Death Is Not the End

Let's go for an experiment, won't we? Find a partner and play "Word at a Time". I'll give you a proto story: "You go to the dark mountain cliffs and meet a monster. Something happens between you and them. Go!" I can wait, try it, it's also fun and rewarding to tell a story like that. 

Anyway, whether you tried it or wanted to read to where I'm going, what I wanted to prove was that almost none of you would have killed the monster, not to mention being killed by it. The confrontation with the monster might have gone like a meeting and then running away, with you drinking tea (or coffee) together, with a short fight that ended with a few scratches...

A scene that ends with a dying character, whether it's you or the monster, not under your watch... The reason for all of this turning and turning around, is that death is not the end of the story. A story can be kept going after the characters die, after the monster dies... 

A dead character can become a ghost that follows the characters, helping from afar. A player that his character died can play a different character. A dead monster's revenge can be taken by another monster. There are no limits to this thing; a dead character is not the end of the story, but a door or a veil to the next stage of the story.

I'm not trying to tell "kill all characters", but to tell that you should not think about a dead character as an end point to the game. Death is a great dramatic term, and if there's always the possibility of death, every decision will be so much more...

What about you? Do you use death in your games? If so, how?