High Lethality as Game Balance

Lethality and Game Balance are two concepts in RPG design and deliberation which have been covered again and again. Jeff from the eponymous Jeff's Gameblog has written about how low level and high lethality play is more fun for him as a referee, and his players. The Principia Apocrypha (written by Ben Milton, Steven Lumpkin, and David Perry) contains advice about how high lethality injects real tension into the game, because players who know that their characters really might die will tread carefully through the dungeon. Many other writers have discussed lethality and threat of character death as adding fun to their games. I usually agree with these people. 

There are—of course—other types of games where character death can be frustrating. If you want to play a campaign where you're taking your beloved character from level 1 to level 20, learning and growing over time, power to you. 

In terms of Game Balance, I find that people online often discuss this concept in regards to 5e D&D. Homebrew classes need to be balanced—Unearthed Arcana material needs to be balanced—encounters need to be balanced—magic items need to be balanced. Things might "break the game." Things need to be "fair." These are always subjective things, or if they're objective, they've been reduced down to such simple mechanical math-based attributes as to suck all the fun out of playing pretend. 

In OSR play we often ignore balance. Or rather, we have more important things to focus on—cool new monsters we invented, the interesting decisions the players make, interpreting the die rolls we made on a litany of random tables. We know that combat is avoidable, and that if a deadly encounter is 'unbalanced,' the players can 'balance' it by simply avoiding the situation, or fictionally gathering enough resources (allies, big weapons, ancient spells) to make it balanced. Again, the Principia Apocrypha has a lot to say about this which I won't bother repeating any more than I already have. 

Something I don't hear very often, however, is how high lethality can provide many of the so-called 'benefits' of game balance without having to worry about fiddly math and endless play testing. 

Ability Score Generation Methods

Many OSR-leaning gamers enjoy the random nature of generation methods, and love the stories that emerge when somebody with 6 STR ends up surviving longer than someone with 17 STR. Others criticize this random generation, saying it penalizes those players who roll low stats, taking away their enjoyment, for no reason. However, I find that most people laying that criticism make a character with the expectation that they will play them over and over in many sessions, over the entire campaign. When you expect your characters to die often, rolling bad stats doesn't become an overarching grey cloud over the entire campaign—it is simply one of the characters you roll. Maybe your player skill allows a low stat character to survive, or maybe the survival of the fittest kicks in, and any low stat character you roll dies quickly, until you roll a high stat one and they survive. Either way, high lethality flattens the overall distribution of ability score rolls over the lifetime of the entire campaign. 

Class Balance

In the GLOG, nobody cares about class balance. Where's the fun in that? Plus, with 477+ classes, who has time to peruse all these listings to compare and contrast for balance? Why even bother, since nobody will ever double-check your work? Much better to just create a class by focusing on awesome ideas, and diegetic abilities which cannot truly be balanced anyways. This results in another interlink between high lethality and game balance—in a campaign with high lethality, over time, characters with levels in 'weak' classes will die. And if they don't, their shortcomings become clear and it is an awesome story to behold this character survive time and time again despite their shortcomings. Characters with levels in 'strong' classes will survive, or it becomes clear that it actually doesn't matter very much. Either way is a win-win. 

Encounter Design

Many OSR referees agree that properly telegraphing danger is a key concept when players are facing monsters and traps. Giving players information before they make a decision that might get their character killed is an important part of play. When your dungeon is stocked with encounters of varying difficulties, and you telegraph danger beforehand, and the players are aware that the dungeon is unbalanced, they will self-select encounters for combat, and encounters for trickery, stealth, parley, and other tactics. There is no need to balance encounters for character level when the risk of lethality is real—players understand the risk and won't push themselves too far. They know that they will die if they do so. Taking away that risk of lethality just makes unbalanced encounters nonsensical. How can something be too powerful if it never actually kills you?

Conclusion

I wrote this whole thing in kind of a rambly method over the past couple days after having the idea rattling around in my brain for a few months. Apologies for any writing which is indecipherable. 

My general point is that beyond the traditional reasons we all profess for loving high lethality-play, it also provides an overarching balance to the game over long periods of time, releasing referees from the work of balancing their encounters, homebrew classes, and ability score generation. The meatgrinder balances it all for you.