Dungeons & Dragons 4E came out about two weeks ago, and I've had a few chances to look at the sourcebooks. I notice that scrolls of resurrection are still in the game—and no wonder. They're a staple, and after a while, you might really need them. It reminded me of something I've always wanted to talk a little about: times when narrative and gameplay collide.

Let's talk about death. In role-playing games, death is relatively common. Failure is a necessary part of any game—if there is no way to fail, then your successes are hollow and useless, and there is no tension—and the ultimate failure is, of course, death. When five valiant adventurers are getting themselves into fights every other hour (and when don't they, in combat-oriented RPGs?), eventually someone is going to kick the bucket. Fortunately, death is rarely the end.

The vast majority of adventure RPGs have some sort of way to bring someone back from the dead. It could be scrolls of revivification, phoenix downs, or elixirs of life, but they are always there, and they are quite common in all instances, because death can occur at any point in the game. But why do they have them?

Put simply, death is a bitch. As game designers, our first priority must always be to ensure that the players are having fun. If they aren't, then something is wrong. Permanent death is rarely fun, so when it happens, there needs to be some way of undoing it, even if it involves significant effort. This is a gameplay issue—we need the chance of death to be tangible or we lose significant tension, but if this results in players dropping dead left and right, then all we've accomplished is frustrating our players. So, there is a definite necessity for resurrection in most RPGs.

Unfortunately, this also has significant negative impact on the other side of game design—the narrative. What we have gained in convenience and potential for tension for the players, we may just have lost in terms of narrative space. Consider, for instance, an adventure set in the court of a local noble, midway through which an important guest is murdered, and blame laid upon the players; it's a nice premise for a story—at least until someone pipes up and says "Hang on a minute, why don't they just resurrect the guy?"

By making death something that is relatively simple to overcome for the players, we have lessened its significance across the board. Suddenly, no one's death matters, when a simple scroll can restore them to life again. Furthermore, just imagine what this means for the society your game is taking place in. If no one ever has to permanently die (at least before old age; D&D rules generally include the caveat that someone who has died of old age cannot be resurrected), what kind of society does that create? Murder effectively becomes trivial and futile for anyone who can afford the scrolls.

One solution might be to state that resurrection (or magic in general) is rare or expensive. But then, how do you explain the fact that it always seems to be handy when the players need it, but no one else? The players are rarely especially rich themselves; more often than not, the adventuring party is little more than a ragtag band of misfits. Are we supposed to believe that a noble cannot afford to resurrect an important ally of his, but a bunch of roving mercenaries are?

Another solution might be to state that the players are special somehow. This is more reasonable in a lot of ways. After all, the players are not ordinary people; they're heroes, by definition cut of different cloth than the general populace. But even this doesn't quite explain why they can always find ways to restore themselves to health so easily. Assuming that these heroes are rare in the game world, the market for scrolls of resurrection must be extremely limited, ensuring their rarity. Alternately, if heroes are common, we're back to the previous problem, except now our society is divided into the mortal and practically immortal.

Finally, some have offered the suggestion that people never truly actually die as a result of combat; they're just knocked out, or unconscious, or something, and that "resurrection" is just a matter of fanning them back to consciousness. I'm not buying this one. If a knife in the back or a poisoned mug of wine can kill someone permanently, then so can a sword to the gut or a venomous sting. I can't find any compelling reason to treat them so differently.

I don't know how to resolve this conflict. Suspension of disbelief might be the only way out. Even so, there are situations I just can't accept, like the murdered noble.