DIE the RPG – First Read
Role-playing games have existed longer than we give credit for. We commonly recognise them to have begun with the release of Dungeons and Dragon (D&D) in the 1970s. However, before that we can see their genesis in collaborative storytelling and early wargames. The Glasstown of the Bronte sisters in 1827, the Little Wars of HG Wells, and earlier still in story games around tables with Tarot cards. Modern day RPGs and story games reflect these early expressions of the form.
The DIE comic from writer Kieron Gillen, artist Stephanie Hans, and letterer Clayton Cowles explores this history and the tropes of play. The story sees a group of teenagers Jumanjied, it’s a word shut-up, into an RPG world only to emerge 2 years later, traumatised by the experience. Later in life they reunite and are sucked back into the same RPG world which is now a reflection of their lives and the mistakes they have made along the way.
First Read articles represent me going through the book in question for the first time. It is my initial impressions of the mechanisms, themes, and setting presented within its pages. I have not played the game at the time of writing.
The DIE RPG visits this idea and in doing so examines the rituals and forms of RPGs. Rowan, Rook, and Decard publish the RPG, with the team behind the comic reuniting to design and illustrate it. In the preface of the book Kieron Gillen says:
“However, it wasn’t just an idea for a comic. It was also an idea for an RPG. It had to be both, and I had to work on them simultaneously trying to make a game that lets you create your own DIE stories at home, to answer the same question: why do we play games?”
The production is fantastic. A full colour hardcover with red material bookmarks to keep your place. A new comic set in the world of DIE kicks off your introduction and we follow the characters in it throughout the book in the examples and explanations of how the game works. This is the same team that brought you the original graphic novels so the style is consistent and beautiful.
D4 – In the Beginning
DIE lays out its stall clearly after the intro comic. It lays out the setup as I have above and then answers this question “What does the DIE RPG let you do?”
“In this game, you make your own entirely bespoke version of the DIE story.
You make your own social group of messed up, real-world humans. They’re dragged to a world which echoes your own strengths and weaknesses, failures, losses and successes back at you. It is your fantasy world, personal and horrifically yours…”
If that doesn’t sound up your street, I totally understand. I love this sort of clarity in an RPG. Don’t be coy about your game. A clear statement of intent is what the reader wants. Without that we can’t all get on the same page with what the game wants to be and what we want from it. If those things clash we can put it down and walk away. That’s ok. That’s a win.
The book goes on to lay out the format of the book. Despite it being around the 400 page mark, only about half of that is 100% essential before you run your first game of it as best I can tell. In fact the book says you only need up to the end of page 137 before being ready to run. The setup briefly mentions in this intro that DIE is intended to be a short campaign of 2-3 sessions. That feels buried amongst the information here. Also the chapters don’t have page references for where they start which seems like a useability oversight.
It finishes this intro with a note on tone. This seems vital for a game based on a comic that explores personal loss and trauma. An additional warning from me here. As the RPG is inspired by the comic, there are spoilers for the plot of those graphic novels. These are marked but are effectively unavoidable. You can decide how much that bothers you.
D6 – The Basics
The core rules are pretty compact. Based around a d6 pool, you roll a number of them based on a stat, looking for successes on a 4+. Test difficulty takes away successes from the rolled pool. Dice that roll a 6+ activate a special ability. Yeah I said 6+. Hints at weirdness down the line.
Combat is gone over briefly. An abstracted range system and the stats Guard and Health are at the core of this: reduce the former, then the latter for the most part. Initiative is a ‘what makes most sense’ kind of affair with some advice. Combats only end when everyone decides to stop swinging.
There is a strange segment here called ‘Extra Mechanics’. This includes rules for critical failures and successes, failing forward, and more. It feels a little bit like the designer is hedging their bets. I really prefer ‘This is how the designer intended’ kind of games. I guess you could see it as part of DIE being a treatise on RPGs, but it mostly makes this tight core feel wooly around the edges.
D8 – Who are you?
The game fires you straight from mechanisms into the Paragons. These are DIE’s character classes. They are all inspiring and have names like ‘The Dictator’, ‘The Emotion Knight’, and ‘The Godbinder’. Each Paragon has a description and a bit about why you might want to play that class. Even the GM takes a Paragon class called ‘The Master’. As an example of what to expect from character classes let me quote The Dictator’s description
“You read a sad story. You cry. Do you think that’s sinister, as if someone has artificially taken over your emotions? Of course not. That’s just what art is.
Anyone who’s ever met a Dictator would disagree.
By performing, they alter other people’s emotional states. Dictators play people like a musician plays a harp. They can pluck the strings. They can snap them.
They’re like bards, if everyone was fucking petrified of bards.”
That description will either delight you, like it did me, or horrify you. If the latter, DIE is probably not for you. No judgement.
Each Paragon then goes over how to create one, and all their starting abilities. Each Paragon has its own special die, one of the polyhedrals from a regular set; d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, or d20. These special dice do different things depending on the class, but trust me when I say you’ll want to play them all. Each class is unique, interesting, and full of colour. Each paragon also gets a full advancement map for levelling up.
The game starts to get foggy here in its intentions. Several pages are dedicated to the advancement for each Paragon. The core mode of play is a short campaign which by default doesn’t contain the opportunity to use any of that. It feels like the game is effectively teasing you with toys you can’t have. There is a section later for running a longer DIE campaign where advancement is a feature, as well as rules for taking some advancement in a short campaign. It feels unfocused.
