the body does not. And this is precisely what philosophers have been aiming at. So: win! They have tried throughout their lives to keep the soul unencumbered by the body in order to gain knowledge. Death finally allows that to happen completely. Rather than fear death, then, we should embrace it. At least if we are philosophers, Socrates thinks.
If Socrates is right, though, I’m in trouble. I am indeed a philosopher, but I’m also a gamer, and like most gamers, I start getting awful grumpy if you suggest that I should give up my Mountain Dew and various 7-11 snacks at the table. Happily, we have reason to be suspicious of Socrates’ reasoning. Knowledge doesn’t require disengagement from the body, but just the opposite. Those of us standing in the empiricist tradition see most knowledge stemming precisely from the bodily senses. Just ask the philosopher David Hume (1711–76). We learn about the world around us by observing it, hypothesizing about it, and then testing it. This is how ordinary knowledge is gained, like knowing that I have a hand. It’s also how scientific knowledge is gained. Even mathematical knowledge – the most abstract knowledge there is – doesn’t require the kind of bodily disengagement Socrates describes.
As far as the question of whether death is best conceived as a kind of immortal soul disengaging from a physical body, that, alas, is a subject too rich to explore at present. What can be said is that even if true, there isn’t quite as much comfort to be taken from it as Socrates imagines. For one thing, one’s immortal soul might end up in a very good place – think the Seven Heavens – or a very bad place – think the Nine Hells. For another, if philosophers – and others – can gain plenty of knowledge about the world with our body and souls intertwined, and it sure seems that we can, then death doesn’t achieve any interesting philosophical goals, at least from an epistemological standpoint.
So I don’t think Socrates, brilliant though he was, had much to offer us in terms of thinking about death. But I do think playing D&D does. A bold claim, to be sure. Let’s start exploring it, dungeon-crawl style.
I’m a big fan of I6: Ravenloft. Flaws and all, it’s consistently ranked among the best D&D modules of all time. And rightly so, for a hundred reasons, including those great “little touches.” The one I’m thinking about now is the description of the cemetery in the village of Barovia.
Every night at midnight … a ghostly procession takes place. One hundred spirits march up the road to Castle Ravenloft … At the castle, the spirits march straight to the chapel … up the high tower stair … to the top of the tower … There, they throw themselves down the shaft toward the crypts, where they disappear. These are the spirits of previous adventurers who died trying to destroy Strahd. Every night they try to complete their quest and each night they fail.2
What a bleak afterlife! But then, just about everything in the cursed lands of Barovia is bleak, and remains so as long as the land is in thrall to “the devil” Strahd, master vampire.
Still, this fantastic image offers us a way to think about the death of our characters. A very tempting way, but ultimately misguided, I think. When that saving throw is missed for your monk against the wail of the banshee roaming the halls of Castle Ravenloft; when that police robot (yes, that’s right) hangs more damage on your druid with that incendiary grenade than you ever thought possible in S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks; when your master thief “scouts ahead” through the green devil face in S1: Tomb of Horrors and is annihilated instantaneously – no saving throw, because, well, because Gygax; when all the raise dead and resurrection spells are exhausted and you’re still looking at a very bad number on your sacred D20 – the one you sleep with under your pillow at night; when the character you spent years and years developing is dead and he’s not coming back, that’s a pivotal moment in D&D gameplay.
You could have a complete emotional breakdown. There’s no shame in it. Plenty of us have. You could spend weeks going over the bad roll and envisioning your beloved fighter or cleric or magic-user or what-have-you now as a cursed member of the graveyard of dead PCs, doomed forever to try, and of course fail, to complete the one quest that undid him. You could imagine yourself a paladin who’s stuck in hell, eternally fighting an infinite number of devils, making no progress. You could do that, and I would be a little surprised if Tracy and Laura Hickman weren’t very aware of tapping into that sentiment when describing the cemetery in Barovia.
Alternatively, you could just pull out a blank piece of paper, roll up another PC, and jump back into the game.
