Somebody Dies

Death is super popular in stories. Situations like dying elders, loss of loved ones, vanquishing a rival and the power of dealing death are fascinating as well as dreadful, and a major ingredient of Storyteller.

Implementing death seemed simple enough at first, "If a character is alive on frame 1 and there's a tomb on frame 2, he died!":

Of course, as with everything else in Storyteller, the final rules turned out to be trickier than this. If there is more than one candidate, the simulator has no idea who to choose without help:

But there is a way for the simulator to solve the problem itself, if somebody shows up alive later:

So nobody could have died if everybody shows up alive later...

... unless one of them can come back to life!

Too simple? Throw in a little complication:

Now, Why not just implement a "kill character" button?

There's no such option because Storyteller always makes sure your stories make sense, and that freedom would allow players to create these situations:

The current implementation of death is flexible enough to support any kind of death situation while still being simple enough to understand and as a bonus, you can't create these conflicts.