No "death penalty"

For future games, I am considering totally nixing the idea that a player whose character is killed is greatly penalized. To this end, here's some things I am considering to make this happen.

• Party XP instead of player XP. All characters have the same XP, and level at the same time. This will necessitate using something like craft points or Pkitty's action point variant to replace XP costs for spells and magic items.
• Will have to negate level penalty for being recalled from death. There are a few ways I could go about this:
  - Different penalties (action points, quest on character, etc.)
  - Only make available magic that restores life without level loss (revivify, true ressurection)
  - No raising magic. Make a new character at the new level.
• Magic items - as characters have the potential to come into the game frequently, will have to address the problem of magic item influx if full magic items are granted to each character. E.G.:
  - hard limit per player
  - reduced starting magic
  - items linked to characters, so some or many are destroyed when they die and are not raised.

The idea here is anyone can make a new character at any time... and any PC can die at any time.

Anyone do anything similar or have any other ideas to the effect?

How about a party XP bonus for the number of PCs who survive each fight? Like, as though survival were one of the challenges present in each encounter.

So instead of a "death penalty", give PCs a "survival bonus"

Cheers, -- N

Nifft said:

How about a party XP bonus for the number of PCs who survive each fight? Like, as though survival were one of the challenges present in each encounter.

So instead of a "death penalty", give PCs a "survival bonus"

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Hmmm... has potential.

Psion said:

Hmmm... has potential.

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On consideration, it seems like the bonus couldn't be enough to really count as a penalty, if done per-encounter. So instead, make it a survival bonus per story arc.

Only if the number of PC deaths exceeds the number of PCs does the bonus turn into a penalty.

Cheers, -- N

I use a negative level penalty instead - It can't be removed by magic, but disappears with time - ie 3 weeks (based on HR calender signifigance) it could be 1-4 weeks, or even as long as a season.

The penalty also vanishes if the character gains a new level.

Yeah, I always hated this. 2 weeks ago, I had my character die in a surprise round before I even got to roll initiative (finger of death--I needed a 7, rolled a 4...). The crappy part was that, in the same surprise round, the cleric (who had revivify prepared, of course) was paralyzed for 7 rounds or something by the second enemy, so he couldn't bring me back. We were pretty deep inside a dungeon, and our cleric was only 14th level, so no true res.

Honestly, I thought about just letting my character stay dead and making another, especially because as an evoker 5/incantatrix 9 (arcane thesis: scorching ray, metamagic school focus: evocation; no lower than original level metamagic cheese, but still often good for 600+ points of damage with one spell), he just had a huge red "x" painted on his forehead. Every single monster had scryed on us and knew what I could do, everything had ray deflection, etc. Ultimately I came back, but the whole level loss thing just left a bad taste in my mouth, especially because I was essentially railroaded into dying in the first place (it was bound to happen sooner or later, as I was saving versus finger of death in almost every surprise round--probably the third or fourth time I'd died under similar circumstances in a month, actually). Of course, the cleric being paralyzed was random chance, but still... Putting one character a level behind everyone else because of a death that was a load of crap in the first place is an even bigger load of crap, IMO. I mean, I didn't even get a slim chance of acting before I was dead... I was just dead before anything else happened.

I don't really blame the DM--he has to find a way to neutralize or severely limit my character to have any chance at challenging us. However, our group generally encourages powergaming in the first place, and the DM (often a player) is no exception. If a character isn't significantly above the curve, he's going to be outshone by the rest of the party at every turn. Even if the DM decides to hit me with a "save or die" spell, which I accept as a reasonable means of attempting to neutralize a threat which must be neutralized in order for any encounter to go 2 rounds, having him just point at me and basically say, "You lose a level," is pretty frustrating, particularly because I was on the advent of a really big level gain...

Getting rid of the death penalty huh? Sounds like a violation of ENWorld posting guidelines. Seems a bit too political.

Never mind...

I don't fully understand what is the target here.

I see that you want resurrected characters to have no XP penalty, and you're wondering if you should give other penalties or no penalty at all.

But then you also talk about making resurrection more difficult or impossible. Do you want characters to be more or less easy to resurrect? Do you really have to address these 2 questions at the same time, or can you address first the penalty issue and then the resurrection facilities?

About penalties, if we forget about XP, then would you use only temporary penalties as a replacement or would you consider also permanent penalties (only not XP)?

If you use temporary penalties, you can really use anything... Ability damage for example would make it harder for the character to adventure for a while, and so would negative levels. However note that you face a dilemma here: use small penalties, and effectively they won't matter much; use large penalties and the character is likely do die twice in a row.

I actually prefer permanent penalties, such as a permanent decrease in one or more ability scores (random). This is a serious penalty that screams "don't get killed" to the player. It doesn't make the character unplayable even after a few deaths, but when the random decrease affects the PC's primary ability, the player has indeed a price to pay.

Just let us know what really you don't like about the current situation A few weeks ago I was musing about resurrection and what I don't like about it, and I have found out that what I really don't like is the IMAGE of it. The whole idea of saying "ok you're dead, we just get you back" like it's a normal thing is what I dislike. Not the penalties, not the quests or bargains to get someone cast the spells, and not even the fact that a character rarely stays dead. I just hate to trivialize death. So I came up with this: http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=207438 (not really what you're looking for, just to show what happens when I try to think of stuff in a different light ).

Li Shenron said:

I don't fully understand what is the target here.

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To restate:

Me said:

For future games, I am considering totally nixing the idea that a player whose character is killed is greatly penalized.

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Everything else is a "how" to that end, how to bring it about in the game and deal with the consequences.

Li Shenron said:

I see that you want resurrected characters to have no XP penalty, and you're wondering if you should give other penalties or no penalty at all.

But then you also talk about making resurrection more difficult or impossible. Do you want characters to be more or less easy to resurrect? Do you really have to address these 2 questions at the same time, or can you address first the penalty issue and then the resurrection facilities?

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Obviously, the existing resurrection facilities implicitly have a persistent penalty against the character, which is against the intent of the proposed house rule. So I either need to get rid of low level life restoration spells or replace the limitation in some way.

I want:
1) Character death to be less of a pisser to the player.
2) Bringing in new characters to replace the old one to be a viable (but not necessarily preferred) option.

About penalties, if we forget about XP, then would you use only temporary penalties as a replacement or would you consider also permanent penalties (only not XP)?

Click to expand...

That would make raising markedly inferior to bringing in a new character, which is not what I want.

I actually prefer permanent penalties, such as a permanent decrease in one or more ability scores (random). This is a serious penalty that screams "don't get killed" to the player.

Click to expand...

That's sort of directly at odds with what I am after here.

Somewhat like you, I don't want life restoration magic to be the implicit option when someone dies, and think it should be a more rare event. But at the same time, I don't want to penalize players for wanting to bring their character back.

Find me the magic solution that fulfills those goals, I'll be pretty happy.