appendix 6: death LARPs

Below are group scenarios or personal thought experiments. Even ones that seem metaphysically naive, unlikely, or impossible to you will likely have value to explore.

Note: I have literally never participated in a LARP or even a TTRPG. I used to play MTG and online MUDs, though, for what it's worth. At the time of this writing, I haven't tried these yet, so I don't have a good sense of who or when things below might be useful or what the psychological risk-reward-cost ratios are like. The "Pocket Guide to American Freeform" (see below) and many, many other resources may have suggestions for safety and other decision criteria. Maybe especially read a discussion of the idea of "bleed," and possibly lots of other things!

The general use case for these is that death is generally "tucked away" in modern society, until a friend, family member, or yourself gets really sick or suffers other misfortune. It sort of feels like this is to the point where it's difficult to set up external and internal contexts where one can explore all your current "stuff" around death. The scenarios below are intended to make that easier. Additionally, meditators are maybe more likely to run into "death stuff" sooner, metaphysically, existentially, and so on. Maybe that's why they started meditating in the first place, whether they knew it or not. And given modern society's sometimes-relation to death (ignore it; squish it into a corner) that can be alienating, from pop culture or local culture, whether you're secular or quasi-religioius, or religious. So the material below is perhaps potentially facilitative for elements of "cosmological synch," belonging, etc.

Again, even ones that seem metaphysically naive, unlikely, or impossible to you will likely have value to explore.

LARP = Live Action Role-playing

See:

  • Stark, Lizzie. Leaving Mundania: Inside the transformative world of live action role-playing games. Chicago Review Press, 2012.
  • Kapitany, Rohan, Tomas Hampejs, and Thalia R. Goldstein. "Pretensive Shared Reality: From childhood pretense to adult imaginative play." Frontiers in Psychology (2022): 614.
  • Stark, Lizzie. Pocket Guide to American Freeform.

mechanics of death

(On first reading, you might skip to the scenarios below.)

There are at least X different types of "death" and Y different "postmortems" that you can use; maybe choose these before you start a round or use a dice rolls to pick during the round:

Types of death:

  1. "long certain prelude" --- when your number comes up, as it were, start a timer for, say, five minutes, or ten minutes, etc.. When the timer runs out, you're dead.
  2. "brief certain prelude" --- when your number comes up, as it were, start a timer for, say, 30 seconds or one minute, etc.. When the timer runs out, you're dead.
  3. "long uncertain prelude" --- when your number comes up, as it were, start a timer for, say, ten minutes. Roll a d20 every minute. For the first five minutes, you only die if you roll <6. At minute six, <7, and so on, until at, say, minute ten, you have a 50-50 chance of dying on each roll.
  4. "brief uncertain prelude" --- at minute 2, start flipping a coin every 20 seconds, if it comes up tails you're dead.
  5. "immanent death" --- start flipping a coin, if it comes up tails you're dead.
  6. "insta-death" --- you're dead immediately

(With the exception of insta-death, you can carry on conversations and do whatever during all this. The dice rolls being distracting is a feature, not a bug, etc. One might have a game master or another player do the rolls for you, though, depending on what you all decide.)

Postmortems:

  1. Solo: at the moment of "death" you smoothly leave the room, out of the line-of-sight of other players and contemplatively hang out by yourself until the current round is over
  2. Group: --- at the moment of "death" you smoothly leave the room, out of the line-of-sight of other players, but you can hang out with and de-brief with other "dead" players until the current round is over
  3. Conversational ghost: After you die you're a ghost; you can't take physical actions in the world, but you can still talk to players that are alive (decide whether you can communicate with other ghosts.) Players can see you or feel your presence.
  4. Mute ghost: After you die you're a ghost; you can watch and listen but you can't communicate with living players, verbally or non-verbally. (Decide whether you can communicate with other ghosts.) Players cannot see you or feel your presence.

(Not all the scenarios below use the death mechanics above.)

Scenarios:

near death experience, solo, unlikely to die soon

One of the group has recently had a near death experience (choose who). They're safe now and on the mend, and it's unlikely that there will be future complications, or it was a near-miss and they didn't get hurt at all. It's been a couple days, weeks, or months, and they're still pretty shaken, and they are or aren't overtly showing it. Now you're all hanging out together.

Further options:

  • (a) You're a friend group (optionally plus intimate partner(s)). You met in college or you've all mostly known each other since high school and you're all now X-ish years old.
  • (b) You're siblings. Choose your ages.
  • (c) You're a core or extended family. Choose your roles (mother, father, sister, brother, etc.)

Further options:

Instead of getting away with it mostly scott free, their health has been really compromised. Everything's different from here on out; could be years, and statistically it will (or won't be), but nobody's sure, yet.

death bed

One of the group is dying (choose who). It's been months and now they're in hospice. You're gathered around them.

Options:

  • It could be more days or weeks.
  • They're hours or, rather, minutes from death. Use one of the death mechanics above.

