# RPG a Day 2026 - 22: Grit tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2026 ![[RPG a Day 2026 (illo).jpg]] There's a term of art in TRPGs: the death spiral. It's an emergent result of systems that make actions more difficult as you take more damage/wounds/whatnot if they provide no mechanism for intervening other than choosing to stop interacting. As an example, imagine a very minimalist system where for an attack we flip a coin. If it comes up heads, you do one point of damage to your opponent. If it comes up tails, you take one point of damage. However, for every point of damage you take, you flip an additional coin, and if it comes up tails, nothing happens. Very quickly, you get into a situation where it's obvious that continuing combat is going to inevitably continue accruing more and more damage for you with no actual useful gain. This is obviously an exaggerated and worked example, but you see this sort of thing happen a lot in games. You start taking minus two to hit with every wound, which makes it harder to hit, which makes it harder to take out the enemy before they can do more damage to you. Once you start losing, it's almost impossible to get out of. The death spiral is real. What can you do about it in your game design? Some games will never change that because it's in their nature. The inevitable doom spiral is part and parcel of their play. Fair enough, they can keep it if they want it, but for the rest of us… ## Boundless **[[Boundless]]** is a really interesting example because it starts by simply changing the definition of hit points. They are no longer a pool of things that you spend out of to stay alive. Instead, they represent your character's ability to avoid life-threatening outcomes. Keep that phrasing in mind because it's important. They don't represent wounds or physical coherence. They represent something about your character, their ability to avoid life-threatening outcomes. If you still have HP, the outcome's not life-threatening. There's an implicit additional element to this. When your character takes conditions, something ongoing (like a wound or fatigue) affects them until you do something about it. This is actually taken from their inventory slots. If they have more things in their pockets than they can carry with their conditions, then they will have to drop something. Some of the gear has to go. By way of comparison, a character has 10 slots. Most items take one slot, small items take none, and large items take two. When you take damage, you lose a number of hit points equal to weapon damage (somewhere between 1d6-1 and 1d6+3, depending on the weapon), or you take a condition that fills up one of your slots. Get down to 0 hit points, or when all your slots are filled with conditions, you have to make a critical save by rolling against your most relevant attribute score to determine whether you stay standing. You may pull off a hit on that check, in which case you stay up. However, your used attribute will drop by one for every miss, and you have a two-thirds chance to roll a miss on any die. Is there a death spiral here? To some degree, it doesn't happen until you realize you're going to have to start dropping gear to deal with your conditions. Your weapons and armor count as gear. However, you've got a good number of slots. After a fight, if you survive, you can rest, recuperate, and do things to try and get rid of your conditions, if at all possible. Get your conditions back, get your inventory slots back, and you're in better shape. Remember how I described HP as the ability to take damage without consequences that threaten your life? Eating up those potential inventory slot losses is where that comes in and where the death spiral is delayed. You can actually lose a little bit before things start getting particularly nasty. There's also a mechanic that lets you take the chance of breaking the death spiral, and that's your ability to push a check. You can choose to deliberately take on a fatigued condition and sacrifice an inventory slot in order to reroll all the misses on a check. If you know that you're inevitably going to take something worse, this might be a good idea. The player has the agency to make that decision. This can stave off the spiral a little bit longer by making a short-term sacrifice they know they can get rid of if they can get through the current situation. ## Loner Let's go in a completely different direction and look at **[[Loner]]**, which largely deals with the potential danger of a death spiral by simply not putting it on the table with a hard endpoint. That is, death is not even on the table unless you say it is. This is one of the advantages of solo gaming in terms of design. You don't have to hardcode in aggressively framed end games unless the whole point of the experience is to get to an end game. Instead, if you focus on the character's motivations, goals, and desires, the question more fluidly maintains itself as, *"Am I able to achieve my goals in my current fictional position? And if not, how do I improve it?"* Let's look specifically at **[[Loner - Cthulhu!|Loner: Cthulhu!]]