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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pukunui" data-source="post: 6670694" data-attributes="member: 54629">Hi folks,In 5e, both raise dead and resurrection maintain that being brought back to life is an ordeal and impose a numerical penalty that reduces over time to represent that mechanically.Personally, I find that penalty kind of naff and boring. My players don't really like it either - they always try to find a way to make it so their character doesn't have to do anything for four days so they can just get rid of the penalty. [Which is not to say that I always let them, but then they grumble about having to remember what the penalty is and when to apply it and so on.]What if, instead, being brought back from the dead worked more like it does in Game of Thrones? That is, you would still have the scars showing how you died, and you'd "lose a bit of yourself" every time. Reading through the various related spells, it seems like raise dead already does this to a certain extent, since resurrection specifically states that it restores any missing body parts (which implies that raise dead does not). The harder thing to model would be the losing a bit of yourself.We know that in the books, when Catelyn Stark is raised and becomes Lady Stoneheart, she a) still has a slit throat and b) becomes completely obsessed with getting revenge against the family who broke hospitality and murdered her and her son Robb. The other example we have, from both the books and the show, is Berric Dondarrion. He gets raised several times, and while he comes across as less single-minded and zombie-like than Catelyn, he does talk about losing some of his memory, and it does seem like he's become a bit obsessed with being a Robin Hood-style outlaw.In D&D 5e terms, I'm wondering if maybe the madness rules could work as a fitting substitute. So if someone is subjected to the raise dead spell, they come back to life but still bear the scars of how they were killed - eg. if they were killed by dragon fire, then they've got burn scars all over their body; if they were stabbed through the eye, then they're missing an eye, and so on - and they suffer some kind of indefinite madness or something.Resurrection would restore their body but would still impose some kind of madness.True Resurrection would restore both body and mind whole.Not sure about reincarnation. Obviously the physical side of things wouldn't apply since you get a new body, but what about mental effects? I imagine it would be a rather jarring experience to find yourself in a shape you're not used to.What do people think?</blockquote>

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