Rules for death and dying

[shilsen]

Shil,

See that's Eberron. Eberron expects people not to come back from the dead, unless they get the soul back first.

Other places it's like one 5K diamond and blamo you're back!

Mostly true, though it seems from posts on these boards that lots of DMs using various settings (homebrew and otherwise) make returning from the dead tougher than in the core rules.

Cpnversely, your comment just reminded me about the complaining I saw from a select minority when 3.5e came out, who claimed that Raise Dead had now become astronomically difficult to use because of the increased cost of the material component

 

[Nightfall]

Eh. It's not easy to get but it's not like you don't find diamonds worth that much these day either.

Me I do like the ideas offered in an issue of Dragon. Ones I might indeed use for Scarred Lands albeit modified to make it so the clerics of the Scarred Lands have to placate both Nemorga (god of the dead) and Belsameth (Lady of Death).

 

[Merkuri]

Similar to wildstarsreach, the current campaign I'm in uses the standard death rules but you can use an action point to automatically stabilize. We've also added a rule not in the RAW that says you can spend two action points to go from dead to stabilized at -9. Haven't had to use it yet, though, as we're only level 1-2 at session 6.

 

[Flynn]

Here's what I use:

Staggered (0 to -Con Bonus, minimum 0)
Dying (less than -Con Bonus, but more than -Con score)
Dead (-Con score)
Once you're dying, you must make a Fort Save (DC 20) to stabilize.

This is straight out of Grim Tales, one of the "one skull" variants, IIRC.

Example #1: Character with a 15 Con score (and thus Con bonus of +2) is Staggered from 0 to -2, Dying from -3 to -14, and Dead at -15.

Example #2: Character with an 8 Con score (and thus Con penalty of -1) is Staggered at 0 hitpoints (since the character has no Con bonus), Dying from -1 to -7, and Dead at -8.

I like this method because it emphasizes the fact that Constitution is a rough measure of your health and stamina compared to others, and so there should be a difference between an unhealthy person, an average person and a very healthy person. I use Point Buy for character creation, so the players can design their characters with this knowledge in mind.

Hope this helps,
Flynn

 

[wildstarsreach]

Shil,

See that's Eberron. Eberron expects people not to come back from the dead, unless they get the soul back first.

Other places it's like one 5K diamond and blamo you're back!

Not all of our campaigns are eberron, however not all of our campaigns use action points either, just the ones that do use action points eberron or not do we get this benefit.

 

[Markn]

We still allow characters to die at -10 but the thing that has always bugged our group is people who die from bleeding. Thus, we created a house rule that if you go into the negatives from an attack that does not actually cause "blood leakage" you do not loose any further hp's per round. For example, if you take a sword slash and drop to -2 you will bleed each round (going to -3, then -4) as per normal rules. However if a Magic Missile hits you and you drop to -2, there is nothing to cause further blood loss.

This has surprisingly singlehandedly saved a LOT of PC's in our group. It's a simple, easy and very effective rule. Additionally, it has occaisionally saved an NPC from dying which then allows the PC's to interrogate that individual.

 

[Merkuri]

However if a Magic Missile hits you and you drop to -2, there is nothing to cause further blood loss.

Not that you have to change your rule or anything, but internal bleeding is possible with something non-sharp that hits you, like Magic Missile. The bleeding may not be visible, but is still very likely to slowly kill you.

 

[hong]

Not that you have to change your rule or anything, but internal bleeding is possible with something non-sharp that hits you, like Magic Missile. The bleeding may not be visible, but is still very likely to slowly kill you.

"All my mojo is leaking out of meeee!!!"

 

[Markn]

Not that you have to change your rule or anything, but internal bleeding is possible with something non-sharp that hits you, like Magic Missile. The bleeding may not be visible, but is still very likely to slowly kill you.

Oh, we understand that. To us it was very frustrating to have a PC bleed to death so we looked for ways to soften the blow in that regard. While its not 100% realistic with our rule it was a compromise that we were very happy with.