Problem: character deaths are leading to enormous party wealth

[Kalendraf]

Actually, just to complicate the situation a bit, the spawn ability says the victim becomes a shadow, not that he lies there and emits a shadow. I don't necessarily see where the shadow doesn't get to keep his stuff, at least until they kill it.

On shadows, I've always ruled that the slain character's actual shadow takes on the undead status and begins attacking, while their body and items remain behind. Many published adventures seem to support that concept where the body and items are left behind when a shadow is created as well. While these could merely be interpretations of the authors, they do seem fairly consistent. IIRC, an example of this would be the shadow at the end of Crucible of Freya.

 

[Kalendraf]

Characters have to be dropping like flies in order for this to become such a huge problem. Exactly how many character deaths have occurred, and what's the average length of time between them? You might want to consider NOT killing off party members for a little while to balance. That is probably your best way of fixing this problem.

In the span of 2 years of nearly weekly play (probably closer to 3 sessions per month), there have been a total of about 7 or 8 character deaths. So figure about 1 death per 10 playing sessions on average, and until recently, there had been a very long stretch of several months w/o a death. However, in the last 2 sessions, there have been 2 character deaths, so the recent trend indicates a higher average than we are used to. I often go out of my way to avoid killing the party. The cases where it has happened have often been due to players being careless or sometimes unlucky.

What is true is that 2 players' characters have tended to be very death-prone, while another character has been extremely unkillable. As a result, party gapping will occur, especially if you enforce a 1-level loss per raise dead/resurection/etc.

Ideally, the problem should be helped by the fact that the highest exp character is sitting out an entire adventure. But such gapping can recur if the weaker, lower-level characters are the ones who continue to die.

 

[Kalendraf]

But I did notice a couple of things. It sounds like some players are opting to roll up new characters rather than have them raised. Is that realistic? Seems to me in those cases where players "choose" to roll up new characters that they should take a larger penalty than just a 1/2 level.

We've had a total of 5 character changes to date. In 2 of those cases, the character was unrecoverable (rogue turned to dust by mummy rot, cleric turned to a shadow). Some DM's might rule that you can be raised after turning to a shadow, since the body is still there, but I've tended to rule that once you are turned into an undead, your very soul is lost to the darkness. This tends to make undead a bit more fearsome.

Three characters chose to be reincarnated and two of them came back as creatures that would be quite hard to adventure with. The druid became a bat, and the barbarian turned into a snake. The druid was playing very much in character and had stated he wanted to be reincarnated if he ever died. As for the barbarian, he was hoping to change into something really cool like a centaur. Unknown to both characters, I have my own regional tables I use. If you get reincarnated in a swamp, you will likely turn into a swamp-dwelling creature. Hence the bat and snake. Both those characters left the party with most of their wealth, so those deaths didn't pose nearly as much of a wealth influx problem as the 2 undead killings did. The other fellow who opted for reincarnate changed from a human into a halfling and just loves the new small-fry character.

The only other character replacement was a fighter/wizard with horrible stats and hit points that died at a fairly low level (4th), and used the death opportunity to get a new character. That was the party's very first casualty, and I was actually happy that he opted for a new character. The concept of the original one was extremely weak in its implementation. I think he was aiming for the spellsword prestige class, but didn't really have good enough overall stats to be messing with multiclassing across 2 fairly unrelated classes (fighter needs strength, con, wizard needs int, dex, then there's casting in armor penalty, etc). It didn't help when he rolled 1's, 2's or 3's on his d10 for hit points either. This death did create a wealth influx, as the items were looted from the dead fighter/wizard, and he actually had some of the best gear in the party at the time. The party had been letting him have some of the better protective items, possibly because he was so pathetic, but was one of only 2 fighters in the party at the time.

FYI, The beginning party (barbarian/ranger/rogue, fighter/wizard, rogue/sorcerer, druid and ranger) was pretty easy to womp. They lacked a decent front line. The barbarian was ok, but his AC was pathetic, fighter/wizard had dreadfully low hit points, ranger wanted to be an archer instead of melee character. The druid was often thrust into front-line duty in spite of fairly weak AC. This group had no cleric either, so the druid was the only source of healing. Some of the early deaths I can attribute to the fact that the party was rather unbalanced, and lacked a true cleric. With each of the replacements the group has become much stronger and better balanced (fighter/wizard->wizard, rogue/sorc->cleric, druid->paladin, barb/ranger/rogue->fighter/sohi, new player->sorcerer, original ranger/deep wood sniper).

So at no time did the players abuse the rule of bringing in a replacement character. Instead they brought in the new characters because their old ones were simply not playable.

 

[Zogg]

Seems to me that your players need to learn the concept of retreating. I mean - yes - PCs are going to die once in awhile due to bad rolls, but if you've got an overzealous party ("I know I only have a quarter of my HP left and the cleric only has 'detect evil' left to help us, but really let's keep going!) that fails to chill out once in awhile, you should have no regrets killing them mercilessly.

Hopefully you've found an idea in this thread (by now) to rectify your gold influx dilemma.

 

[Morte]

With the proviso that I'm speaking from experience of Neverwinter Nights (an almost-D&D computer game) rather than P&P...

I was very interested to see this thread, because I hit exactly the same problem in the first substantial campaign I ran. Here are some things I did for the second campaign, which worked out pretty well:

1. Assume that there will be a certain number of deaths and that the gear will sometimes be redistributed. Give out about 80-90% of the theoretically correct loot to compensate. Adjust on the fly.

2.Rule that the DMG figure is for the total amount of loot a character has acquired by that point, but it includes potions he drank, bard items the party sold at 50% because they had no bard, etc. A character who acquired the DMG figure in loot from his adventures + dead comrades might actually retain about two thirds of it. A new character would be created at about two thirds of the DMG figure to match.

[Unfortunately, this requires a fair bit of paperwork to track wealth. It's not so bad in the computer game, because I can use a script that prints the players' inventory and its value to the logfile every time they login/die/level. I imagine there must be software available to maintain and value character records for P&P?]

3. Use modified XP rules that give a larger share to the lower level members of the party. It tends to bring the levels closer together over time. Players have been happy to accept this if I sell it to them up front "for the good of the game as a whole".


Once I've decided whether I need to adjust wealth up or down, I use some of the tricks mentioned in this thread. In particular, the players are liable to find themselves on side quests against lots of trolls or ogres or whatever if I think they're too rich. They also start discovering a higher percentage of loot which is no use to them (e.g. druid items when they've got no druid) and selling it at 50% instead of using it. That gets the XP up without gaining much money, also compensating for the XP lost on death so that they can get back to the main campaign and cope.