D&D 5E Looking for unique suggestions on making player resurrections punishing.

[discosoc]

A few options.

1. Bring back the CON loss from older editions. Advantage to this option is it largely effects all classes (barbarians slightly more, however) equally. Disadvantage is that one or two CON drops in 5e isn't really that big of a deal in the long run, so unless you're killing people left and right, it's not a huge concern.

2. Drop *all* stats by 1 after resurrection. This is probably the solution I'd choose, since it hits everyone equally, and has enough punch to really make the thing meaningful.

3. Introduce permanent disadvantages after resurrections. Stuff like, permanently losing losing an eye (disadvantage to ranged attacks), or gaining a limp, or losing a hand completely, PTSD trigger (disadvantage to all actions under certain conditions), or other such things. This is also harsh, and could easily be tailored to the cause of death, which really gives a way of making sure each scar has a story to tell. "I've never been able to face a Ogre ever since getting killed by the last one...". This could really cool, but only if the players are all on board. Otherwise, they'll just start to be prone to character suicide for the sake of rerolling.

4. Introduce mostly cosmetic physical changes after a resurrection, much like Beric Dondarrion gets after each of his resurrections. He's a pretty gnarly looking dude after a few. And to further the Beric Dondarrion concept, make it so that each resurrection requires something like a CON check that gets progressively harder each time. I think memory loss was another big thing with him; each death meant the permanent loss of some memory chunks, to the point where Arya finds him he mentions having no memories older than being sent by her father to find The Mountain. Not sure how that would play out with PC's, but could be fun.

5. Make each resurrection remove a death save failure check box. So after the first one, you only get 2 fails before death. After the second one, you get 1 failure before death. After the third one, you can't fail at all, and there's no coming back from death via a resurrection type spell.

 

[epithet]

Here's a thought - don't punish your players. That's not your job.

Several suggestions in this thread have put forth great ideas for adding narrative consequence, enriching the story of the campaign. If you're of the opinion that death is trivialized in this edition, I think that considering those suggestions might make your game more satisfying. Anything that doesn't impact the story, though (like permanent stat nerfs) is just putting you in an adversarial role relative to your players. Don't fall into that trap - a permanent mechanical nerf to a character is more likely to earn you player resentment than to encourage player investment.

 

[Fishing_Minigame]

Everytime a PC is brought back, a paladin of Mr. Resetti appears and harangues the player for 1d4 x 2 minutes, times the total number of times their character has been revived.

 

[77IM]

You know, just today I was thinking about stealing a death rule from 13th Age and converting it to 5e:

When you cast raise dead, add up the total number of times you have cast raise dead plus the number of times the recipient has been the target of raise dead. Upon casting the spell, you gain that many levels of exhaustion, and so does the recipient upon returning to life. If this would result in 6 levels of exhaustion (death), then either the spell fails, or the caster dies and the recipient returns to life with 5 levels of exhaustion (the caster chooses which).
​

The implication is that spellcasters who are capable of casting raise dead are reticent to do so because they can only cast it a limited number of times. Likewise, the more times you've been raised the worse it is, so there's a lot of incentive not to die too much. Finally, the exhaustion means you'll either be spending days in recovery, or somebody has to blow through a lot of greater restoration spell slots to get you back on your feet.