The End

I seem to be thinking about the end of campaigns and character death a lot lately. I remembered the idea of rolling or your character's life expectancy around the time I was using the D&D Rules Cyclopaedia. I just had a look through the Dungeon Crawl Classics book and saw something about wizards burning through ability scores. Warriors in DCC get to perform mighty deeds, and I'm sure there are other aspects to the character classes to make them all interesting and cool, but I straight away found myself coming up with a new homebrew mechanic for getting yourself killed.

This whole concept might need to exist in a campaign where the player characters are headed for some great destiny. At the very least there needs to be collaboration among the players to get everybody moving towards the same goal: the end of the story.

So, I initially thought that warriors would have an ability to deal a massive blow to a single enemy. Something like "reduce a target to 0hp, and reduce your hp to 1" would work in D&D. But the cost of using this power is, for every 10hp that are used up, the warrior's lifespan is reduced by one year. It would be a last ditch ability that could be called on to turn around a losing battle, but it couldn't be used over and over again without a great cost.

So what about wizards? I don't want them to simply overlap with the warrior, so they could have an ability that channels raw magical power to burn up many enemies. It might say "reduce the hp of yourself and any number of enemies in sight by the lowest of their hp totals." Again, for every 10hp of damage this deals, the wizard's expected lifespan is reduced by one year.

As for a thief, they can steal an item from any character, but for every 10hp of guards and monsters this bypasses, their expected lifespan is reduced by one year.

And what about this expected lifespan? Some versions of D&D have a random roll to determine a character's starting age. I would instead make all characters start off fifty years from the endpoint for their race. A small random variation should be applied as well, to keep the expected ages unknown. As the game unfolds, great deeds are accomplished but the characters march inexorably towards their end. If a character's expected age reduces to meet their current age, then they die in the next session. It's up to the DM to announce this as they see fit. Perhaps at the start of the final session they tell the players that one of their characters will die tonight. It's then up to the players to try to achieve their most epic deeds yet, so the death will be a memorable one. If they all survive until the end of that session, then the character in question dies 'off screen.'

I'd hope that this system creates a feeling of a great destiny that looms before the heroes, but with a great cost. A character like Druss in Legend would work for this, one who chooses to go to war again instead of living a long and quiet life.