Rules for death and dying

[evilbob]

I tried -10 - level - con bonus, but that was complicated and people always forgot it. I changed it to -10 - fort save, which is almost the same thing but easier to remember.

It's only come up once or twice in my campaign, but it certainly seems like most folks give an extra bit of leeway. It's especially frustrating at high levels, when monsters do far more than 10 damage a hit, and having a character who is up at 2 HP is way more dangerous than a character who is down with -2 and no longer a "threat." (Well, you could rule that monsters keep attacking until a player is dead, which would make it more balanced - but really suck for the PCs.)

Just remember that whatever you do, do the same for the monsters/NPCs as well.

 

[pallandrome]

I tack on the M&M version. Once they hit -10, they have to make a fort save every round, DC10, or die. The save DC goes up by one every round.

 

[hong]

Death in D&D tends to be temporary anyway, what with raise dead, resurrection, true res and the like. I dislike resurrection with all of my body including my pee-pee. Well, okay, maybe not including my pee-pee. But still, I don't really like it.

What I might do is, whenever your character dies, you have the option of treating them as still alive (just as you can choose whether raising your character is successful). If you so decide, you revive at the end of the encounter at -9 hp, or after 1 minute if you died outside of combat (HAW HAW). Effectively, you're treated as never having died at all; you just got lucky. That's because the gods were smiling on you, or the PC halo was working, or you're just too ugly to die, or whatnot; making up an in-game explanation is an exercise left for the reader.

This does NOT work if you suffer a TPK. If noone is around to tend to you, it's curtains.

However, because near-death experiences shake even the toughest hero up, and so that players will still treat death as somewhat serious, you're at a -2 penalty to all d20 rolls and AC for a length of time. Maybe a week.

Based on the NWN2 system where all party deaths are temporary, unless a TPK occurs.

 

[Aeolien]

Death in D&D tends to be temporary anyway, what with raise dead, resurrection, true res and the like. I dislike resurrection with all of my body including my pee-pee. Well, okay, maybe not including my pee-pee. But still, I don't really like it.

What I might do is, whenever your character dies, you have the option of treating them as still alive (just as you can choose whether raising your character is successful). If you so decide, you revive at the end of the encounter at -9 hp, or after 1 minute if you died outside of combat (HAW HAW). Effectively, you're treated as never having died at all; you just got lucky. That's because the gods were smiling on you, or the PC halo was working, or you're just too ugly to die, or whatnot; making up an in-game explanation is an exercise left for the reader.

This does NOT work if you suffer a TPK. If noone is around to tend to you, it's curtains.

However, because near-death experiences shake even the toughest hero up, and so that players will still treat death as somewhat serious, you're at a -2 penalty to all d20 rolls and AC for a length of time. Maybe a week.

Based on the NWN2 system where all party deaths are temporary, unless a TPK occurs.

My first reaction when reading that was "It's totally unrealistic, though." Then I realized that I'm playing D&D and nothing is 'realistic'. I might talk that over with my PCs; thanks a bunch!

 

[just__al]

If you are taken from non negative HP to -10 or below you are now at -9hp. You WILL die one round from now and you DON'T get a stabilization roll. Your allies have to find a way to stabilize you.

Makes for very frantic, heroic, nick of time saves...

 

[Caliban]

My house rules:

Staggered = 0 to -con mod (or just 0 if your con is less than 10)

Dying = -con mod to -con stat (or -10 if your con is less than 10)

If you are beyon -con stat, you can still be saved if you are healed to postive hit points within 1 round, but you are unconcious until the next morning (or 24 hours if it occured just before morning).

 

[wildstarsreach]

In most of our games we use action points, a rule from ECS, we allow 1 action point to be spent to stablize if negative and if at -10, another action point to keep final death at bay. As long as your body isn't left by the party or everyone isn't killed, then they can heal you back up. Now the penalty is that they can't cast heal in the middle of combat and have a combatant back. It means that you are also out of it for the duration of that combat. This is good for PC's to avoid con loss due to raise dead and resurrection.

We have had due to situations where a character is out of the parties reach and and this rule didn't help when the party was forced to retreat or face annihilation. So sometimes characters die.

 

[Nightfall]

Why make it more difficult? They get Ress for free half the time!

 

[shilsen]

Why make it more difficult? They get Ress for free half the time!

Depends on the game. Returning from the dead is NOT easy at all in my Eberron game, and a PC gets dropped below -10 on average once per 2 sessions (which means every 3-4 encounters), so I need the rules I mentioned above. In a game with easy returning from the dead it wouldn't be needed.

 

[Nightfall]

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!