OSR New Edition of HackMaster!!!

[Jahydin]

I do worry about the death-issue because I'm torn about how to handle it. In all cases, death should move the game forward in some way. I've lately been making unavoidable death (usually the DM rolled many critical hits) a discussion with the player: is this it for your character, or what do you think about this idea? In our Dragon age game, our necromancer got tossed into lava, dead and dead. He had mastered the highest level of necromancy in the game, so I let him hang on as a weakened ghost (who absorbed his magic items, could never trade them but could use their powers). It made for an awesome story, but I've been doing things like this a lot. We've had in other campaigns trips to the Abyss to retrieve souls, deals with the Summer Court of the fey, and so on, as loopholes to permanent death. In other instances, our gamer has said that's it, dead and dead.

Pretty neat ideas in there, I like them. Castles & Crusades' Castle Keeper's Guide has a great section on death alternatives that leans into this method exactly. I used to be against it, but over the years playing with different people and different games I've come to realize there's many ways to use mechanics to tell the stories you want.

In my OSR games, I've adopted the "Funeral Rites" mechanic which lets you send off a dead PC in exchange for a portion of their XP for the next character they roll up. If I were to run a game where I want the PCs to live, I think I would just decide ahead of time how the failure state of each battle would impact the story.