D&D 5E Looking for some resurrection rules

[Nick Hatfield]

I want to make death a more meaningful aspect in my game. I was thinking of making resurrection a skill challenge, with higher level spells providing easier DCs. Does anyone have homebrew rules that they like that addresses this topic?

 

[Wulffolk]

A few ways to address this:

Diamonds are not sold by every merchant the players run across, especially the larger diamonds. You can make it more difficult to acquire diamonds, or at least less likely for players to hoard enough to always be able to resurrect character's at will.

Part of the formula is that the spirit must be able and willing to return to the body. Did the deceased move on to the afterlife that they expected as a reward for how they lived their life? Is the entity that controls that afterlife willing to allows the spirit to return? Are there other reasons or obstacles that might get in the way? Is there a purpose that the spirit must return to accomplish?

I tend to favor permanent death solutions. I think that Raise Dead and Resurrection are taken too lightly. Reincarnation is a problem for me as well. The spirit may be allowed to be reincarnated into a new form, but that form should not be fully grown and ready to go. The spirit should have to grow up in a newly born body and potentially be a character for a future story.

 

[Charlaquin]

Matt Mercer’s resurrection rules he used on Critical Role and in his Tal’Dore campaign setting sound like exactly the sort of thing you’re looking for. Might be worth checking out.

Personally, I just heavily restrict the availability of diamonds, since all resurrection spells have expensive diamonds as material components. In a world where large diamonds are essentially 1-ups, it makes sense that their trade would be heavily regulated. In my campaign, it’s completely under the control of the church of the Raven Queen, so diamonds can only be bought from Raven Priests (and they usually want more than just money), or sometimes at huge markups on the black market. Basically, one way or another, resurrecting someone is either going to lead to a side-quest, or consume the reward you got from a previous side-quest.

 

[jaelis]

Bear in mind that a conjurer can create a diamond at will... if you don't want that to work as a component, best let the player know

 

[Phineas Q. Conundrum]

A few ways to address this:

Diamonds are not sold by every merchant the players run across, especially the larger diamonds. You can make it more difficult to acquire diamonds, or at least less likely for players to hoard enough to always be able to resurrect character's at will.

Part of the formula is that the spirit must be able and willing to return to the body. Did the deceased move on to the afterlife that they expected as a reward for how they lived their life? Is the entity that controls that afterlife willing to allows the spirit to return? Are there other reasons or obstacles that might get in the way? Is there a purpose that the spirit must return to accomplish?

I tend to favor permanent death solutions. I think that Raise Dead and Resurrection are taken too lightly. Reincarnation is a problem for me as well. The spirit may be allowed to be reincarnated into a new form, but that form should not be fully grown and ready to go. The spirit should have to grow up in a newly born body and potentially be a character for a future story.

All good things. I'm not sure if I would change the spells mechanics-wise, but I think some ways to make death a little but more meaningful are to really dig into the implications of being resurrected. I would make revival spells give the character a complete mental shuffling. Even if the soul is willing, the character will have gone through a traumatic experience. They have a very different personality after encountering death. I would say it gets worse the longer they've been dead; an instant revivify is likely to make the character confused until a short rest, while a resurrection after 99 years of death might cause them to go ballistic on the party members they no longer recognize, or to lie in an unresponsive stupor for months.

On the homebrew rules topic, having a DC that increases each time a character is resurrected is a popular way to make players weight their decisions more carefully. If you want a more realistic aesthetic where death is usually irreversible, you could make it so that spell scrolls for resurrection spells are very rare, or they have a very high chance of failure or the above consequences.

 

[Charlaquin]

Bear in mind that a conjurer can create a diamond at will... if you don't want that to work as a component, best let the player know

What, with the Minor Conjuration Subclass Feature? Yeah, I don't allow that to replace expensive material components for any spells. It's not a true example of the object it imitates, given that it's obviously magical and disappears after a short time. Likewise, I wouldn't allow players to pay for goods or services with a platinum piece created with Minor Conjuration, because it's obviously magical and the NPC isn't going to accept fishy coins.

 

[Oofta]

My campaign uses a tweaked version of the Norse mythology where even a god (Baldur) can die, so getting raised from the dead is not always an option.

In my cosmology when someone dies their soul goes through the Nifleheim (shadowfell) on their way to their final destination. Once they get to Valhalla/Helheim or whatever their destination is it's difficult if not impossible to retrieve them.

So, if someone wants to come back from the dead, they have to hang out in Nifleheim and delay their departure. Problem with that is that as they stay in Nifleheim their soul slowly "evaporates" eventually leaving behind a shell of their previous self in the form of a ghost or shadow. So the longer they linger the less and less they remember of their previous lives until eventually there is little left.

So how does this play out in game? Well, people that die and don't make their way to their final resting place risk becoming ghosts. In addition, raise dead merely sends the souls of the caster (and willing allies) to Nifleheim to retrieve the soul of the dead person while their physical bodies appear to be in a coma. It becomes a mini-adventure to retrieve them and may include trying to persuade the soul to return, etc. Other beings might try to stop the PCs, not to mention the possibility that they may bring back a necromantic parasite or two. Oh, and there's always the possibility of an old foe or two showing up as well of course.

While raise dead means retrieving the soul from Nifleheim, resurrection would require basically breaking in to and escaping Hel's domain (or Valhalla). Breaking out a mortal might be possible because there's less attention paid to them than a god, but nobody's ever attempted it.

Revivify works like normal because the soul hasn't had time to fully transition into Nifleheim.

 

[iserith]

I want to make death a more meaningful aspect in my game.

What do you mean by "meaningful?"

What actual problem in the play experience are we trying to solve?

Have you recently had a character death in your game that was an issue?

 

[jasper]

Use something similar to the old 1E. Loss of a con pt per every time you come back. You have to save on a con saving throw. Nice DC 5. Not nice dc 10. etc. Disadvantage if you been dead once.
Hmm Raise Dead DC 15? and go down from there with higher level spells.

 

[Rotipher]

(Sorry to be responding so late, didn't see this thread before.)

One method I've experimented with, that might work if your players aren't too "hack & slash", is to treat any attempt to resurrect someone as a role-play challenge. Rather than just chanting over a corpse or whatever, the character who's performing the resurrection rite would psychically visit the Land of the Dead, where they would serve as an advocate for the dead person in a confrontation with my campaign-setting's embodiment of Death (the Hound). The challenge would be for the priest's player and the player of the dead character to come up with a reason why the deceased's death wasn't an appropriate closure to their particular life - not pragmatic reasons like "the adventure's not over" or "the party needs them", but something personal and consistent with their personality - by which to justify their being granted another chance to get their death "right". In-character, it's an appeal to the Hound's sense of aesthetics, that people should die in keeping with their principles or lack thereof; out-of-character, it's a reward to players who've gone deeply enough into their characters' personalities to come up with a good argument.

It's not exactly making resurrection any harder - the Hound is a reasonable sort, if spooky, and I never actually refused anyone's restoration so long as they at least made an effort to argue their case - but it'll make the players take a character's death more seriously if they know they'll have to essentially win a debate in order to get their PC back.