Character death is not equal in all role-playing games, however. In some games a new character can be generated in five minutes. In others the process may take hours. In either case, if a player has been using a character for many months (or years), the sudden death of that character can carry quite a sting. Without detracting from the significance of a character’s demise, it is possible to make the experience less painful for the player and perhaps even make it enjoyable.

When a character expires, it should almost be as much an occasion for celebration as for mourning, like a traditional New Orleans funeral procession. The character’s journey has ended, but that doesn’t preclude the player from role-playing the death scene to the hilt. If the scene is role-played well enough, whether seriously or comically, the player ought to be rewarded in some manner when they generate the next character. Depending upon the game, the GM might award the new character bonus experience points, a reroll of one attribute, an extra skill, a special ability, an increased chance for psionics, or anything else that appropriately encourages good role-playing and rewards good sportsmanship. And if any particular behavior should be encouraged above all others, for the health of the hobby and the enjoyment of all, it’s good sportsmanship.

Ah, but there’s the crux of the problem. After all the effort of truly creating a character with a terrific name and an interesting background that explains who that character is and why, what if this character is snuffed out of existence in his first adventure when he falls into a pit lined with stakes? Or when he is swarmed by angry kobolds? Or when he is tenaciously pursued and torn to shreds by a ferocious man-killing rat? (O.K., that last example is from the Intellivision ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Cartridge game, but the idea still applies.)

High mortality is a more of a problem in some games than others. Call of Cthulhu is a popular example, but so is Dungeons & Dragons (and its retro-clones). Most adventure games, in my opinion, are more enjoyable when there is a risk of a character not surviving. It increases a player’s sense of accomplishment when it is not only achieving the goal, but survival itself, that denotes the successful adventurer. Risk is part of the thrill of the game. How then does one reconcile the time spent creating a character with the life expectancy of the average low level adventurer?

I submit that the answer is gradual background building. In most works of fiction, we do not learn everything about a character as soon as that character is introduced. We learn about their backgrounds gradually. By all means they should have a name and a physical description, but perhaps, at first, we know nothing about their background beyond what their accent tells us. Perhaps we know where they are from, or at least where they must have been living for some time. As the story progresses, we may learn something about their religion or philosophy, or their family, or their ancestry. The same can be done in a role-playing game. Once you have rolled up, equipped, described, and named your character, write a single sentence pertaining to the character’s background. If the character perishes from an ill-fated encounter with green slime in the first outing, all you’ve lost is the effort of writing one sentence (backgroundwise). If the character survives the first adventure, write another sentence into the background story. Repeat as needed. The longer the character lives, the longer the background story grows as well as the story that is being created with each succeeding adventure. In a way, your character is growing both forwards and backwards in time. And if your character meets an untimely end after a long career of adventures, the background you have written will make your memories of the character that much richer.

One way to infuse non-player persons with a little personality is to give them something to talk about other than the most pertinent adventuring opportunities or the most tantalizing rumors when player characters meet them. The average bystander or shopkeeper will probably have more important things on his or her mind than how to help a suspicious-looking stranger. Perhaps they know something, perhaps they don’t. In any case, the best way to entice people to talk is usually to talk about something that interests them. It is not difficult for a GM to choose credible subjects of interest for non-player characters who are fully detailed, but those who are little more than a name, a profession, and a brief description on a random encounter table offer rather less insight. For such characters we simply note one or two common topics of conversation.

A topic of conversation could be anything from the superficial to the personal to the obsessive. It could be the weather, a hobby, a sports team, a television show, a news story, politics, anything. Not all topics will be appropriate for all situations, of course, but it can be useful to have it in reserve just in case. You can add topics to character descriptions beforehand (or jot them beside their names if that is all they consist of), or you can make your own Random Conversational Topic Table and roll on it whenever it seems appropriate, such as for spontaneously created characters. (If you decide to use a random table, it might be helpful to then write any topic so generated in the character’s description for future reference.) If you don’t have any preconceptions about a given character’s interests, the random table may help to add flesh to that character’s skeleton as it were.

Topics of conversation for non-player characters can be beneficial to players as well as GMs. In role-playing games that utilize character skills, they provide a usefulness for Trivia skills beyond adding color to a character. Even if the player isn’t knowledgeable about a topic, the character might be, and that could be just the edge that is needed.

[Edit: This article was rewritten on 13 February 2011.]