Further options:

  • (a) You're a friend group. You met in college or you've all mostly known each other since high school and you're all now X-ish years old.
  • (b) You're siblings. Choose your ages.
  • (c) You're a core or extended family. Choose your roles (mother, father, sister, brother, etc.)
  • (d) You're family and friends and intimate partner(s). Choose your roles (mother, father, sister, brother, etc.)

recent loss

You're a family or a group of friends (choose your roles). Someone has recently died (not a player). It's been a blur of solo logistics, and funeral stuff, and you're all together for the first time with nothing to do.

remote suddenness

You're a group of friends or family or extended family or family-in-laws at a rural or low-tech location. (Say camping or a long drive up in the hills.) Getting help would take at least an hour or many, many hours, so there's no real chance of a life-saving intervention. Without any warning, someone has a sudden health crisis. Use one of the death mechanics above. You can also have a meta saving throw, where they were choking and almost die or it turns out to be something really painful but obviously not dangerous in retrospect.

dystopic or unfortunate situations

exactly one of you

You're in some strange situation (dystopia, hostage, something) where exactly one of you is going to die, though the characters don't get to choose who, and the characters (as opposed to potentially the players) don't know who it will be in advance. Decide together who will die ahead of time or have a mechanic that will choose any of you randomly. Decide whether it will happen at a known or unknown time. Use one of the death mechanics above.

all of you in a known order

In this scenario, you're all going to die and there's a known death order. You die one by one and the group of remaining alive characters grows smaller and smaller.

all of you in an unknown order

You're in a dystopic situation or there's been an accident and poison gas or radiation is slowly killing all of you and there's no hope of escape. Possibly with a delay for more role-playing, initiate the long-extended prelude mechanic for all of you.

post-apocalypse

There's been a global accident or disaster, and all other humans are dead except for your small group. You have enough food and shelter to sustain everyone indefinitely, and for whatever reason there's no status or sexual competition, and you're all sterile. You have decades ahead to live, if you choose to stay alive, and there will never be more humans.

diner booth at end of universe and the end of time

You're a group of friends at the end of the universe and the end of time. How that works cosmologically, metaphysically, and existentially is ill-specified. Say, there just isn't anything more or anything more to do, and nothing more is going to happen. You're free of that burden. And you're hanging out. Maybe you're doing a retrospective on your lives and everything that's happened.

new universe is about to begin, erasing this one

You're a group of friends in a locally safe situation, and a new universe is definitely about to begin that will completely erase this one (what that means for all of you, metaphysically and existentially is uncertain or ill-specified, but you're going to die, and you know this). You know there will be more, but you won't be a part of it. (And whether you ever were at all, whether you ever will have been at all, and how that works or doesn't work, is ill-specified, or, as players, you can discuss the "real" or "fantasy" (meta)physics of this!)

longevity and rejuvenation and cryonics (and transformative artificial intelligence)

You're in a time period where some or all of longevity, rejuvenation, or cryonics are not yet workable technologies, but they perhaps might be in the proximate future, but possibly not in time for all of you or some of you. Choose lifespans for everyone, maybe two people who'll die in ten years, two people who'll die in twenty years, and so on, so there's a good spread and some people are close together for time of death. Then choose decades where possible technologies will become available, that have some overlap (or no overlap) with character's chosen lifespans. That certain knowledge is meta or only known with certainty from the player perspective. Then decide how certain or uncertain the (player-)characters are for when those technologies will become available. Some characters can be much more certain than others. Now you're all in a group, discussing timelines and uncertainties and how you feel about that and how you are and will live your life under those uncertainties. (You can of course switch to talking about your really-real positions on all this, too, but as a group be clear about whether you're exploring fantasy and thought-experiment space or whether you're exploring more close-to-home positions, or both, etc. (First draft 20230301.)

Further options:

Some or all of these technologies have arrived are are relatively mature (with consistent geopolitical and economic and sociological implications). Now, run some of the other scenarios in this document as if that were the case. So, sort of a LARP within a LARP. There may be ways to conceptually simplify this! Basically, what changes and what stays the same, in a world where cryonics or longevity+rejuvenation are mature technologies?

isekai

You or your entire group definitely died, and now you're alive(?) again in a different place. It feels either "real" or "heavenly" (or hellishly). Things seems relatively safe at the moment and you have plenty of downtime to reflect on your situation.

not quite immortal

You're a group of beings or future humans who aren't quite immortal. Your probability of death, lightly abstracted, is a well-understood and well characterized distribution. You've lived for eons, and, statistically, it's "overdue" for one of you to die.

incoming

You don't know when, down to the second, but the culmination of a disaster is imminent. (Shockwave? Gamma rays?) You're all going to die fairly instantaneously and without immediate warning.

alone

Your friends, or your friends and your intimate partner (choose roles), are hanging out in the next room while you're napping. You (choose who) suddenly wake to a feeling of doom and pain and pressure in your chest. You can't tell if it's your heart or your spleen or what. For whatever reason (surprise, sleepiness, pain) you can't even call out for help and then after 10-60 seconds you can. The pain subsides to ambiguous levels such that you begin to doubt something had even been wrong. You can say or shout something to the people in the next room.

2103 words · appendix