Death offers a game for your life. You decide on D&D.
“I assume you’ve never played?” I asked.
The cloaked figure across from me shook their head slowly.
“Great,” I said. “I’ll be the DM. I’ll walk you through everything. First, character creation.”
Six hours later Death sat leaned over the table with a mountain dew in one hand and a D20 in the other. Their hood was thrown back to reveal a bleached grinning skull.
We were in the company of four infernals from the depths of the Abyss. I don’t remember which of us invited each of them. Turned out we had quite a few friends in common.
They rolled a one.
“Oohh, tough luck,” I said with a smile.
“Fuck. This is the best time I’ve had in centuries, but I really should get back to work,” they said reluctantly.
“Yeah…” One of the demons agreed. “I actually have a meeting with some senators in like an hour.”
“Same time next week?” Death asked.
“I’ll be here,” I agreed.
I suspected they knew before we started that this was a game that didn’t have to have an end and didn’t have a winner.
For those who don’t know, this xkcd strip was done as a memorial when Gary Gygax died.
They came back the next week, and the week after that. After a month of weekly sessions, Death pulled me aside.
“Hey,” he muttered, shuffling his skeletal feet a bit and rubbing his arm. “I don’t want to be That Guy, but this game does have an end, right? I’m having a blast, but this is still technically work for me, and I have to file reports, especially with all the loopholes I had to pull on to get a multi-session game approved in the first place.”
“Oh, yeah, for sure!” I told him. “There’s lots of ways for it to end. “Your characters could all die, we could finish the story we’re telling together, or our group could even just stop playing.”
Satisfied, he took his place at the table, but for months thereafter, he would cock his head at me every time I ended a session with excitement to play again. All I could do was shrug.
The weeks turned into months, turned into years, and Death stopped his reminders that our game, like everything else in the world, would eventually have to die. He told me, once, that he was determined to see this through to the end because my absurdly long game would make for a good story, but I think he had grown attached to his gnome cleric. Her magic was from the Life domain, and his grin always seemed just a touch wider every time he healed someone.
Half a decade after we began, my players were as seasoned as their level 20 characters, and I was running out of curveballs that would challenge them, so I wrote an end to the campaign. I spent months on it, carefully tying up every loose plot thread I could think of and giving all five members of the party the best resolution I could muster. Three of them got married to each other.
There were tears flowing from every eye that wasn’t an empty socket as I narrated their proverbial rides into the sunset, before finally I folded my screen, looked at each of them in turn, and said “The end. Death, you can take my soul now.”
He froze, and the demons around the table turned as one to stare at him.
Then, slowly, he cocked his head the same way he used to. “But you won,” he said. “The object of the game is to tell a story with your friends, and you did.”
“But so did you!” I cried. “And everyone knows that when Death wins a game, he gets your soul.”
Death’s grin spread wider than it ever had when he saved someone’s life in-game. “Didn’t you just finish pouring it into a game that you shared with me?”
