Death in Eberron - What to Do?

[Cthulhudrew]

Working with the House Jorasco bier of resurrection idea, why not have a minor sidequest or something for the PCs to resurrect their friend? Have them learn about an item that is a holdover from the Last War that was designed to be able to bring the fallen back to life, but that either didn't work properly, worked too well, or something, but was lost after the war. Then have a minor sidequest to find it, and use it on the PC.

The thing that I would do as a key point, though, is to make sure there are consequences to such a resurrection. Either the PC isn't brought back quite right (maybe a reincarnation, rather than a resurrection), or something else. Something gets brought through with him, something happens to him, etc.

(Now that I think about it, though, even in SCAP the PCs go to another plane at some point in one of the later adventures- two, actually, but one sooner rather than later. Maybe that could be a connection.)

 

[Gundark]

another option is that you can simply have the PCs twin join the group....

 

[Sidekick]

Hmm at 6th level I reckon he's toast, especially in Q'Barra.

There's simply not the people with the power to do that. Sure maybe a Quori - but that could lead to all sorts of problems and debts they dont' want.

Just get them to roll up a new character. once they're powerful enough to raise then they can do it, until then they're outta luck

 

[Iku Rex]

If the problem is finding a cleric willing to cast spells for money, limited wish can be used to duplicate raise dead. It will be more expensive though. (And probably not a viable option in Q'barra.)

 

[Glyfair]

If the problem is finding a cleric willing to cast spells for money, limited wish can be used to duplicate raise dead. It will be more expensive though. (And probably not a viable option in Q'barra.)

The problem is two-fold, finding a high level character with a PC class and finding someone willing to do it. Finding someone who can cast Limited Wish is far, far less likely than finding someone who can cast Raise Dead.

 

[Solarious]

Also, the problem with Jorasco's Altars is they don't use them very often, and anyone capable of Raise Dead uses at least an Augary to confirm if they should do it or not. Why? The Maruts tend to get a little upset when the dead are brought back too frequently...

 

[Rackhir]

The DM for both of my current campaigns permit action points to save a "dead" character. IE. if your character would be killed by an attack and you have the action points to spend, then you are stable at -9. Otherwise pretty much every character in both campaigns would have died multiple times. You could retroactively implement such a rule, having the character not be dead and just having been beaten to -9 if you don't wish to be killing off pcs.

Otherwise, I would just have them make up a new PC.

 

[Grymar]

The DM for both of my current campaigns permit action points to save a "dead" character. IE. if your character would be killed by an attack and you have the action points to spend, then you are stable at -9. Otherwise pretty much every character in both campaigns would have died multiple times. You could retroactively implement such a rule, having the character not be dead and just having been beaten to -9 if you don't wish to be killing off pcs.

Otherwise, I would just have them make up a new PC.

Obviously you find that your rule works in your game, but do you feel that it takes any of the...fear out of it? As long as you save an AP (I have some players who almost never use them) then there no threat of death.

 

[Mallus]

Obviously you find that your rule works in your game, but do you feel that it takes any of the...fear out of it?

The opportunity to fail still exists. In spades.

And really, what kind of fear are we talking about? Fear of losing a fictional character? I've always found in RPG's that failing to accomplish a goal that players are invested in is just as meaningful as character death.

 

[Rackhir]

Obviously you find that your rule works in your game, but do you feel that it takes any of the...fear out of it? As long as you save an AP (I have some players who almost never use them) then there no threat of death.

First there are worse things than death for PCs. It doesn't prevent PCs from being captured, robbed, humiliated or embarrassed. A lot of PCs would much rather be killed than those. As my mage in Shilsen's campaign has put it more than once "If you kill them, then the suffering stops."

In practice I've found a lot of what it actually accomplishes is that it insulates the PCs from mistakes the DM makes in terms of the lethality of foes. Mallus, the DM for my Tueday campaign is infamous for going "Oh... I didn't realize it would do that much damage" when the Power attacking giant gets a crit with the x3 large battle axe.

Shilsen the DM for the Saturday campaign can merrily swing away with his custom tweeked barbarian horde or CR 12 Tree monster vs the lv 8 party and not have to worry about the character who takes twice his total HP in a single round.

If the DM is running foes who REALLY want to kill the PCs there's nothing to stop them from doing so. For example, in a recent battle in Mallus's campaign (the tuesday) some pirate priests were getting set to do a coup-de-grace on a pc who'd been knocked down.

So it doesn't eliminate risk or danger to the PCs. It simply removes, casual random death from the mix. Especially that due to DM misscalculation.