2021 Day 31: DIE
DIE is a comic about a group of roleplayers who, meeting back after many years, end up being taken to the fictional world they created. Bad things happen.
DIE has also been described (not by me) as a deconstruction of swords and sorcery roleplaying.
The roleplaying game is in development and beta testing by the comic writer (Kieran Gillan), with the help of the good people at RRD and it has the same idea. You develop the swords and sorcery world your characters created, then play as they find themselves there as some hybrid of themselves and their own characters. However the world of DIE uses its own system as the game-within-a-game-within-a-game is not as straightforward as it first appears. There is a madness to it which is more of a threat than the person who actually took you there.
In the same way that Ninja Burger has the Story Guide playing the Dispatcher, so DIE has them play the “evil ST” character (the Master) in the world. And the thing about Masters (yes, there are more than one) is that they cheat. This is, amongst everything else, literally a game about bad DMs.
(And yes, I know I used three different terms for the same thing in this paragraph!)
Once in the world of DIE, each PC is given a different character class. The goal is that everyone has a different sheet, but get the one which best fits their Persona (the real world character of the PC) plus their role in the Persona’s own game and a few other things. The classes are … different. The bard archetype morphs into the Dictator who can influence emotions, but struggles to do so with control. The cleric archetype is essentially making deals with deities: most of their spells are direct requests from a deity which they then have to pay back later. The rogue archetype wields a pistol, but literally feeds off gold. On top of that, each one has a different dice from the standard dice sets which is “theirs” and they all work differently (the Dictator’s D4 being a very good example, he says cryptically).
Once you have your class, character creation is extremely straightforward. You have a couple of points to adjust your stats and a few choices of gear/appearance. It’s all on the sheet, even the rules. (Which are, largely, roll your dice pool and look for 4+; 6s trigger specials.)
To try to show you how dramatic the characters are, I picked a [blank] Knight. I’ll get to that in a sec. (Also: The character might be a bit close to home for some, so I used some random dice rolls for what happened after the game.)
John used to be a rules lawyer. Not the good kind, but the type who constantly says “You can’t do that.” His coping mechanisms got worse. He dropped out of University because he couldn’t cope and ended up working as a low-level civil servant, a job which can cope with sticklers. He was overqualified for his work, but his inability to deal with the human side of his job got the better of him. Over time his resentment of life and people intensified.
Despite that, he found a wife who adored him and he adored in return. They found in each other a refuge, and the security to have children together (two of them). It wasn’t a hard decision for him to stay at home to look after the children and the home whilst she earned a good salary as a senior manager, and he turned out not to be a bad parent. They even started wearing down his inflexibility (I mean, he didn’t have a choice really).
But then. Then. Then the cancer came. Suddenly and violently. His wonderful life fell down around his ears. And that’s where we meet him, when the children’s three grandparents forced him to take a holiday and visit his old friends (whilst they looked after their grandchildren).
In their teenage game, John played a few characters (as they got variously killed off or left behind), but he was normally some sort of fighter because he didn’t need to think outside the box and it left him more room to tell the others what they couldn’t do. And to clarify, he wasn’t a total tosser. He was a loyal friend who could always be relied on. As long as you followed the rules.
So then, that brings us back to DIE. And in the world of DIE he takes on role of an Amazement Knight. The game uses Plutchnik’s wheel of emotions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Plutchik) and I chose Amazement and worked backwards from there.
He wields a sword, because in the game he played that was the best weapon, and the sword is Brutal and speaks in the voice of his late wife - patient, intelligent and encourages him to do the right thing (which is normally violent in this case).
John’s stance is Riposte, and his venting ability is to Duel one opponent (because he can deal with people individually, and because I think that’s such a cool ability that isn’t found in enough rpgs).
So most of the time he will be a really useful fighter. But the more he says “You can’t do that!”, the more powerful and dangerous he becomes (up to the level of destroying gods). But also the more obsessive and unthinking he becomes.
Part of John's character sheet
http://diecomic.com/rpg/
Contains the first issue of the comic.