As someone who played video games long before I ever rolled a d20, one of the things that I've always found kind of challenging in TTRPGs is figuring out failure states. In a video game, from Mario to Dark Souls, you're often playing as a character in some kind of dangerous situation, and in order to master the game, the vast majority of players are going to get their character killed here and there. But death is also kind of cheap in these games - to use those examples, in Mario games you have multiple lives, so you can keep attempting whatever level you failed at, and in modern Mario games, usually the worst penalty you take for losing all of your lives is that you don't get to re-try that level from whatever midway checkpoints you've reached. In Dark Souls and its ilk, death is expected and even canonical - each has a conceit that explains why you're coming back from the dead over and over, and while you can lose all of your Souls/Runes/Blood Echoes/Ergo/whatever if you die and then die again before retrieving them, which can be a real pain, the expectation is that this is going to happen many times over the course of your game.
In TTRPGs, though, a character's death can often mean that the player needs to roll up a new character - the original character's story has ended tragically, and a new figure must come and take their place (so that the player still has something to do).
Now, depending on the game's genre and overall vibe, death might be very permanent or it might be something that can be dealt with: given that most popular RPGs, and the most popular RPG, are set in fantasy worlds, miraculous magic can be worked to bring someone back from the dead.
Draw Steel doesn't stray too far from this. But I do think there are some interesting wrinkles to the way they approach death and dying.
One of the central design conceits in Draw Steel, less famous than its "every attack hits" element but I think of a similar ethos, is that control over your character is almost never taken away from you. Status effects like D&D's stunned and incapacitated don't exist. There is a Medusa that can petrify you (and once again, I'm heartbroken that they didn't take the opportunity to name this creature a Gorgon, finally correcting the baffling misnomer from D&D,) but for the most part, the game wants you to continue to participate.
And nowhere is that more radically enforced than in the Dying condition.
When you are reduced to 0 Stamina or less, you get the Dying condition. This doesn't impede your abilities in any way - except that you are now Bleeding, and you can't take the Catch Breath maneuver. Bleeding means that when you take a Main Action or Triggered Action, you lose 1d6+your level of Stamina. Unlike D&D, you do track negative Stamina, because if you get the negative of your Winded level (half your max Stamina,) you die.
Catch Breath is the maneuver that anyone can usually take to spend a Recovery and heal up a third of their max health, so it means that if you're Dying, you're in a rough spot and are going to need some kind of ability or the help of a friend to rescue you.
Draw Steel is meant to feel cinematic, and I think that this mechanic really reflects the drama of an epic fantasy action scene. The clearest example, to me, is the death of Boromir in Fellowship of the Ring. We see Boromir, after he has had his lowest moment and tried to take the ring from Frodo, reawaken his true, heroic nature, and goes to fend off the Uruk-hai coming after the Hobbits. Slaying them in droves (minions,) he ultimately takes an arrow to the chest. He's now Dying.
(As a note, I actually like the idea of "Stamina" over Hit Points in the way that it suggests that you aren't actually getting injured until you're at 0, like Stamina is your energy to parry and deflect attacks. Does this clash with abilities that say they, like, impale you and pull you toward the monster? Yes. But it does have an interesting flavor.)
Now, Boromir could just stop and hold his wound, but tactically, this wouldn't necessarily be smart: the Uruks are probably just going to hack him to death, and then go for his friends. So, Boromir, despite the damage it's doing to his body, continues to fight on. He knows he's doomed to die, but he figures at least he can do something to help his cause before he drops. Ultimately, it's a partial success: he gives Aragorn the time to get the drop on the Uruk-hai leader (Leader?) but Merry and Pippin are taken nonetheless.
Indeed, beyond pure altruistic heroics, there are probably some times when fighting on while Dying is the best choice - monsters aren't going to stop attacking you just because you're wounded, and so you might need to finish them off quickly before they can do so to you.
But what about when you do finally hit that -50% mark? How does the game treat things when you do fall in battle?
Well, first off, some Ancestries have unique relationships with death. Revenants, the free-willed, sentient undead, have a trait called Tough But Withered, which actually prevents you from dying even if you hit that point, only causing you to go inert for 12 hours - as long as you don't take any fire damage, which will burn your dried out dead husk of a body. Notably, Revenants can purchase an ancestry trait that gives them immunity to Bleeding, which means that they can be nearly at full strength even if they're on the verge of death. Hakaan, the stony half-giants, have a purchasable trait (I haven't gone over ancestries yet, but there's a cool system there) called Doomsight, which essentially gives you visions of the battle in which you are doomed to die, but until that point, if you'd normally die, you instead turn to stony rubble for 12 hours before you reassemble and revive.
For others, the most obvious way to bring someone back is via a Scroll of Resurrection, a consumable treasure that can bring back anyone who has been dead for less than a year, if they're willing (though not a Hakaan who used the Doomsight feature).
However, working with the Director, there's yet another route: Titles.
Titles in Draw Steel are a bit like feats, but rather than earning them as part of your normal level progression (Perks are the closer analogue there,) Titles are rewards for quests and adventures, and the prerequisites can be quite strange: among them are various ways in which your character died.
Presumed Dead can be earned if you die in a way that prevents your body from being recovered or examined, such as falling off a cliff. What the title does is that you only appear to have died, but instead, you regain 1 Stamina and can spend 1 recovery, and you even get a minor treasure. You and the Director coordinate for your hero's triumphant return (once again, this is almost precisely like Aragorn's seeming demise in Two Towers, when he goes over a cliff on a warg).
Saved for a Worse Fate is a title that the entire party can earn if there's a TPK: rather than dying, you're all captured by the monsters you were fighting, and various scenarios can play out from there.
There are more of these titles, and what I think they do is give the Director and the players permission to use whatever comic-book shenanigans they need to keep a player character in the narrative.
I will note that I think these Titles require buy-in from the Director - meeting the prerequisites is not a guarantee that you get the title. But I'd recommend that Directors look at these and try to award them when it helps keep the narrative going, and especially to use these death-reverting titles if a player doesn't want to give up their character just yet.
Just another element of TTRPGs that I think Draw Steel has a really cool and refreshing (that makes it sound like I'm describing an iced tea) take on.
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