D&D 5E What to do when Pc's die? What then for that player?

[miniaturehoarder]

As to it being punishment to make the player have a character lower level than other PC's, in my experience four times out of five, it is the other players being too cheap to resurrect the dead character or the player being too impatient to wait for their allies to raise the character.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Rather than always have a prisoner chained to a wall, I scour my brain for replacements for that character that may be at hand.

For instance - one of my characters had a familiar, nearly died from being drained by a shadow and then did die from being unwillingly exposed to a beam of evil energy.

Out of that, I offered him: playing on as his familiar, coming back as a shadow creature or playing a golem that would be showing up shortly. He picked his familiar.

I never de-level people, and I've yet to see someone who feels 'meh' when their character dies.

 

[Talmek]

For our group the standard was agreed upon prior to beginning the campaign, and as we are all (relatively) experienced players this was a topic that everyone unfortunately was familiar with.

As it stands currently the first PC death is "free", meaning that if the rest of the party is unable to resurrect the deceased then the player may re-roll another character without penalty. HOWEVER - said player must return with a unique character rather than a photo-copy of the deceased.

All subsequent deaths by the same player causes cumulative losses in level relevant to the average party level. For instance -

1st Death - Free (Unique re-roll required)
2nd Death - Average party level -1
3rd Death - Average party level -2

And so on...

I have found that this solution (again, agreed upon by all party members prior to beginning the campaign) shoves the PC into caring about the consequences of their decisions, especially as the campaign progresses and those deaths begin to add up!

 

[Mouseferatu]

As always, play how you like, YMMV, there's no badwrongfun, etc. etc.

But IME and IMO, if a player requires mechanical penalties to "force" them to care about the consequences of their actions, something's already gone wrong. Players should care about the consequences because they're RPing a character who cares about the consequences, whether or not there are any numerical modifiers involved.

 

[aramis erak]

As always, play how you like, YMMV, there's no badwrongfun, etc. etc.

But IME and IMO, if a player requires mechanical penalties to "force" them to care about the consequences of their actions, something's already gone wrong. Players should care about the consequences because they're RPing a character who cares about the consequences, whether or not there are any numerical modifiers involved.

That has an issue, tho' - not everyone playing D&D or other RPGs does so to roleplay. For some, it's a character scale wargame. For others, it's about story. For others still, both. And for a few, it's just a social activity, with no investment into the characters.

Mechanical reward for playing in character is for situations where some of the group are into the roleplay, but a few are into the boardgame aspect, and they can be trained to RP by mechanical rewards. Sometimes, they even come to enjoy RP for RP sake.

 

[Mouseferatu]

My group is very story-intensive (as opposed to deep RP), and I still feel that the death of a character is its own consequence, as part of said story.

As far as the character-scale war-gamers... Well, that's why I included the disclaimer. Nothing wrong with people who want to play it that way, but they're not going to have a good time at my table, or vice-versa; this is just one of many examples of why.

 

[Talmek]

That has an issue, tho' - not everyone playing D&D or other RPGs does so to roleplay. For some, it's a character scale wargame. For others, it's about story. For others still, both. And for a few, it's just a social activity, with no investment into the characters.

Mechanical reward for playing in character is for situations where some of the group are into the roleplay, but a few are into the boardgame aspect, and they can be trained to RP by mechanical rewards. Sometimes, they even come to enjoy RP for RP sake.

So, in our group this is the case for one, perhaps 2 of my players. Something that did go wrong, causing this apathy where character survival was concerned was a lack of agreement regarding playable classes. This was (most likely) my fault since I would not guarantee that magical healing potions, etc would be available in the event no one played a class with at least some healing abilities.

Could I have just dropped healing potions on every encounter? Yes, but why would I when I get to watch grown men argue about being Player 2 (healbot)?!

I will not kill the challenge of a campaign simply to prevent a loss of a party member. These are the risks that were all agreed upon walking in

Candy land is an option... (Or someone else could DM!)

Note: 99% of this post is jest. I'll let you decide where the 1% remainder is.

 

[Lanefan]

For our group the standard was agreed upon prior to beginning the campaign, and as we are all (relatively) experienced players this was a topic that everyone unfortunately was familiar with.

As it stands currently the first PC death is "free", meaning that if the rest of the party is unable to resurrect the deceased then the player may re-roll another character without penalty. HOWEVER - said player must return with a unique character rather than a photo-copy of the deceased.

All subsequent deaths by the same player causes cumulative losses in level relevant to the average party level. For instance -

1st Death - Free (Unique re-roll required)
2nd Death - Average party level -1
3rd Death - Average party level -2

And so on...

I have found that this solution (again, agreed upon by all party members prior to beginning the campaign) shoves the PC into caring about the consequences of their decisions, especially as the campaign progresses and those deaths begin to add up!

A few questions:

1. Do you mean unrevived deaths where a new character is required, or any death whether revived or not?

2. How do you handle retirements, whether by player choice or not? For example, if player A decides to retire her 9th-level Fighter and at the same time player B's 9th-level Cleric gets captured by the enemy, do these instances each get treated the same as a perma-death? IME these sort of things generate as much character turnover as perma-deaths once the party has decent access to revival capabilities and can afford such.

Lan-"the answer, of course, is to always play two characters at a time"-efan

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

That has an issue, tho' - not everyone playing D&D or other RPGs does so to roleplay. For some, it's a character scale wargame. For others, it's about story. For others still, both. And for a few, it's just a social activity, with no investment into the characters.

Mechanical reward for playing in character is for situations where some of the group are into the roleplay, but a few are into the boardgame aspect, and they can be trained to RP by mechanical rewards. Sometimes, they even come to enjoy RP for RP sake.

Yeah our group is very gamist if that is the word, not quite wargame on character scale but we aren't trying to have theater night. So when PC die they lament them for a bit cursing their luck, bad decisions, or me for being the DM that killed them, then get out the dice and start rolling a new one. Everyone is fine with losing a level or starting at level 1 again. We are lucky to all be on the same page when it comes to playing D&D.

 

[airwalkrr]

When PCs die they are dead and they stay dead (unless someone is generous enough to pay for a raise dead). You have to start again at 1st level. 5e really caters to this old school play style and I love it.

The way I run my current Pathfinder campaign (since I haven't been able to get a 5e group together yet) however necessitates a slightly different approach because the system isn't exactly designed with that flexibility in mind. Because I still insist on the "experience must be earned" philosophy, all new characters must start at 1st-level, but my players are encouraged to have multiple characters, so that a new one can step in should one die. I run adventures that take 3-6 sessions and they rotate their characters around for each adventure, occasionally introducing new ones to the group (often relegated to back-seat duties until they are at least 2nd or 3rd level). Each player has built a "stable" of 3-5 characters now so that a character death isn't a tragic loss that causes a setback for the whole campaign. I've told them that I would prefer to start playing 5e later this year after wrapping up the present storyline, and my players actually requested this feature of having multiple characters in the new campaign, so it has proven popular.

In order to keep things more on the level and not overwhelm lower-level PCs, I do try to make encounters with super-powered monsters that can kill a 1st-level PC rare. Far more often I use large numbers of smaller enemies when spending my XP budget.