Death

[K'Plah Q'Houme]

Help me out. When a character dies, he can be resurrected by various means the penalty being loss of xp (loss of 2 con poins if 1st level). But a high level character, or a character who can afford it, can be resurrected with no penalities (true resuraction). Now i'm not sure i like this. Offcourse it's a shame to have a character die, but if you can resurrect him with no penalities, then what's the downside to dying? I would like to have a system, where you acctualy loose something when you die (offcourse you loose arround 26000 gp on the true resurrect spell, but that's nothing for a high level player, and surddenly worth it, and nothing at all if you have a PC cleric). How do you guys handle this?

 

[maddman75]

I handle it by generally not killing my PCs. That and I make magical revivification rather hard to come by. The clerics don't do it for just anybody you know. Of course if there's a cleric in the party that can weild such magics, there's not much you can do.

 

[Henry]

This sounds more like a "House Rules" type of thread, so I'll move it there.

THe simplest solution as DM is to impose a level-loss penalty anyway; True Resurrection alreaday has an adventage over Resurrection, in that you don't even need a piece of the body, so it still warrants higher level (maybe 8th level, instead of 9th depending on how you feel about its power level after removing lack of level loss).

The new Eberron campaign setting has an interesting idea: On times when the plane of Death (Dolurrh) is remote instead of coterminous, you have to PHYSICALLY travel there to recover the person's soul! Make that a permanent feature, and you have not only a major annoyance to death, but an epic quest in the making.

 

[Ghostknight]

The new Eberron campaign setting has an interesting idea: On times when the plane of Death (Dolurrh) is remote instead of coterminous, you have to PHYSICALLY travel there to recover the person's soul! Make that a permanent feature, and you have not only a major annoyance to death, but an epic quest in the making.

Problem is that the dead character is now out of the game. He ends up being a cohort to another player or playing an NPC. All in all less fun for him while the quest to recover his soul is on place. A nice idea for an adevnture (send the PCs to recover the sould of an important NPC), but imho a bit of a problem for PCs. Rather go the other route you siggest- just have no resurrection spells with no penalty (maybe give true resurrection a -1 or -2 Con penalty but no reduced level or require the cleric to burn 500xp/level of the raised creature (hmm, lets see the partt cleric give up a level to prevent a fellow party member from losing a level- or how reluctant NPC casters are going to be to cast this on someone without their mates agreeing to a Geas or somesuch as part of the compensation!)

 

[LazerPointer]

I haven't figured out how I'm gonna handle this in my campaign. good idea making all ressurection spells have a cost, tho.

 

[Treebore]

In my 19 years of playing and DMing I have only seen one player who didn't mind his character dying. Dying sucks and most players know it sucks and usually happened as a result of bad luck or stupidity on someones part. No reason to rub salt in their wounds by making raising or ressurecting even more of a penalty than they already are. True ressurection is the way it is because the cleric earned the priveledge to cast such a spell due to long and dedicated service. Now you want to shaft the cleric because someone else died?

your the DM and therefore the god being asked to give the Raise Dead or Ressurection spell when prayed for. DOn't grant it if you don't want it used. Otherwise leave the issue well enough alone, there are far more important things to worry about in a campaign, like having fun.

 

[Gort]

One way to handle this would be to make it so that characters can't be killed "accidentally". IE, when they fall below 0 hitpoints, they are knocked out. If someone wants to kill them, they have to come over and Coup De Grace them.

Then you can pretty much remove all magic resurrection in the hands of the players. If people only get killed due to plot reasons, they only need to be resurrected through plot means.