D&D 5E Rethinking the Raise Dead Penalty

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Yunru]

It will be a rare occurence in my game to see a character raised from the dead if he is not a follower of a religion. Raising the dead is quite a miracle and miracles do not go to the unfaithful.

The penalty can be meh. As spending 4 days in row is quite easy. That is why i'm thinking of a special house rule.
Raise Dead should still inflict a penalty of -4 on everything. But it fades by 1 for each week spend resting.

Now it is a whole month. Monsters in the dungeon might get reinforcement. Reset traps and repair some stuff that was destroyed by the players. Evil NPCs might try to get their revenge in that time.
I'm still not sure to implement it. Just thinking of an alternative.

Isn't that just playing with the long day variant?
Which I'm not against at all, except for its effect on any sense of urgency.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I have yet to see an RPG where death was treated as a trivial issue, regardless of how easy or difficult resurrection is, with one exception: paranoia. In that game, players just delight in dying/killing each other stupidly.

In any other setting, people tend not to like dying because it feels like losing, even if you can hop back to your feet after the battle.

So I don't really see any need for resurrection penalties at all.

 

[Shiroiken]

It really depends on how you want to treat death in your game. If you want to have long term consequences, simply increasing the time frame to 1 week per point loss is fine. Switching from a flat penalty to Exhaustion seems good to change the type of penalty, but makes it more avoidable (since if you can cast Raise Dead, you can cast Greater Restoration).

Personally, rather than changing the penalty (which is going to feel fiddly, regardless of how you do it), I'd return the Resurrection Check. To update it to 5E, I'd require a Con check (no proficiency bonus or any other ability bonuses) DC: 5+ number of deaths. Even with a 20 Con, you have a 5% cumulative chance to die permanently each time you die, and with a 14 Con (the most common I see), you have a 20% chance of failure at start, with the +5% change after the first. This happens regardless of the method used to return the character to life.

This would keep death as a serious threat, because it would mean the permanent loss of a beloved character.

 

[Jester David]

You know, a -4 penalty does seem severe.

But, it is better than the alternative.

The alternative for the character is death. The alternative for the player is a new character without the penalties...

 

[Jester David]

Switching from a flat penalty to Exhaustion seems good to change the type of penalty, but makes it more avoidable (since if you can cast Raise Dead, you can cast Greater Restoration).

True, but greater restoration only removes one level of exhaustion. To remove all the levels will always take a couple days, since 5th level spells cap at 3. So two days of max spells, which is still a time limit. Unless you want to blow higher level spell slots.

But it you can reduce the penalties more quickly, which is more strategic as you can decide how fast you want someone to recover. If at level 15 you really want someone back at 100% and want to blow all your spell doing so, you can...

 

[Willie the Duck]

It's hard to enforce any sort of lasting consequence for death, in a world where players are used to bringing in new characters that are as powerful as everyone else.

The current death penalty is fine, for what it is. They could have gone with exhaustion, except that exhaustion can be negated by a spell or potion, and they wanted this effect to always matter for at least a little while. Unfortunately - and you see this in a lot of places in the game - they seem to be under the bizarre impression that characters are going to have adventuring days on consecutive days. More likely, the penalty will last until the end of the day, and the character will be back to normal by the time the next adventuring day rolls around.

It certainly makes it a penalty of differing actual consequence, depending on playstyle and PC's situation. Given that the made natural healing so much quicker (negating this same differing playstyle issue), it does seem odd.

Given the lower gp totals in this version, I don't think any penalty is exactly needed, but I also don't see it as a huge problem.

 

[Horwath]

I would also add that ressurecting ages you.

When you get ressurected you age at 10% of your max expected age for your race.

I.e. humans live max of 100 years and elves 700, so human would age 10 years and elf 70.

For true ressurection, aging can be 5%


As for immidiate penalty, I would go for disadvantage on all attacks, save and checks for 1 week.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

I don't houserule and I think the rule is okay as it is. -4 to all stats isn't all that bad really. If you allow to roll for stats such a stat difference can actually already happen right at the start if one person rolls unlucky and another lucky.

Also this seems rather theoretical for me, because in actual play, I didn't really feel that players felt completely useless because of a temporary stat decrease.

Sometimes death can also be a good incentive for a player to scrap his old character he didn't enjoy playing anymore to start a new one (I let them start at level 3).

 

[Helldritch]

I have yet to see an RPG where death was treated as a trivial issue, regardless of how easy or difficult resurrection is, with one exception: paranoia. In that game, players just delight in dying/killing each other stupidly.

In any other setting, people tend not to like dying because it feels like losing, even if you can hop back to your feet after the battle.

So I don't really see any need for resurrection penalties at all.

The computer is your friend. The computer protects his friends from people in sects (called secret societies) and mutants. These are all traitors. The computer is pretty crazy and paranoid.
Unfortunately, these kind of traitors are everywhere. Your job, you and your team is to find and eliminate them.
Unfortunately, you are a mutant
Unfortunately, you are in a sect.
Fortunately, you have six clones that will activate in case of untimely death at the hands of your comrades... errrr... traitors!
Knowledge is power and it is on the need to know basis.
Traitors want to know more than what they have credentials for.
You will not ask for something you have no credence for would you?

In this game, you die a lot. By your friends' hands, by the computer's decisions (or lack of), by your lack of knowledge. It a nice game to do to have a session or two of laughter at how you died. You are supposed to die in various, hilariously ways either through your competency or lack of it. How do I use that bazooka?
Computer's answers: "That knowledge is restricted to a higher credential. Why do you seek such knowledge? Please, go to the nearest recycling center to be recycled." Players run away...
Computer again: "X, is a traitor. Terminate this traitor asap. Not terminating a traitor is a traitorous act."

Well... you get the point.