** because it's a great platform for talking about death spirals and assumed endpoints. In particular, the classic approach to the Cthulhu mythos is for losing your mind, going completely cuckoo Cabeza. It is typically considered the worst thing that can happen to you, worse than physical death. I'm not actually going to argue that. However, in this game, it's not necessarily the end of your play; it's the end of the investigation that they're on, for sure. They can certainly survive with permanent changes, and there's a table for that. Only one of them really looks like it's a particularly long-term horror: catatonic withdrawal, but this is **Loner**. Go ahead and shift for a few sessions to a horrifying psychodrama, moving across your damaged internal emotional landscape — looking for a way out, in a very **[Johnny Got His Gun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB7j4C6hBBA)** kind of way. That's perfectly appropriate, both to the setting and to the game. As for Sanity in **L:C**, it's worth noting that as you progress down the three-step hierarchy of destabilizing psyche, you do acquire detrimental traits, but you also pick up traits that improve your chances. Sure, with one mark against your sanity, you're *Unsettled*. You're jumpy. You can misread situations. You might think things are other than they are because you're jumping to conclusions, but you might also be a little bit hypervigilant. You could catch that guy sneaking up on you who thought he was down the street. What we have here is a form of dealing with the death spiral by simply sidestepping it. It provides both positives and negatives until the character reaches a point where a permanent change must be made. Even then, at that point, the character can continue play, just with deep alterations that represent their experience. You may have it in your mind to ask, *"But what about physical combat?"* You can use the standard resolution system, which effectively asks questions and gets answers: *"Can I take the Mi-Go down from behind with a single strike?"* Or you can drop into the Harm and Luck system, which doesn't definitionally tie into the trait system unless the conflict itself is about changing your traits, or it makes narrative sense to do so. Lose an exchange with a Hound of Tindalos, and you're probably going to come away with a lasting physical wound. It'll take you some fictional maneuvering to get rid of. Lose an exchange with a group of curious Mi-Go, and you may just wake up in a metal cylinder without most of your body. Your situation can change, but there is no death spiral. You may accumulate negative traits, and they may cause an increasing level of challenge for pursuing your current goal. However, it's never quite a spiral because it never leads to finality, just complication. ## Something is Wrong With the Chickens Sometimes what you need is a dose of pure electric insanity. A game about chickens that have been imbued with eldritch power from beyond our world pretty much lands dead center on that. **[[Something Is Wrong With the Chickens]]** goes out of its way to be *high speed, low drag*. The mechanics are deliberately minimalist to the point they fit on a single sheet of paper, and there's plenty of white space and elbow room that could have been used. This game is unique not just for its subject matter or its method of presentation, but because it has two "death" offramps. If you want to resolve an action, you roll 3d6. The outcomes are interpreted as either Chicken or Eldritch. Chicken are dice between 1 and 3, and Eldritch are 4 through 6. You need to have a mix of Chicken and Eldritch in order to succeed. If you get all Chickens, the action fails and you lose an Eldritch trait. You start with one. If you lose them all, you're *too* delicious and you're captured. If all the dice end up Eldritch, the action fails, and you gain a new Eldritch trait. End up with all six, and you transcend this mortal realm, no longer concerned with the struggle between Chicken and Man. Is this insane? Yes. Is it interesting? Also yes, because of the double-ended death potential. It looks a lot worse than it is. After all, there's an equal chance of getting an all Chicken roll as there is an all Eldritch roll. This does mean that you could lose your only Eldritch trait at the beginning of the game on the first roll and become too delicious to be snatched up and taken away right out of the gate, but that's part of the fun. If anything, something is wrong with the chickens manifests an inverse death spiral. As you become more Eldritch, you gain more tools to be able to get yourself into and out of situations. Of course, that gives you the opportunity to make more rolls. More rolls mean more opportunity for chaos to insert itself in your life. Instead of a death spiral, this is more of a push your luck spiral. Playing the game at all demands that you push your luck, so you roll your dice and cluck your chances.[^1] ## Exeunt There's a ton of other games that approach the death spiral in different ways, but most of them give you a way to apply your true grit to get out of the hole at some point. A few make it explicit that the inevitable gravity of the situation is going to drag you down, and that's part of the fun. Not really my thing, I have to admit. If you've seen other mechanisms that help you demonstrate your mettle and avoid the death spiral, tell me about it. I'd be curious to know. [^1]: Honestly, you have no idea how long I've been sitting on this game, waiting for it to hatch into an idea that I can link into something. I am clucking happy about this. I'm glad I didn't chicken out.