On New Year’s Eve as we were waiting for the countdown to midnight, I ran the tabletop role playing game Death in Space, available from Free League Publishing. I had picked up this game months before and had intentions of running it for some friends from work but I never got around to it.
My kids (ages 12 and 15) love playing TTRPGs but it’s almost impossible to get them to actually sit down and do so. They’d always rather do something else, until they start playing and have a great time. This one was no different. They knew we were going to spend the time together and I just announced that we would play the game.
Character creation took maybe 10 minutes altogether. WHY DO PRETEENS ALWAYS WANT TO NAME EVERY CHARACTER BOB!?!?! I did veto Bob and had my kid us a name generator to find a scifi name. Otherwise the characters had 0 or -1 in all four of their stats. One of them was a little bummed until I reminded him the name of the game is Death in Space. Literally, he should just be happy if he makes it out alive.
One thing this game does well is makes character creation super streamlined. My kid always wants to play the “bad” character ended up with a super heroic good and honest character, which was nice to see that he still went with it. Then we got into the game.
I just ran the space station that comes in the game, and I rolled on the random tables for what happens as they go along. It was basically about 10 minutes of prep for me in which I read through the book and went with it.
Personally, I thought the adventure wasn’t compelling. I threw in some NPCs and tried to make the first few scenes just social encounters with one “battle” in the end, where they tried to steal a robot dog from a junker. They did summon a snake from the abyss and lock the door leaving the snake to take out the junk dealer. It was a lot of chaos.
The kids enjoyed it. The next morning my 12 year old couldn’t wait to tell my wife about the game, so that’s a clear win.
What Death in Space does well
On the up side, DiS gets you immediately into role playing. There’s a handful of rolls to build a character but those PCs have enough personality and uniqueness that you can immediately start playing them.
The random encounter tables worked out fairly well. There was enough content to keep the action flowing. I could have easily added in three or four more scenes using just the content in the book. I wrapped the session up when I did because we were closing in on the new year and wanted to do the countdown.
What DiS doesn’t do well
I walked away from the session feeling unimpressed with the story. As the GM, I could have done a lot more to prepare for the game. However I wanted to run it in the spirit of how the game is written. In doing so, I felt like it was a pretty bland experience. That being said, both of my kids said they thought it was really fun.
Play again?
I think I would play this again, but if I do so I’d probably want to write some content instead of run it as a zero prep game the way I did. I think this is more about me and my personal style of play than anything the game well or poorly.