Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kalendraf" data-source="post: 909021" data-attributes="member: 3433">There are certain ways that characters can die that prevent them from being raised.  For example, being drained by an undead and coming back as one of them.  Last night's unfortunate episode had the 10th level cleric get jumped by a bunch of shadows which managed to drop him well below 0-strength, causing him to turn into a shadow.  His corpse and items were still there for the party.  I'm running them thru Hell in Freeport, so finding a proper place for burial, or a temple, etc is pretty much out of the question with their present situation.  Ian't really blame the party for taking his items at this point.Pretty tough to explain how you keep gear across a character change.  Sure some items might transfer (cloak of resistance), but if the player decides to switch from a Fighter to a Wizard, there's not much point in letting the new wizard have +2 breast plate and a +2 shield.This is essentially their mode of operation.  Items found during adventures belongs to the collective party, and stuff returns to the collective party when characters die.  Characters that decide to leave can take their share of the loot when they leave.  It's going to be pretty tough to shake them out of this mentality.  The item loss option is probably easier to implement from a DM standpoint.For the most part, it's not the weapons that have gotten out of control, but rather the defensive items (cloak of displacement, rings of protection, etc) and attribute bonus items (+6 headbands of intellect, etc) that seem to be causing the most problems.  There are characters in the party with saving throw bonuses in the low 20's already, and armor classes in the mid-30's.  Is this normal for an 11th level party?  I think not.  Sundering might be a way to break some weapons, but I need a solution to the other items slots, much of which isn't even metallic.The cases where body looting has happened is where there was simply not a plausible explanation for the body being destroyed.  I would have done that had iit been an option.  My party might start getting suspicious if every encounter starts happening with a cauldron of acid/magical flames/bottomless pit right next to the battle scene.  Not all encounters occur with monsters able to consume the body either.As for the starting wealth, that's how we've done it, and changing it  now would likely cause just as many problems as it might solve.  At the point they've reached, starting with just normal wealth probably seems like a penalty all by itself.As for the deaths, I think we've had a total of 7 deaths in 2 years of nearly weekly playing.  Is that too much?  I don't like to kill characters, but it happens.  Of those deaths, only 3 have led to this influx of wealth problem, but each has caused headaches for me as DM.  The latest death was last night, and I can already see where this is heading.  I'm hoping to avoid further problems like this in the future, but I'm just not sure how to handle it easily.I should have been more clear.  Raising is also a half-level loss.  The reason this was done is because the characters dying were the farthest behind on exp, and dropping them a whole level each time would have led to a party with characters about 4 levels apart.  Instead, it's only 2 levels of gap now.  So if you get raised or get a new character, it's just a half-level loss.</blockquote>

Verification