PCs die. 1st-level PCs die. 18th-level PCs die. And much of it is due simply to the roll of a die. But the game goes on, with you as part of it, so long as you’re ready to roll up another character and jump back in. That is the essence of D&D. I promised some life and death philosophical lessons from playing the game. The first is this: play at life passionately, but be detached enough to let go when the dice don’t roll in your favor. Passion and detachment, in living life and confronting death. That’s not an original philosophical idea, of course. It finds a welcome home from various strands of Buddhist thought; indeed, the idea I’m pointing to is captured exceptionally well in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of creating sand mandalas. These are created with much passion, rigor, creativity and sophistication. They are also left to blow away, and when that doesn’t happen, are consciously swept aside. Buddhists in this tradition put much significance in this process. For them, it reveals a fundamental truth about life, death, and the impermanence connecting the two.
Suppose, then, you take this idea to heart. Let go of that PC. Retire the sheet and roll up a new character. Wait! Time for the second big philosophical lesson in the lifecycle of PCs. It’s this: just as with player-characters, our natural advantages and disadvantages are due to luck.
This, no doubt, seems obvious on the PC side of things, given that the characters’ strengths and weaknesses are determined by rolling six-sided dice. Actually, if we’re being honest, when we start thinking about rolling up characters, we immediately start graphing probabilities based on the various methods described in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Let’s push past that, for all of our sakes. The ability scores of a character are his spine, and everything hangs off of them. Strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma: these hallowed traits are the foundation upon which everything else about a character is built. Something so important couldn’t really be determined by random dice rolls, could it? In the older editions of the game, the answer is an emphatic yes.
You play what you roll. Didn’t get the scores you needed for a ranger? It’s okay. There’s always the fighter. You know how it goes. Rolled poorly on your hit points? Be careful! You’re as squishy as the wizard. The lucky and unlucky rolls at the character-creation stage give the player advantages and disadvantages – all unearned. Her skill comes in how she works with them.
The philosophical insight is that the same is true with us. It may not sound all that insightful at first. Of course our natural talents – our height, intelligence, beauty, and so on – were not things we earned, or deserve, but were determined by a “natural lottery” – a cosmic rolling of some six-sided dice. So what? It turns out that for some philosophers, this fact of life has some rather important implications.
John Rawls (1921–2002) built a portion of his theory of political justice upon the idea that our natural talents are not earned, but acquired by luck. Rawls was concerned with what would make a state just – what political and economic institutions it needed to establish in order to count as promoting justice. And one of his principles of justice stated that society ought to be arranged in such a way that inequalities of income and wealth could only be justified to the extent that they maximized the welfare of those people in society occupying the worst-off positions. This difference principle – as it has come to be called – is rather demanding, and its satisfaction would likely require the state to adopt policies that significantly redistribute wealth.3
For a lot of people in America, this idea is anathema. And the argument against it goes something like this. The money we earn from our labor is earned from, well, our labor. We have a special claim on it, a claim that’s violated if the government adopts policies that tax the fruits of our labor to redistribute it to others. This idea, in very rough form, is the foundation of much libertarian thought.4
Rawls, however, has a rejoinder, based squarely on the observation that our natural talents were a matter of luck. As he sees it, we don’t have an absolute claim on the fruits of our labor because not all of those fruits are deserved. Yes, we developed skills. But no matter how skillful we are, we need certain natural talents to succeed at some things. And those we didn’t earn. They just came to us. Through luck. A player’s fighter may earn an extra 10 percent in experience points due to a high strength score, but since that score was the result of a roll of the dice, the player shouldn’t pat herself on the back for earning it. She didn’t do anything but roll dice. If a DM decided to distribute those extra experience points to the poor guy who rolled a bunch of 3s on his ability scores, what claim would the player have against the DM – besides pounding on the relevant page in the book? (And we all know how those arguments go.)
For Rawls, then, we don’t have an absolute claim on the fruits of our labor because not all of them are earned. Now, admittedly there is a lot more to say about this, but the take-home insight is this: the reality of luck may carry with it obligations of justice. And if that’s not deep, we’ve been delving together in the wrong dungeon.
We’ve talked about how the death of a PC can be an invitation to think about passion and detachment, and how the creation of a new PC can be an invitation to think about fairness and justice. Does playing D&D really lend itself to thinking about such things? Of course! And we’ve just gotten to level 1. This is Undermountain. There’s always further down to go.