The other odd thing is that some of the Paragon classes include rules for what happens when you use some of the ‘Extra mechanics’. For instance the Dicatator has rules for what happens when you ‘perform’ and there is a critical failure. So are critical failures an extra mechanic or not? The book seems unclear on the matter.
D10 – Down to Business
On p.107 we get to the meat of how to set-up the game. This includes specifics on player counts and the short campaign alluded to earlier. It really feels like this information should have been right at the front of the book to really cement what DIE is about.
That aside, this section seems excellent at getting you ready to play. I admit I’ve buried the lead a little so far. In DIE you create two characters: the ‘real world’ Personas who have personal issues and traumas, and the characters (the Paragaons) in the RPG those personas get sucked into.
Character creation starts by you using the Reunited setup. You all used to play RPGs together and now you are back together for old times sake. It then takes you through some collaborative world building answering questions like ‘Why did the group get together?’. It then moves to each player to answer questions about how their Persona fits into this group, and here it starts diving down into how each of these characters is flawed. There are some really tasty prompts here that seem well set up to create interesting characters and conflicts between them.
Those Personas created you leave the table and come back to it as those people. During the break the GM has decided which Paragon each of you is going to be. That’s right, you don’t choose your character, the GM chooses for you. There is a ritual here where you hand over the character sheet and their special dice ‘lock eyes and intensely recite’
“This is your die. There is no other like this in the whole game. This is special. This is yours. Use it well, [fill in Paragaon name].”
Once you’ve gone through the character sheets there is a procedure to start the game as the personas get sucked into the world of DIE and become their Paragons. This first session of play includes all the Persona and Paragon creation and then a small amount of combat in the world of DIE but no more than that. Just a taste of what is to come.
Of course the game isn’t going to work without the GM getting to mine the Personas for their weak points. Between session one and two there is more work for the GM to do in determining the ‘Core Lack’ and ‘Temptation’ of each Persona. From these you generate a ‘Necessary Encounter’ to present to each Persona in the game world.
The rest of this chapter has advice on running the game, later sessions, and bringing it to a conclusion. With that the core part of the book is over.
This section of the book is called Rituals and that seems apt. The game is very prescriptive in the way it wants this part of the game to run, and how you wrap up each session. You do some of these rituals at the start of every session and I think that might get tiresome over time. I know things like the ‘declare your name’ in Agon fall by the wayside pretty quickly, and I can see the same happening here. The ‘feel’ of the game could be altered by dropping some of these parts, but it feels inevitable.
A whole chapter of advice on running the game follows. Some of the top level advice given in the Rituals chapter spills over here and there are specifics on how to handle each of the Paragons.
We then get into some world building advice and a bestiary. GMs are encouraged to mess with the creatures and races described within which I really like. Each entry presents you with ‘Truths’. These are the established tropes of each of these monsters or people in the fiction we consume. Choosing and twisting these to your heart’s content to create the ‘truth’ of your world is an appealing prospect. Each entry also has a ‘Good echoes for’ segment to suggest how you might use them to reflect the Personas personal issues back at them in this fictional world. The design team are trying to make it as easy as possible for you to construct this horrible fantasy.
D12 – The road goes ever on and on
DIE’s latter third is dedicated to the longer campaign and other alternative modes of play. I admit I’ve only skipped over this a bit, but there seems to be a lot of good tools for the GM and players to use to build their own version of the DIE universe over a longer campaign.
The alternate modes bit is very extensive, perhaps too extensive. There are lots of different setups here for the real-world group you might create from being developers on a computer game to attending a convention together. There is even a specific one-shot mode called Total Party Kill. This is the one mode that stands out to me as being something that really belongs, as I think all RPGs should keep the ‘one-shot’ style of play. Many folk may only ever experience your game in this style of convention or home play, and it will help them enjoy it if you can provide good advice on how to make that happen.
The Appendix has even more extra rules. One for running ‘The Master’ as Player rather than as the GM’s Persona. Alongside this is a Grimoire of spells, that several of the Paragons use. Tucking this away at the back of the book feels a bit awkward to use during character creation.
The best thing in the Appendix is a worked example of how to prepare the second session. This takes all the questions the Personas answered in session one and shows how Gillen uses his own advice to create the ‘Core Lacks’, ‘Temptations’, and ‘Necessary encounters’ the game requires. I do think this should be further forward in the book, but is a great example of the kind of assistance I want more RPGs to provide to their players.
D20 – It’s all for you
Reading DIE this first time I have found myself conflicted. I think at its core there is a good design and a great premise. This is backed up with good advice and a very ritualistic approach to play I find intriguing. It’s a game that examines what it means to play an RPG and that fascinates me.
That said I’m not sure DIE fully knows what it wants to be. Is a short form examination of RPG tropes? Maybe it is a sprawling hex crawl campaign? Is it both?
I think it is worth noting that DIE was a Kickstarter campaign product. Although only one or two of the extra set-ups are mentioned in the stretch goals for the campaign they feel like the kind of bloat that comes from a project that has maybe spread a bit beyond its boundaries. The book feels a bit baggy and unfocused. I would have loved to have seen a more precise version to deliver on what the premise promises.
I really want to play DIE. I’m itching to run it as well. It has a well written core and the idea of playing an RPG that examines what it means to do just that fascinates me. DIE is ambitious and different. That is to be celebrated, even if I end up not liking the game in play. I’d rather play this than a mediocre game that just does what it says on the tin. We owe it to ourselves to celebrate the weird and ambitious.
I bought DIE with my own money. I have not played the game yet.
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