No One Here Gets Out Alive: Playing RPGs where you cannot escape Death

No One Here Gets Out Alive: RPGs Without Survival

Most games promise a chance to survive, however slim, however costly. Even horror games and tragedies offer the lure of a last-minute reprieve. But what happens when you take that away?

What happens when survival is not on the table?

Not as a twist, but as the premise.

You will die. The game knows it. The players know it. The characters should.

What does a roleplaying game become when there is no hope of walking away?

It becomes something else. It becomes a reflection of life.

Ten Candles and the Illusion of Survival

In Ten Candles everyone dies. But in practice, it plays like a survival horror story: you struggle to last as long as possible, and that is your goal. The fact of your character’s death is held by you, the player, not by the character. The characters believe they might escape. The players know they won’t.

That split is intentional. Ten Candles isn’t about the meaning of life. The darkness is always coming, and the system ensures the light dies out. Most players act with hope and still try to push the ending back. There is resistance, not acceptance.

So while the structure guarantees doom, the emotional frame is about delaying it. It’s not a meditation on finality, it’s a dramatic staging of denial, struggle, and last stands. You are focused on survival, not on life.

Wraith: The Oblivion and the Afterlife That Isn’t One

Wraith begins with death. You play the ghost of a dead person, but the game soon gives you an entire world beyond it.

You have died, yes. But now you have purpose: factions, powers, enemies. And a Shadow. The setting is always busy, finding you all sorts of reasons to continue being a ghost. You exist. You struggle. In many ways, you are reborn. You don’t roleplay the descent into unavoidable oblivion. You roleplay the second life of your emotional residue.

And in that sense, Wraith pulls its punch. It doesn’t strip you of agency, though at times it feels that way, when the characters stay in the Shadowlands (the world of the dead juxtaposed to the world of the living) and look over their loved ones.

But the world of Wraith is thick with systems, politics, passions, and wars. The real danger isn’t oblivion, it’s irrelevance. And even then, you can fight back.

So while Wraith has doom in its DNA, it also cheats the finality of death. You don’t disappear. You don’t diminish. You go on, damaged, haunted, but still active.

And maybe that’s necessary. Maybe we can’t bear to roleplay death without reward.

But it shows just how rare it is to find a game that doesn’t smuggle hope back in.

When You Remove the Possibility of Survival

Every RPG gives you goals—even when no one says them out loud. These goals shape what players do, what they value, and what they come to expect from play. And they come from three places: the mechanics, the scenario, and the setting.

1. Mechanics tell you what matters

In Dungeons & Dragons, the mechanics reward you for survival, combat, and accumulation. You gain experience, treasure, abilities. Monsters give XP; danger is something to overcome. Even if the narrative says you’re a hero, the rules quietly teach you that victory lies in killing efficiently and living long enough to grow stronger.

In Call of Cthulhu, the mechanics are different. There’s no leveling. Your skills increase slowly. Combat is lethal. Your sanity slowly (at first) goes down with every horrific situation you encounter. So eventually, you always die or go crazy… but you can retire the character before it happens.

2. Scenarios tell you what to pursue

D&D modules often assume a structure: a villain to defeat, a dungeon to clear, a world to save. Even if the players go off-script, the scenario frames your purpose. There’s a quest to complete, a reward at the end, and a moral arc that bends toward heroism.

CoC scenarios offer something different: you’re not meant to triumph, but to uncover, and maybe protect. The scenario presents a mystery—something strange, hidden, ancient. Your job isn’t to destroy it, but to understand it. The cost may be your sanity or your life, but you are still pushed to know. There’s a kind of glory in the unraveling. And certainly glory in delaying the end of the world, even if just for a few aeons.

3. Settings tell you what kind of life matters

D&D settings often revolve around heroism, prophecy, power. You are part of a world where people become legends, where artifacts shift the balance of history, where gods meddle and destinies unfold. Even if you’re low-level, the setting promises that your choices can change things. That the world is shaped by heroes.

Call of Cthulhu offers no such promise. Its setting is cold, vast, indifferent. The Mythos cannot be beaten. The most your actions can do is delay disaster or shield a few others from knowledge too heavy to bear. The setting tells you: you do not matter to the cosmos, but you may still matter to each other.

So even when you’re not told what to do, you’re shown what to want.

The mechanics reward it. The scenario aims you at it. The setting gives it emotional weight.

A few games try to subvert this—Mörk Borg flirts with annihilation, Trophy Dark is designed for inevitable ruin, and Bluebeard’s Bride strips away power entirely—but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

What happens when you take all of it away?

When the mechanics offer no progress.

When the scenario has no solution.

When the setting promises nothing.

When there is no victory, no revelation, no survival.

Then you remove not just the character’s future—you remove the player’s framework for meaning.

This can lead to clarity. Maybe you begin to see what the characters choose to care about when nothing is pushing them.

What they cling to when there’s nothing to gain.

Who they protect when it won’t save them.

What they say when it won’t change the outcome.

In that absence of purpose, something else arises:

Expression instead of optimization.

Presence instead of progression.

Values instead of rewards.

If no goal is given, maybe characters (or players?) can bring their own.

Escapism with Teeth

Even when doom is written into the rules, it’s still a kind of fantasy.

Because your character will never die the way most people do.

Not alone in a hospital bed.

Not after years of being slowly forgotten.

Not after your voice has become too soft for the nurses to hear.

Not long after your story has already stopped.

No one roleplays that. Not really.

Even in games about doom, your death has shape. It comes at a peak. It may even mean something.

And maybe that’s not escapism.

Maybe it’s a form of longing—for a death that reflects what mattered in life.

For one final moment where you can say, “this is who I was.”

Bringing Inevitable Death into Your Game

You don’t need to play Ten Candles or Wraith to explore these themes. You can deny survival in almost any game, if you do it with honesty.

1. Scenario-level doom

• The characters are poisoned. There is no cure. The scenario unfolds during their final hours. Somebody did this to you. Does it matter who and why?

• The spaceship is doomed, heading toward a star. It cannot be stopped. The end is not a twist—it’s the premise. But… you just discovered something new about the cosmos. You can focus on learning more—or pass on what you’ve learned so others can continue your work.

2. Setting-level inevitability

• A fantasy world where everyone knows how much fate the gods grant them. Fate is tracked, measured, seen by others. When your fate is over, you die.

• Magic exists that can tell others how much time you have left—and how much is already gone.

3. Mechanics-level fate

Imagine a fantasy world where everyone has points of fate. Every time you would die, you lose a fate point. Otherwise, your character can become better at everything through normal progression. But the catch is this: you can never regain fate points.

So your character gets stronger—but has progressively less time to make a difference.

You can still have dice. Still have choices. But not to escape.

To express. To love. To fail with grace. To fall while reaching. Or in a blaze of glory.

What’s Left

When you remove the hope of survival, only what matters remains.

These should not be games of despair. They should be games of urgency. Of clarity. Of honesty.

They ask you: what would you do if you knew this was it?

What would you say? Who would you stay with? What would you not regret?

Don’t play to escape death.

Play to stare at it long enough to know who you are when it arrives.