My Low Magic Game and Coming Back from the Dead

[Wippit Guud]

"Your friend is just mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. "

 

[Conaill]

8) Change the Rules! - Death doesn't occur at -10 HP, it begins at -10 (at first level, as a minimum), but when HPs rise above 10, it takes a number of negative HPs equal to your full positive HPs to kill you... You still pass out a zero, and you still bleed 1 HP/round, until stabilized. You can still die, and will likely spend days being unconscious, but will die less often.

It has always seemed weird to me that in D&D, characters get more "fragile" as they go up in levels, in the sense that the margin between unconscious and dead becomes smaller and smaller, relatively speaking. This means that deaths and resurrections become more and more frequent when you go up in levels.

GURPS has a bad reputation for being "grim and gritty" with a high chance of dying, yet in all the years I played GURPS I've never seen as many character deaths as in D&D! Why? Well, PC's in GURPS have a relatively fixed number of HP, but their defenses improve over time, and they only die when they reach negative HP.

In D&D, HP go up linearly with level, but so does damage so that kinda balances out. If you want to avoid an increasing spiral of deaths and resurrections with level, you have to have some way to scale that "buffer zone" between life and death as well. At the very minimum you could place death at minus 10+lvl, if minus negative hp is too drastic for you.

 

[Grazzt]

Necromancer has a really cool book called Raise the Dead (I think that's the title) and in it are 4 adventures for characters were the end goal is raising someone from the dead.

I was just gonna mention that. And yeppers, the title is "Raise the Dead."

 

[Conaill]

If you do get a TPK, I guess you could always switch to Ghostwalk and let them continue their quest as ghosts.

Heck, even for the occasional dead PC that's a viable option - just make sure you keep the +5 LA in mind. Wizards.com has a nice article on acquiring Ghost template levels.

 

[mmadsen]

It has always seemed weird to me that in D&D, characters get more "fragile" as they go up in levels, in the sense that the margin between unconscious and dead becomes smaller and smaller, relatively speaking. This means that deaths and resurrections become more and more frequent when you go up in levels.

Absolutely.

GURPS has a bad reputation for being "grim and gritty" with a high chance of dying, yet in all the years I played GURPS I've never seen as many character deaths as in D&D! Why? Well, PC's in GURPS have a relatively fixed number of HP, but their defenses improve over time, and they only die when they reach negative HP.

The GURPS way in analogous to boosting AC with level rather than hp.