Death and Defeat

Story Arc characters have no 'hit points' as such, but any character who is vulnerable to harm have Endurance Thresholds. An attack roll has a number of degrees of effect, and these degrees rack up in the form of penalties. When a penalty becomes as negative as the threshold is positive, that person is defeated. But like in most stories, the results of combat aren’t necessarily death.

Most of the time, the GM can allow trivial NPCs to die, if that's the kind of story you're telling. But sometimes NPCs are important parts of the story that you don't want to lose just because the wrong numbers come up on the dice. The same is true of PCs. The idea here is that, generally speaking, players and gamemasters shouldn't have to lose their characters unless they want to, or there's a dramatically compelling reason.

So, defeat could mean any of the following things, or whatever else you'd like:

• Permanent Impairment: The character suffers some normally incurable impairment, such as blindness, loss of limb, a mangled voice box, brain damage, or similar. Repairing such an impairment may be possible, but not easy.
• Unconsciousness: The character is knocked out cold.
• Clichéd Non-Death: The character seems to die, but gets up again as soon as everyone least expects it and either sneaks away, runs off laughing, or starts attacking again.
• Eventual Death: The character is delivered a wound which will eventually kill her. Before that, however, some time is going to pass — how much depends on the situation. Maybe she has only enough time to spit out a dying curse, or possibly she won't die for a couple of hours (or even much longer, as a result of infection or something).
• Death: When the defeated character is a trivial character, or if the PCs have worked really hard to dispatch a villain, it might actually be time for that character to die. Of course, in many stories, there are ample ways to have characters return even after death.
• Ambiguous Exit: This one is tricky, but fun. The character seems to die, but whether he actually does is unclear; instead of being killed by a blade, for instance, perhaps he throws himself off a cliff and vanishes from view, or perhaps her body is carried away by folks with a gurney or large birds or something. Whether or not the character will return is supposed to be ambigious (but we all know he will).

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