Your character died, now what?

[FalcWP]

Well, first there was the burning. Then there was the smoldering. And then there was the cursing (mostly good-natured) about my corpse being looted. Which led rather directly to the rest of the party getting drunk, under the guise of mourning my death.

And the next day they found a new adventurer at the tavern, and everyone lived happily ever after until the next fireball.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I usually give my players an option: Either the old character's belongings get sent to his next of kin, buried with him, etc. in which case the new PC comes in with an appropriate amount of wealth, or the old PC gets looted, and the new PC comes in with the bare minimum of equipment. Peer pressure is the determiner for whether someone comes in with nothing or not.

Totally gamist, I suppose, but it keeps the group wealth about the same and makes a point not to screw over your fellow players by being greedy and taking advantage of the DM.

Some might say it's unfair, but by the same token there's nothing to stop players from "mining" new PCs to get a few extra thousand GPs worth of equipment because someone got tired of their old character.

A similar system developed in our campaigns. What sometimes happened was that the PC's got to loot the dead guy and the new PC got to join fully equipped. The amount of magical loot in the game would boost a bit but it was easy to keep in check on the DM end. New items just became more rare and less powerful for a while until things balanced out. This worked out as the best solution for those times when a fighter was replaced with a wizard or something of that sort.

 

[justanobody]

Wait, so would the new character be fully equipped and the party kept the old gear, or the new character was equipped with the old gear....OR the party traded up with the corpse gear, and gave the new character their leftovers?

Pick any number of the following that apply

• Party keeps old gear
• New character is fully equipped as normal with his own gear
• New character gets the old gear

 

[Obryn]

I usually give my players an option: Either the old character's belongings get sent to his next of kin, buried with him, etc. in which case the new PC comes in with an appropriate amount of wealth, or the old PC gets looted, and the new PC comes in with the bare minimum of equipment. Peer pressure is the determiner for whether someone comes in with nothing or not.

Totally gamist, I suppose, but it keeps the group wealth about the same and makes a point not to screw over your fellow players by being greedy and taking advantage of the DM.

Some might say it's unfair, but by the same token there's nothing to stop players from "mining" new PCs to get a few extra thousand GPs worth of equipment because someone got tired of their old character.

That is exactly what I do in my games. I started it back when I was running Arcana Evolved a few years back. "Loot the corpse, and the next guy has almost nothing!"

-O

 

[Rechan]

I usually give my players an option: Either the old character's belongings get sent to his next of kin, buried with him, etc. in which case the new PC comes in with an appropriate amount of wealth, or the old PC gets looted, and the new PC comes in with the bare minimum of equipment. Peer pressure is the determiner for whether someone comes in with nothing or not.

Actually, a thought occurs to me.

"Loot the dead PC. Then, send an equal amount of magical items we need less of." If the dead PC's +2 flaming sword is more appealing to the Fighter than the fighter's +3 sword, he just sends the +3 while keeping the +2 Flaming.

The pool of items stay the same for the group (so to speak), but they still get first pick of the PC's items, if there's anything anyone really wanted.

 

[knightofround]

As a player, I usually let dead dogs lie, unless the dead character is central to the plot. D&D isn't very fun to me unless there's a real danger of you losing a character you care alot about. I hate playing in games where DMs pull punches so every player plays 1 PC from campaign start to finish.

Usually what I do is plan backup characters in advance. Either family, guild-mates, former rivals/allies/whatever. I hand these characters over to the DM ahead of time, so they can introduce these characters as NPCs ahead of time if they like...and I update their character sheets during playing downtime.

As a DM when a PC dies, if the PCs can recover the body I don't think its out-of-line to let them keep the loot. I don't see it much different than taking your dead buddy's rifle because your current one is out of ammo. If your dead buddy's sword is a family heirloom it might be different.

As far as ingame treasure balance goes, there's plenty of cooler ways to go about adjusting it -- thieves, market prices, decay, etc. The DM-fiat is lame, and the "nekid high level PC" gets old after one or two uses.

As a side note, in one of the campaigns I was running, a mid-level rogue PC died. The other PCs didn't care for her very much, so they fully looted the body and passed around the stuff. They didn't even bother informing her kin that she died. She was resurrected an in-game year later by her brother (who became an adventurer himself to find her) and together they tracked down the group, and robbed *them* blind. =P I had to adjust encounter stats downward for a good 5-6 sessions (it was RttToEE) until they were able to get back up to their proper treasure level.

 

[Rechan]

I will say that, as a DM, I'm also fairly against resurrection, except in one case:

The PCs go into the land of the dead to get their comrad back.

This is an adventure I would enjoy running.

 

[justanobody]

Return to ToEE....!!!

Well that surely sounds a lot like me.

My character dies, I start rolling a new one. If I get lucky and my party brings it back then I already have the spare, otherwise I prepare to use the new character.

Never even bothering with family members are that would be metagaming to use the corpse gear. Family members may turn up, but they were always broke to begin with when I use them and the gear is just junk that you will find more of.

As a DM when a PC dies, I don't do anything. The players know how to look for a temple or such if they want services of either kind. They also know how to bring back the character themself.

I present the players with series of challenges for them to overcome during the course of an adventure, and if they take a wrong step along the way to cause death, then I do not interfere.

Likewise for PvP when it is not disruptive. Kill each other if it can be explained the reasons behind it. Then what results happen inside the player group are left up to them. I just make sure the PvP was done and went off fairly as though I were watching over my own monsters fight the PCs.

I have had many characters die, and sadly less comrade PCs die. There are tons of things I do when dead or have a dead comrade.

Speak with dead is a favorite for my group to see what kind of deal the corpse wants to make to come back and a contract written up. Most of the adventurers take place under contracts anyway so all things are nice and legal.

This could even include the return to life for fallen party members as part of the payment or expense account for quests/missions.

Of course death may be reversible in this case, but not being able to participate is annoying, and the lack of gaining anything in or for the character are annoying, but I made the mistake and died.

I recall no time when I ever had the choice to freely have a character come back outside of a contract. Some contracts were not reached and so the character died. Others had heavy costs including loss of all treasure for the mission, in addition to raising fees. Once even had to be a personal servant for a month to each other party member.

So many fun things happen when you die it is always exiting to get to play a new character, or continue with the last one. It is always interesting most to see what the party wishes to do when your character dies. How much value did they put on the character to want it to return to the party, or even need something else in its place. When fights break out over your corpse its funny.

So for me a character dying is about as much fun as when he is alive, but I prefer to not let my character die in the first place to not slow down the story to spotlight my character over the rest of the party and the adventure. But it still happens.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Wait, so would the new character be fully equipped and the party kept the old gear, or the new character was equipped with the old gear....OR the party traded up with the corpse gear, and gave the new character their leftovers?


Pick any number of the following that apply

• Party keeps old gear
• New character is fully equipped as normal with his own gear
• New character gets the old gear

In the situation I described in my first post it would be a,b, and possibly c.

The balancing out would come into play going into the future after this event. I would determine how much magical loot could be in play at the party's given level. The more loot that was kept from fallen PC's the less there would be available as new treasure until the amount of total loot was increased (higher level PC's). This way if players want to farm dead PC's for loot they were free to do so. Eventually a point will be reached when the number of magical goodies doesn't matter, but the quality and power level does. At that point the low powered loot needs to be ditched or the party can continue on with a large collection of +1 type items with little hope of gaining anything more powerful for quite a while.

 

[justanobody]

Ah OK.

I would be happy to be trodden with a new PC with a bunch of +1 weapons. They would be turned into whatever I wanted rather than what the old character had. Wouldn't be too long before I was able to even it out with a new PC in my hands.