Last night, during our weekly remote TTRPG session with my friends, my character* died. Instantly. Thanks to shitty dice rolls.
*this is not the same character who nearly died and my friends did something really narratively sweet for me, as I wrote in a previous blog
Needless to say, I was grumpy… and by grumpy I mean I had to mute my microphone to bark out some of the most obscene things I’ve ever said to a computer program… and by bark out I mean nearly shouted at the top of my lungs and probably disturbed the sleep of my wife and son.
Not exactly the most mature behavior for a man who just turned 47, but I’ve seen people similar in age get more upset at the results of sporting events, so I don’t feel too bad.
The worst thing about it wasn’t the character loss, though that did sting. I rather enjoyed this character and will miss pretending to be them for a few hours a week with my friends. The worst thing about it was being unable to participate in the game for the rest of the night, and doing so in solitude.
My character’s death happened in the middle of a dungeon crawl, right before the final boss fight, and narratively it made no sense to have someone show up out of nowhere to replace my character and help the surviving team. It also happened not quite at the end of the night. So, basically, I had nothing to do for the last 30-45 minutes of our game time.
And so I discovered a major drawback to remote gaming, much of a blessing as it is. When things go south for you and you’re “out of the game” for the night, there’s no one physically near you to cheer you up. To their credit my friends were sympathetic to “instant death by crappy dice rolls” and did their best to console me, but I was in a foul mood that only the physical proximity of my friends could pull me out of.
So I stayed muted while the game went on without me, privately swearing at the program we use to roll dice for its inability to make my character actually succeed at the things I put all my bonuses in to, just being generally miserable and alone in the moment.
Character death sucks in TTRPGs, but having to sit around by yourself in the depths of a bad mood with nothing to do feels way worse.