Out-of-Body Travel and Experience

[candidus_cogitens]

In my campaign, I need a way of handling out-of-body travel to the spiritworld. Specifically, what happens in your encounters? Can you die? Can you gain XP?

Here's what I'm thinking:

You can gain XP as normal, but you can also lose XP, depending on the amount of hitpoints you have lost upon your return to your body. In other words, if I have an encounter in the spiritworldl and my spirit-body suffers damage, then when I return to my real body, it will not be damaged, but I will have lost a certain amount of XP.

I came up with XP loss because I needed a way of having consequences for damage sustained, but I wanted it to be distinct from normal damage.

So, what do you think of this idea, in general? And secondly, how should I determine how much XP is lost?

 

[DanMcS]

The Astral Projection spell is exactly this, out-of-body travel, and includes no such dodgy rules about losing XP. You gain XP as normal while projecting, but if you're killed while projecting, you just get returned to your body.

XP shouldn't be lost for being damaged. XP can be lost by being level-drained, which is described as an undead sucking the life-force out of you. It can also be lost by spending it on spells or creating magical items, which is described as investing some of your life-force into those magical acts.

Hit points aren't life-force. If you want to penalize a character for being injured while projecting (which sounds terribly odd to me, being damaged is its own penalty), perhaps their "real body" suffers ability score damage in some relation to the hp damage suffered. Nonphysical ability scores, of course. For every 10th of your hps you lose which aren't healed when you return to your body, you suffer 1 point of temporary wisdom damage. Or something.

 

[Aaron2]

In my campaign, I need a way of handling out-of-body travel to the spiritworld. Specifically, what happens in your encounters? Can you die? Can you gain XP?

I'm doing something similar, replacing all the outer planes with one multi-purpose spirit world that can be reached via the Ethereal plane, plus adding a Shaman class that excels at this sort of travel. In order to add the danger back in that sort of travel, I've added a set of creatures that can eat souls, causing you to die forever is killed in spirit form. They won't be common, but the threat exists (this is to discourage low-level parties for bopping around for easy XP). Plus there is the added threat that when you die in spirit form and wake up in the real world, you have lost contact with your party and are, pretty much, out of the adventure.


Aaron

 

[candidus_cogitens]

Yes, I should have explained that the reason some sort of consequence is necessary is that I want to make out-of-body travel much more common than the Astral Projection spell. That spell is, and should remain, something special. I want normal, low-level characters to have opportunities to experience the spriti world, but I want the dangers to be real. I don't want them to just go out there hoping to get lucky and win some XP, assuring themselves that if they get smacked, they'll just return safely to their regular bodies.

I like the idea of Wisdom damage. That would work nicely with another idea I had which was that there would be a risk of partial insanity.

Aaron's approach is also interesting . . . perhaps simpler. Just create a creature that would create the threat, rather than creating a game mechanic.

Dan mentioned level-drain, which might be the perfect kind of threat for my campaign, since I do not want the threat to be as severe as a risk of permanent death. I could just fill the spirit-world with creatures that drain levels. This would be enough to make them fear spiritworld travel, but not so much of a threat that I could not in good conscience levy it against them if they mustered the courage to step out of the material world (which I want them to do).

Thanks for the ideas. More would be welcome.