azmodean said:
Concerning the large hassle of having an adventure just to have someone brought back to life, there is a very simple alternative, making a new character. It's not like a player of a dead character is penalized in any way aside from losing the character, they are still free to play their other characters and to make a new character to replace the old one. I wouldn't be opposed to allowing said player to play a new character specifically created for the purpose of a ressurection quest who is retired when the original character returns from the dead(keeping the items/wealth of the two characters seperate of course).
Did you ever say a mouthful there.
First, I disagree that there is no player penalty when a character dies. The planning and development of that character is essentially lost. The player is left with the possibility of either regenerating the
same character with a different name, which is somewhat less than appealing, or abandoning what might have been a promising character concept, one the player was interested in exploring.
Also, if there is sufficient mortality in a setting, and if res is sufficiently hard enough to find, that effectively acts as a level cap to the setting. Anyone who played 1st edition with DMs who scrupulously followed Gary Gygax's rules for risk vs. reward probably remembers rolling up a
lot of new characters. And, while playing low level characters can be fun, a steady diet of it gets monotonous. Living ENWorld has been around for almost 2 years, and there are still fewer 5th level characters than you have fingers on one hand. If we couple slow advancement with difficult resurrection, then eventually Living ENWorld
will be a character-dominated world...by the few lucky characters who make it to high level!
Now, you do have an interesting idea, that of allowing a "resurrection" character. It does get the burden of doing the res off of the players who's characters didn't die. But I'd think we'd need a bunch of rules for rolling up that character and making sure it had the resources available for the res.
I'd also like to introduce the concept of goodwill. It's hard to imagine a group of good-aligned characters who had the resources failing to revive a good-aligned fellow adventurer who had fallen defending them bravely. Likewise, it's hard to imagine a band of orcs going to any great trouble to revive a slain member of their troop. I'd expect both party dynamics and available (or likely) resources would play heavily into any res decisions, quite independently of the fallen character. In that sense, getting a free res would be the reward for playing a character well right up to the end (presuming that wasn't a well played
evil character), and sitting out the adventure in which your character was raised would be the penalty for dying in the first place. Intrinsically, that seems fairer to me. What would be in it for the party? Well, would Thorax the Ranger ever want to adventure with Cephalapod the Paladin again? If he does, he'd better drag Ceph's dead butt to one of Spires, or else forego that planned trip to the planes while instead spending a few "easy" adventures bringing Newbie the Bard up to a level where Newbie can survive the challenge. That's the tradeoff.
If I'm not being clear, let me finish by saying that I think that death needs to be rare but not too rare, and resurrection likewise. If our characters never face a challenge, then we need to leave munchkin land, and if they're dropping like flies, then there's not much point in developing a character. And if res is too easy, ENWorld becomes just another MMORG, only without the fancy graphics. My vote is for somewhere between all the extremes.
