Personally, I’m a fan of consequences in all TTRPGs. That doesn’t necessarily have to mean death, but there should be something at stake. It comes down to a simple premise – if you can’t lose, then you can’t really win either, right? If there’s no aftermath to your actions, it doesn’t matter what you do. If there is no negative outcome, why would a positive one matter?

Sanity checks? That’s a consequence for seeing that which man was not supposed to see. Darkvision? That’s a way of negating consequences for going down into a dark place. (I actually think a lot of 5E abilities are more about negating consequences more than anything else).

Let’s pretend a huge and terrible monster shambles out of the crypt. In a game like 5E, with it’s general playstyle, the players are going to roll initiative and murder the thing, as was expected from the get go. In Call of Cthulhu, they’re going to make a sanity check and then hope they’ve unlocked the secret to defeating it because they’re likely dead otherwise. In Mork Borg, you’re going to probably lose a few PCs in terrible ways and laugh about it while rolling up new ones (more on this in the next post).

And in Old-School DnD, you’re going to hope to hell that it doesn’t have level drain because that is *terrifying*.

Do you see the difference here? In these various systems, the PCs will act with varying levels of cautiousness to match the varying level of consequences. They’re much more likely to run if there’s a chance they could actually die. This is why consequences matter.

Now, again, consequences don’t have to mean PC death, though more severe consequences do spawn larger feelings. That said, let’s look at a list of other consequences.

– loss of gear
– capture of slef
– capture of an important NPC
– death of an NPC
– loss of time (there must be a reason this matters)
– the problem can’t be fixed the way they hoped (Blades in the Dark is an excellent example of this)
– getting lost
– the enemy grows stronger
– their allies grow weaker
– they’re faced with an impossible choice (give the enemy the powerful artifact or they kill the important NPC they’ve taken hostage)
– they end up somewhere they don’t want to be
– wounds or conditions (blinded, poisoned, etc)
– a loss of sanity
– going insane
– the task is now impossible. The PCs must move on.

In each of these, the PCs live to fight another day, but there is at least something on the table they can lose.