Bring out your dead.

[Darklone]

Raising the dead is an ordeal IMC. It was done once ... and only because I abused it to add more flavor to a sidestory.

Usually it's "Roll up a new char with half the groups average XPs".

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

It depends on what the rest of the party decides to do with the body. Raising the dead can be expensive; sometimes you need to feed the corpse to a roper to get out of some other entanglement.

 

[Eccles]

With my lot, you lose a level for a replacement character, the same as if you'd had a raise dead spell.

The extra XP is calculated, so if you were halfway to 10th level, you'd come back roughly halfway to 9th.

Mind you, it's a "previous level -1 or party average -1, whichever is the higher" deal, so sometimes dying can actually be beneficial!

They get less EQ than the book says, to counter the stockpiling factor.

And really cool deaths wouldn't be penalised as much. (Self sacrifice needs to be rewarded, even if I've not seen any yet!)

Oh, and retired characters are replaced at the same level, with full EQ.

I think that answers the question.

 

[Goobermunch]

When PCs in my campaign die, they come back as ghosts about 10 minutes later. Then it's up to them to decide what their going to do before they succumb to the Calling and are pulled into the True Afterlife.

Then again, I'm running a Ghostwalk game.

--G

 

[Zappo]

Generally, characters can get raised, but they have to get their hands on a raise dead somehow, which isn't always easy. Also, often players decide that their character doesn't want to be raised, and roll up a new one instead.

For new PCs, we've tried lots of different things. Imposing severe XP penalties in comparison to raising doesn't seem entirely fair, so generally people get raised one level below what they were. However, I want to encourage people to maintain their characters, for sake of the story, so people who make a new character start at the beginning of the appropriate level, while people who get raised drop to midway.

For items, typically, signature items are returned to the family/buried with the corpse/donated/whatever, but minor items are often kept. People don't die so often that this causes inflation.

 

[Datt]

In the main campaign I play in you can get ressed if you have the gods favor. If not then you make a new character one level below the lowest level in the party and have 85% of the gold for that level to otufit yourself.

 

[Morrus]

I always find it important to ensure that death does not benefit the player (or the party). So a new character at the same level with a whole new loadout of quipment and magical items basically means the party just got thousands of GP worth of stuff for free.

A sensible party should budget accordingly, so that they have some stuff (which they actually earned) to give to the player's new PC, or some money to give him to spend on stuff. That way, the death still costs the party something and is generally viewed as a disadvantageous thing.

 

[S'mon]

IMC raised PCs are by-the-book.

I have some complicated guidelines for what level new PCs start at, eg:

1. They always start with at least half the XP of the previous PC
2. There's a minimum starting level, which is no more than 3 levels below the highest current PC.
3. Generally in my current game the new PC gets to start at at least the same level the previous PC started at. Currently some (perfectly decent) players have been losing a PC every week for several weeks, so it seems only fair.
4. New PCs should not start at higher levels than the lowest-level current PC. In conjunction with (2), this has once caused me to raise the level of the lowest-level existing PC when a new one came in.

Currently IMC the starting PC level is 11th, up from 9th about 9 months ago. The highest current PCs are 13th. We had 3 PC deaths last week (killer DM, yeah yeah) , the group currently has by my count 4 11th level & 3 13th level PCs.

 

[S'mon]

Re starting gear, I used to give new PC wealth-by-monster-CR (ie very little), but have just started giving them wealth as NPCs of their level. Most enemies IMC are NPCs so they have plenty of opportunity to garner more wealth if they do well.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

I always find it important to ensure that death does not benefit the player (or the party).

That strikes me as just right... otherwise it will turn into who can die the fastest!

Kind of like:

I used to play in a DMs game who pretty much killed a PC a week. Since we knew that was his goal, we'd roll up characters are load them with one or two big budget magic items and let him get killed. The magic items would go back into the party, then someone else would die the next weak. We managed to stockpile quite a large sum of items before the DM started to catch on, then we stopped.

That's quite funny.

Was there a shopping list involved at any point?

19 more vorpal katanas and I can get that small kingdom I always wanted?