Dealing with death and resurrection

[Quartz]

In this thread, criticisms are made of the game effects of death and resurrection.

One suggestion is here, but the negative level concept seems to detract more from the fun of the game. Plus it can remove a spellcaster's highest level spell, often critical in lower level games.

I was mulling this over and would like your thoughts on this: the character doesn't lose a level but gains a virtual LA. How great this would be and long this would last would depend on your game, but +1 LA for 2 levels seems pretty stiff to me.

 

[smootrk]

I tend to bring back folks at the same level, although they do so at the lowest amount of xp possible for the level. Hasn't happened yet, but if someone dies twice in rapid sucession, then I would likely apply a xp penalty that they would have to work through before gaining new levels....

... but at least the character does not increasingly become a burden to the party by returning at a lower level.

There should be a mechanism for penalizing a death, but to come back less effective seems counter-intuitive.

 

[Hawken]

Penalizing a character by level loss or Con loss does not encourage players wanting to use Raise Dead. Why the heck would I want to bring back a character progressively weaker? That's not encouragement, it's the opposite. 5th level spells are capable of instant kills (without penalizing anyone), why not instant life (without penalizing)?

Then, there's the argument, "if you want the character back bad enough, you'll take the penalty". True, but why bother? If existing characters cannot get through an encounter, the DM would have to be either crazy or stupid to think that weaker characters could succeed instead.

Instead of level loss or Con loss, I think taking a cue from Everquest II might not be such a bad idea: Experience debt. No level loss, no Con loss. The character comes back as powerful as before (albeit at 1hp per Raise Dead), but has an XP debt to pay off before he can gain anymore XP. I would suggest 10% of the minimum XP needed for their character level. All XP the character gains after being brought back goes toward paying off that XP debt. Once that is covered, then he can resume gaining XP normally.

 

[Thurbane]

Removing penalties from Raise altogether leads to a "videogame mentality" of "Oh, I've died - quick, reload from the autosave point"...

[Of course, that's just an opinion ]

 

[Quartz]

I was mulling this over and would like your thoughts on this: the character doesn't lose a level but gains a virtual LA. How great this would be and long this would last would depend on your game, but +1 LA for 2 levels seems pretty stiff to me.

That would be a LA for the purposes of calculating XP only. So the other characters would advance faster.