Irrevocable death? Or do you allow resurrection?
howandwhy99
Adventurer
All new PCs begin at level 1, 0 experience points. So, yeah, I voted Yes on the poll. But there is a significant resource cost associated with this. It's typically beyond the amount available at low levels, that's if the rest of the party attempt to use only the dead PC's goods to pay for the resurrection.
Savvy players, though, can convince other players to pony up some of their own dough "for the good of everyone" in the party. They can certainly get paid back and it's better to have a more powerful PC than a lower one covering one's butt.
Savvy players, though, can convince other players to pony up some of their own dough "for the good of everyone" in the party. They can certainly get paid back and it's better to have a more powerful PC than a lower one covering one's butt.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
I've been kicking around the idea of creating a Viking-themed game world, and setting it in the Heroic Domains of Ysgard (or the Halls of Valhalla, perhaps?) Here, people go forth and live their lives like anywhere else, but those who die honorably in battle are carried home by Valkyries and raised from the dead on the following morning.
The exact definitions of "honorably" and "battle" would be very important, obviously.
At any rate, I think this would be a lot of fun. And I don't think it would break the game all that much...it is pretty much how D&D gets played at higher levels anyway. Even so, this style of game might be best suited to a weekend-long gaming session or a sandbox game, instead of an extended 20-level campaign.
The exact definitions of "honorably" and "battle" would be very important, obviously.
At any rate, I think this would be a lot of fun. And I don't think it would break the game all that much...it is pretty much how D&D gets played at higher levels anyway. Even so, this style of game might be best suited to a weekend-long gaming session or a sandbox game, instead of an extended 20-level campaign.
GrimGent
First Post
As others have said before, it depends entirely on the game. In the last three I've run...
- Changeling: The Lost generally doesn't allow for resurrection, except through very special circumstances such as performing a quest for a dream-god known as the Pale Brother, which the PCs in this case haven't done. (For that matter, they don't even know who the Pale Brother is.)
- Nobilis makes the casual resurrection of mortals rather trivial, but the likes of the PCs are a different matter since they can't be targeted by direct miracles. On the other hand, Nobles can easily enough set up emergency preparations for their eventual demise, immortality isn't exactly hard to come by, and hanging around as a spook after death is always an option.
- Praedor includes no possibility of resurrection, at all. Dead is dead, and no one knows what happens to people when they die, even though various religions of course have their own ideas about that. Superstitious peasants tell stories about ghosts and walking dead, but those are actually extradimensional entities summoned from parallel realities with different physical laws. It's a fantasy setting, but somewhat... well... agnostic.
Man in the Funny Hat
Hero
I look at it and handle in the following ways:
1. There has to be permanent death in a game or else, seemingly in contradiction, it just sucks tons of fun out of it. If there is no REAL risk of permanent death then the impact of most of the roleplaying just gets the legs cut right out from under it.
2. Resurrection magic is and always has been nothing more than an in-game solution to a meta-game issue. It exists in the game solely for intended use by PLAYER characters, not NPC's. However, because the in-game presence of such magic creates additional in-game issues that can be just as much of a fun sponge those issues need to be dealt with as well. This, however, is NOT something you find in the rules, nor even in advice to the DM.
3. Accordingly, any character in game who can obtain the spell can use it on fallen comrades. Like any other spell, if you can find it and afford it you can have it.
4. It will ALWAYS fail to work on NPC's. Well, okay, it's possible it might work in extremely rare cases, but IMC when a character dies you're then in whatever afterlife your PC believed he would find after death. Generally this means you're in something like paradise. Resurrection magic requires a WILLING return of the soul from the afterlife. It may be for entirely meta-game reasons, but the only souls who then willingly return from the afterlife are those of player characters, never NPC's.
5. This all has SIGNIFICANT roleplaying implications for player characters. NPC's WILL NEVER share the kind of attitudes toward death and resurrection that players seem to allow their characters to have. PC's won't necessarily be shunned for these bizzare attitudes, nor for the truly exceptional fact that they HAVE returned from the dead without being UNdead - but they will almost universally be treated DIFFERENTLY as a result. NPC's will always carry feelings of disquiet, even mild distrust of resurrected PC's. PC's who display openly cavalier attitudes about death will certainly be treated as somewhat mad.
6. Even with affordable and available resurrection magic there will always still be a chance of failure of that magic, and of course the normal, listed penalties for successful resurrection are enforced.
7. Even having said all that, I am still considering allowing a one-time "freebie" resurrection to low-level characters whose players are likely to have been unable to do anything about their death. If the magic can be obtained it would then carry standard penalties but would automatically work. Once a character reaches a certain level (4th? 5th? Not sure) or the one-time freebie has been used, then all bets are off.
1. There has to be permanent death in a game or else, seemingly in contradiction, it just sucks tons of fun out of it. If there is no REAL risk of permanent death then the impact of most of the roleplaying just gets the legs cut right out from under it.
2. Resurrection magic is and always has been nothing more than an in-game solution to a meta-game issue. It exists in the game solely for intended use by PLAYER characters, not NPC's. However, because the in-game presence of such magic creates additional in-game issues that can be just as much of a fun sponge those issues need to be dealt with as well. This, however, is NOT something you find in the rules, nor even in advice to the DM.
3. Accordingly, any character in game who can obtain the spell can use it on fallen comrades. Like any other spell, if you can find it and afford it you can have it.
4. It will ALWAYS fail to work on NPC's. Well, okay, it's possible it might work in extremely rare cases, but IMC when a character dies you're then in whatever afterlife your PC believed he would find after death. Generally this means you're in something like paradise. Resurrection magic requires a WILLING return of the soul from the afterlife. It may be for entirely meta-game reasons, but the only souls who then willingly return from the afterlife are those of player characters, never NPC's.
5. This all has SIGNIFICANT roleplaying implications for player characters. NPC's WILL NEVER share the kind of attitudes toward death and resurrection that players seem to allow their characters to have. PC's won't necessarily be shunned for these bizzare attitudes, nor for the truly exceptional fact that they HAVE returned from the dead without being UNdead - but they will almost universally be treated DIFFERENTLY as a result. NPC's will always carry feelings of disquiet, even mild distrust of resurrected PC's. PC's who display openly cavalier attitudes about death will certainly be treated as somewhat mad.
6. Even with affordable and available resurrection magic there will always still be a chance of failure of that magic, and of course the normal, listed penalties for successful resurrection are enforced.
7. Even having said all that, I am still considering allowing a one-time "freebie" resurrection to low-level characters whose players are likely to have been unable to do anything about their death. If the magic can be obtained it would then carry standard penalties but would automatically work. Once a character reaches a certain level (4th? 5th? Not sure) or the one-time freebie has been used, then all bets are off.
GrimGent
First Post
Well, even in some sword-and-sorcery hack-and-slash campaign, death is far from the only meaningful negative consequence for failure; but several comedy games such as Toon and Teenagers From Outer Space go further than that and specifically leave it out altogether as something that simply doesn't fit in with the source material and the intended mood. This doesn't mean that there can't be outcomes which in practice eliminate PCs from play as permanently as dying would, however: for example, in Maid the characters may lose their jobs if their Favour score falls to zero.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
I agree, to a certain extent. Risk assessment is a big part of strategy, so the DM needs to retain a certain amount of risk in order to make challenges, um, challenging.
But on the other hand...in D&D, there are so many more horrible things than death.
