There’s a nice house rules on dying by Andy Collins. I might use them for the next campaign because we’ve had some discussions about regaining lost levels. We ruled that we would reroll hit dice and that we could pick a different class on levelling up etc. But unfortunately that requires you to keep track of hit and skill points per level. That sucks. Some of the players do it, but it seems such a waste of time.
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The idea of Andy Collins sounds very interesting. Some more thoughts about dying – from death-experienced players point of view. ;)
If you play high level characters, the party has always money enough to resurrect a dead party member. Even though, everybody is afraid to die. And this fear sometimes paralyzes the plot and almost ruins challenging encounters. And sometimes even a brave character _ player almost dies because his party members didn’t fully support him._
In fact, dying of a single character has – from my point of view – only two negative aspects (which are not even really that bad):
1. Loosing XP and therefore, a level. Honestly, the only problem with that is, that the other party members may be “better”, higher level, they are ahead with all the goodies etc. All the discussions and arguments such as “I really love my character”, “I invested a lot of time and energy”, “the last 10 encounters for nothing” etc. are IMO false pretences. I’m sure, everybody had fun with the last 10 encounters, nobody really looses something (except money for resurrection, also see Sektats short comment on Belflin Goes To Arcadia) and, the encounters as 10th level fighters are not much better or challenging than at 8th level.
2. Wasted time – on the on hand for “rebuilding” lower level character. Andy Collins has a very good solution for that. I like it. On the other hand, the party may loose time during the adventure, the story. But, first of all: for the player it is very boring just to watch the story and wait for a cleric. But if he is motivated to do so and the party is willing to carry the dead corpse maybe for days and weeks up to mountains, through deserts etc. the character isn’t lost – no problem at all.
So, why is this fear during encounters? Sure, if the whole party dies, it is something completely different. 😄
Some other thoughts, maybe options to discuss for house rules:
Also note that *Raise Dead* requires a whole body. If a friend is killed and beheaded, for example, you will need a more expensive spell... In the old games, there was a limit to the number of resurrections: Every resurrection cost one permanent Con point. At some point adventuring is just too dangerous and it’s time to settle down and start running an inn or a shop somewhere. 😄
– Alex Schroeder 2008-01-23 23:57 UTC
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or become king! :D
– zeno 2008-01-24 12:53 UTC
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I think the loss of XP is too punitive. When the “party” defeats a monster, everyone present gains XP, regardless of contribution. This makes sense and is as it should be, because (1) contribution to overcoming a challenge or winning a fight is hard to quantify, and (2) D&D is a cooperative game, not a competition. When a character dies, however, it is often a result of bad luck, poor collective play, or simply that character doing his or her job (like the paladin interposing herself between the rest of the party and the balor) and just getting too much of a monster’s attention. The idea of splitting the XP loss burden across the party is intriguing.
But I am a firm believer that XP is not a resource, to be used or lost (whether from level loss or crafting magical items), but rather a tracker of your character’s progress. I like the semi-permanent negative level idea from Andy Collins’s house rules.
I think the hard part should probably be bringing characters back from the dead in the first place, whether through increased cost or level of the spells involved.
– Adrian 2008-01-24 14:12 UTC
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Well, as a GM it’s always hard to say no to a player who had his character die. It’s also often weird if characters died non-heroically at the hands of some random encounter, eg. ghouls or phase spiders. Right then and there, the GM must come up with a suitably intriguing sub-quest, and provide the player with a nice NPC to play in the meantime. It’s easy if everybody has a cohort in the party, but it’s tricky if the party is in a remote desert or somewhere in the Underdark, days away from any help.
– Alex Schroeder 2008-01-24 15:32 UTC
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“Bad things should happen to the characters, not to the player.
A bad thing happening to a player is not playing. A bad thing happening to a character is taking damage, having to overcome a nasty poison or what-you-have. The key thing is to have things that are bad for the character, but they shouldn’t be bad - in a pure “game” sense - to the player.”
This is a quote from a discussion on ENWorld about Stun/Paralysis in 4E. But I think it sums up nicely one of the problems with character death, and why we have to tread carefully with it.
– Adrian 2008-01-24 16:39 UTC