Death and the Fixing of It

[Numion]

I've noticed that it's usually the DMs that think resurrections are easy on the players. Players, on the other hand, are usually quite devastated or at least pissed off when their characters have to be resurrected.

You should just step back and weight if making resurrections difficult adds anything to your game. Resurrections allow a player to play their favourite character for longer. If thats what they like to play, whats the harm? Dying still hurts, but it doesn't have to be the end. FWIW at least my players tend to make a new character after two resurrections at the lates, so it's not like it would become a VIDEO GAME.

 

[Bigwilly]

I'm with him

One of the things I like about RPGs is players getting attached to their characters. I like it when I'm a player, and I like it when I'm a GM. Raise dead and similar effects help to encourage that kind of play, I think.

Especially as we don't get together that often to play, I like it that my character develops over the course of a campaign. I do agree that raise dead shouldn't be taken lightly or be necessarily easy to get. A good example is one of the dwarf PCs in my campaign who still gets a hard time from the other dwarf in the party for spending 6 months in the local city cavalry in exchange for a restoration. This sort of character history is something that only comes from the same group playing together for a good long while and just wouldn't happen if these characters had died off and couldn't be raised.

Of course high level characters who have access to these spells themselves, makes things tougher for the DM and can lead to the party cleric having raise dead memorised every day or praying for it the day after a fellow character has fallen in battle. But at these levels, the characters are already getting to be serious movers and shakers in a normal campaign world.

Bigwilly

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

Both of these points are subjective. That is, while any fantasy setting is guaranteed to have other-worldly residents and events, the scale of how much and of what sort varies widely from table to table.

Agreed. And that's why you'll see that I used enough "I think"s and "I like"s and "I'm starting to feel"s to indicate that I was stating an opinion and not writing my manifesto declaring that your crimes against roleplaying must be punished.

In our group, high character mortality plus low chance of character resurrection eventually equals shallow, disposable characters. It's just how things end up working out for us. And since we don't really like shallow, disposable characters (they don't fit in with the kind of gaming we like to do), we tend to either keep character mortality low or, in the case of game systems like D&D where it's pretty easy to die, we tend to not put additional obstacles in the way of resurrection.

Having lost a few characters in my time, I've never viewed the situation as being "punished". I've most often had other things to do. One resourceful GM actually had me in the spirit world for nearly three sessions, where I actually interacted with ancestors, hero spirits, and other entities. Other times, I've been creating my new character while the party continued on their way.

Anyone feeling "punished" simply didn't keep busy during the interim of his return to the game.

The times that someone's character has died, they do keep busy. But they're not busy gaming with the rest of us, so they're not busy doing the one thing that they specifically came to do that night, and that sucks. We want to game as a group, we want to have the PCs interact with each other and with the gameworld, and so we're not all that enthusiastic about changing the rules to make it more difficult for that to happen.

It's probably also why we don't spend a lot of time playing games where character death is easy and common, or games where combat is particularly emphasized. There are lots of risks characters can face that fall short of death (and lots that are worse than death), so you can have all the fun of a high-intensity, high-stakes game without having to deal with creating new characters all the time or trying to come up with some overarching philosophy of resurrection. Most of the time, our PCs are motivated far more by fear of failure than they are by fear of death.


Besides, I'm having a little cognitive dissonance here: when you say that "the intensity of the game" suffers when the risk of PC death is "simply a minor setback," then follow it up with "I never viewed the situation as being 'punished,'" I begin to think that we're both very lucky to not be playing in the same group. If death is a major setback, a risk that seriously increases the game's intensity, then...uh...isn't it something you don't want to happen? That makes it hard for me to see how it's not a punishment. It's certainly not a GOOD thing. I can't imagine you deliberately letting your PC die just so you can spend the rest of your evening working on a new character while everyone else plays.

Not that either of us want to start a pointless argument about that, of course. I'm just puzzled by it.

--
but i'm totally okay with being puzzled, it's kind of fun

 

[green slime]

Not only DM's but players can get frustrated over other players, regarding ressurections.

Instead of getting on with the adventure, with the player sitting in the sidelines rolling up a new character, or allowing their dear character to be merely raised from the dead on the spot, or otherwise contributing positively to the game, a whining session starts up, with demands that the other characters should go out of their way to obtain a true ressurection, rather than an ordinary raise dead. In the middle of the incursion into the "dungeon", without consideration that the enemy will be even better prepared, next time, without consideration for the versimilitude of the characters behaviour, or the obvious annoyance to the other players (it is their gaming time which instead of resolving the threat at hand, gets dissolved into a search for someone capable of casting the correct ressurection).

Which wasn't available, anyway. Some people think that because a 9th level spell was once available, that it should always be available.

Personally I detest them from a story point of view, whether from player or DM perspective. Dead is dead.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

This thread and the thread with the identical subject and starting post in "House Rules" should probably be merged.

(I saw the thread in "General Discussion" and damned near declared myself prematurely senile because I knew I'd posted to the thread, but my post wasn't there. Turns out I posted to the version of the thread in "House Rules," of course.)

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

Not only DM's but players can get frustrated over other players, regarding ressurections.

