Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="WarpedAcorn" data-source="post: 6922980" data-attributes="member: 6819400">Character death doesn't seem super strict in 5th Edition, at least to me.From a DM perspective, after the character has initially dropped and started bleeding out they have a minimum of 3 rounds on their own before death. That's a HUGE amount of time for someone to cast a healing spell, spare the dying, administer a potion, or stabilize with a Medicine check. Its possible for the Character to take that extra point of damage that kills them from an AoE, but I don't think most DM's are going to have an NPC take the time to just kill a character. But if that happens, you still have options to Raise them with a multitude of spells including a very accessible Revivify. Otherwise the party can still take the body and have someone in town cast a Raise Dead or Reincarnate to keep the character around.So really TPK's are the only instance I see where Characters should legitimately be dieing without the option of coming back.That being said, lets say a Character dies in the first fight of the adventure, you are nowhere near a town or healer to revive, and your friends had planned on playing for another 3 hours. You can get creative and do something like have the Spirit of the Character stick around and participate in as much of the game you like (maybe only the other PC's can see him, or maybe he can also participate in Combat but only distract enemies and use the Help action). Or you can give control of an NPC to them for the remainder of the session. Maybe Glenda the Good Witch dies and until the party can revive her the player is given the option to control Markus, the Thug mercenary (straight out of the Monster Manual).Character death is also sometimes a way to try something new out, so although Glenda died...maybe the Player is more interested in just grabbing a new character and leaving Glenda dead. Then all it takes is some creative storytelling to add in the new character. Like iserith said, having a back-up character on hand is always useful. After one of my recent characters almost died I went ahead and drew up a backup for if he dies.</blockquote>

Verification