Instead of getting on with the adventure, with the player sitting in the sidelines rolling up a new character, or allowing their dear character to be merely raised from the dead on the spot, or otherwise contributing positively to the game, a whining session starts up, with demands that the other characters should go out of their way to obtain a true ressurection, rather than an ordinary raise dead. In the middle of the incursion into the "dungeon", without consideration that the enemy will be even better prepared, next time, without consideration for the versimilitude of the characters behaviour, or the obvious annoyance to the other players (it is their gaming time which instead of resolving the threat at hand, gets dissolved into a search for someone capable of casting the correct ressurection).

Which wasn't available, anyway. Some people think that because a 9th level spell was once available, that it should always be available.

Personally I detest them from a story point of view, whether from player or DM perspective. Dead is dead.

Sounds horribly frustrating!

From the way you've told it, it seems to me more like an issue with a difficult player, rather than a spell thing?

For me, the half session do nothing to do would seem the big problem. Even over any potential 'back from the dead' versimilitude issues.

In that situation, I'd prefer it if the DM stepped in and came up with a simple yes/no answer:

'You spend X hours/days/years searching - no True Ressurections are available for purchase at this time.'

'Pay up, it's done. - now back to the main task'.

Or make a sidetrack that gives everyone something interesting to do?

I'd quite agree with you about spell availability. Just because someone in the world can cast it doesn't mean it should be freely available!

 

[hong]

You could just go metagame on the whole return-from-the-dead issue. I mean, why is it so important for people to be able to come back from dying anyway? Because 1) dying at inopportune times can be inconvenient for the narrative (you can work it into the story, but sometimes it's easier just to avoid the whole mess); 2) people get attached to their characters, and you want to encourage that, not discourage it. These are metagame reasons for wanting to avoid death, and finding an in-game mechanic for it is really using the wrong tool for the job.

So, give people some get-out-of-jail points: say, two per level, more or less depending on your taste and the underlying lethality of your game. Every time a player would lose a character, they can use a GOOJ point to avert this calamity. Exactly how events transpire instead can be left to the DM, or the group as a whole, to decide on the spur of the moment. You can either have the PC in an almost-dead-but-not-quite state (-9 hp), or they're still intact, just as if the blow had never landed. The details are left as an exercise for the reader.

 

[Shallown]

In my present game the players agreed. No raise dead or coming back once we are dead. It makes the game a little more interesting.

In the last game we played I GM'ed and when characters wanted to come back it often invloved dealing witha God (or his representative) and telling them what you were willing to do to come back. Often the whole group had to bargain for a characters life. I would often take each player into another room and ask them what they were willing to give up. It was interesting t o see the range of things offered. One character offered up his own life so the Diety was impressed and made it so the next time the one raised was suppose to die that character did instead. Which happened much later. From then on the sacrificing player (Who was dragged from death's door) wouldn't let the other character out of his sight for fear it would happen again.

Some prices paid include skill points, Ability scores etc. An elf's long life, future quest, agreements to protect other characters (a diety made one character protect the Cohort who was a priest of his)

The campaign was not one were the deities hung out with mortals they had a vested interest in seeing what the party was doing got done.

Also I had a rule that everyone had one round to die. No matter how negative you were (unless disintigrated or such) you didn't die permanently if you could be brought up to -10 and stabilized. It was often more interesting to watch the mad scramble and tactical planning involved in saving a character. Discovering its a full round action to pour a potion down someone's throat sucked for them. Since they couldn't move to a downed comrade and get him up enough to live. So many back up plans to helped downed comrades developed and made it interesting and dangerous since you had to ignore the bad guy while helping a buddy. I have seen players throwing a scroll across the room while another person caught it and held it up while a third (the rogue) moved to read it hoping to make his UMD roll and get off a Curative. It makes for some exciting combat.

Just some ideas.

Later

 

[green slime]

Yes, Action Points. Good things, IMO. However, even they will not prevent character death. Sooner or later, someone will run out of AP and kick the bucket regardless.

And yes Inconsequenti-AL it was a very frustrating experience. Yes, the problem could be defined as player expectations. It was pointed out by other players that there was no way we could assume that the spell was available. The player still wanted everyone to try. After much debate, we decided to go and give it a shot, to no avail. So half the session disappeared. IMO, the DM shouldn't have let that one player push the others into suspending the adventure.

 

[scholz]

If you want to make Raise Dead less common, I suggest you make death less common. That will do it.
How to do that? Good question. Well, first, stick to reasonable ELs, many games I've been in have made very big parties, 7 or more people, and then they feel the need to bump up the monsters to high levels say four or more CR EL higher than the PCs. This results in many player deaths because the damage curves of monsters get too high. Solution, more encounters, or more monsters at lower CRs. That can help.
Another fix. Action Points. They can help, but it has been my experience that people don't like using them to prevent death (often from shame or frustration). I think it might be a psychological effect. So you need to encourage that more to get people to see no shame in using them.

And... if none of those work. Use an alternative Death mechanism. One suggestion is the one in Castle Falkenstien. In that game, you can't kill a person in combat. You can reduce them to unconsciousness, but to kill them, you need to, in effect do a coup de grace. That is one way to keep the PCs alive. It is a pretty extreme solution though, as it might encourage people to be more aggressive than they ought.