D&D General Typical procedure after character death?

[AngryTiger]

Depends if the party is high enough level to be able to have some sort of resurrection magic.

If they are, then the dead character is immediately resurrected.

If not, then they usually head off into closest town and try to find someone to do it for them. If they don't have the money to pay for it, then i usually allow the dead character be raised at a friendly temple anyway, in exchange for a future service. Gives me a easy plot hook for a future quest.

 

[R_J_K75]

Funny enough, every time someone has been fired from my job their desk sat untouched for days, usually weeks, like some strange silent memorial. It's almost always our office manager who ends up clearing everything away, and even he usually waits until we're in the process of hiring someone new. It is almost like people are afraid to disturb the "corpse" for fear of being cursed by it. Personally, I'm happy with my setup at work and have no interest in "looting" someone else's desk.

In the one office in particular Im thinking of, doing mechanical design and drafting sitting at a desk the better part of 8-10 hours a day two things were a premium, chairs and monitors. So when someone got the axe you had to move quick. If you were lucky you could get both the monitor and chair if you did it on the sly but usually as you were unhooking the monitor someone else was wheeling away the chair. Once the chair was yours it was yours, if you were fortunate enough to end up with two monitors within a few weeks IT usually came and took it.

 

[R_J_K75]

Depends if the party is high enough level to be able to have some sort of resurrection magic.

If they are, then the dead character is immediately resurrected.

If not, then they usually head off into closest town and try to find someone to do it for them. If they don't have the money to pay for it, then i usually allow the dead character be raised at a friendly temple anyway, in exchange for a future service. Gives me a easy plot hook for a future quest.

When I played characters I always chose a patron deity no matter what race/class I played and tithed portions of my treasure be it gold or a minor magical item when I was in a village, town or city. This way if I needed to be resurrected or get another party member raised it was a lot easier. As a DM I always encouraged my PCs to do the same because if they just showed up at a random temple out of nowhere expecting to throw around some gold to get someone raised I usually to them to get lost if they've had no previous relationship with the clergy. I always looked at it as them closing the barn door after the horse already got away, too little, too late.

 

[Fanaelialae]

In the one office in particular Im thinking of, doing mechanical design and drafting sitting at a desk the better part of 8-10 hours a day two things were a premium, chairs and monitors. So when someone got the axe you had to move quick. If you were lucky you could get both the monitor and chair if you did it on the sly but usually as you were unhooking the monitor someone else was wheeling away the chair. Once the chair was yours it was yours, if you were fortunate enough to end up with two monitors within a few weeks IT usually came and took it.

I work in software development, and the owners are fairly understanding that you need to spend money to make money, as they used to write the software themselves. On at least two occasions I've had IT come by my desk unbidden to ask me if I wanted a third monitor (I declined, as two monitors are perfect for me, but some of my co-workers took them up on the offer).

 

[R_J_K75]

I work in software development, and the owners are fairly understanding that you need to spend money to make money, as they used to write the software themselves. On at least two occasions I've had IT come by my desk unbidden to ask me if I wanted a third monitor (I declined, as two monitors are perfect for me, but some of my co-workers took them up on the offer).

The places Ive worked in manufacturing went one of two ways. They only upgraded software or hardware only when absolutely necessary, and even then a monitor here, tower there or a license for a new hire. Or they were on a subscription plan where everything was upgraded for everyone every year or so. Regardless, Id have loved to have a third monitor, more places to minimize the screens of the things I wasn't supposed to be doing when the boss came by, like buying concert tickets, or reading a D&D book.

 

[J-H]

I find this interesting as I have never thought to do this as, see above usually its looted, and realistically I couldn't justify a new character showing up with all the gear the last player that just died had. Is this an OOC house rule?

There's no difference between that and "New player shows up with just the base starting gear, and loots the dead guy's body." The party works well together, so equipment went to where it was most useful.

What I was not going to do was introduce new "free" magic items that had not been collected by the party during the campaign.

One dead PC body was not retrieved by the party in a timely fashion (they had to run away). They found some of his gear soon after in the treasury. His two most iconic items (Ring of Protection +1 and Wand of Lightning Bolts) were still on the corpse when they fought the Avatar of Death later on... said corpse was a minion during the fight, casting his most commonly-used spells and using the wand.

This is all of course if Raise Dead doesn't happen. The cleric was gone the week one of the two PC deaths happened. The other one got killed by Finger of Death, and the party didn't use Revivify during that one-round "pre-zombie" window.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

The player pulls out his/her backup PC, which will almost always be 1st level unless they've played the character before. If the player creates a new PC, he does it right then and there. The PC will be at the average party PC level, -2, maximum starting level of 3rd. (e.g., 2nd if average PC level is 4th, 3rd if it's 5th or higher, and 1st in every other case). That said, it's the OPTION TO, not a requirement....a Player is always free to create a level 1 PC, even if everyone else is 5th level, 7th, or whatever (for the record, nobody has cracked the 7th level mark in any of our 5e games).

Creating a higher level PC just seems like cheating. It also doesn't seem "fair" to players who have managed to keep their PC alive up to whatever level they are. Lastly...starting at level 1 is just the coolest level! Why wouldn't someone want to start a new PC at level 1?

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[R_J_K75]

Creating a higher level PC just seems like cheating. It also doesn't seem "fair" to players who have managed to keep their PC alive up to whatever level they are.

We used to do this in the 1E & 2E days, it was mandatory. But 9 out of 10 times it spelled certain doom for said 1st level PC if the party was any level over 3. Compound that with the fact that in order to stay alive you had to play pretty cowardly and stay out of combat most of the time which meant less XP so it took forever to advance I think its probably alot more feasible in 5E and maybe even 3E.

 

[Richards]

Our campaigns generally include resurrection magic - or at least raise dead, if the cost of a resurrection or true resurrection are out of scope for the still-low-level PCs. But there have been a few times when a player wished to "abandon" a PC (sometimes after being slain, once because the entire character concept had been an experiment that hadn't really worked), in which case they brought in a new PC at the same level.

In my last campaign, each of the five players ran a single PC and we had a sixth character, an NPC cleric, who got passed around from session to session as to whose turn it was to run her as a second character. She was the default "spare PC" if your PC got killed, in which case whoever had been running the cleric handed over the cleric's folder so the player with the dead PC had somebody to run to finish off the adventure, and then hopefully we could get the dead PC back to life before the next game session.

In the campaign before that, each player had two PCs and decided each session which one they wanted to run. The two PCs each had magic rings that would allow them to teleport to each other and back again, so the "spare" PC was back at Guild HQ and if the "adventuring" PC ran into trouble (or got himself killed), by activating the ring the two PCs could switch out, allowing the game to press on without a PC death causing much of a delay in action.

I just started my current campaign, but so far I haven't made any special provisions for PC death. (There are two clerics in the party of five; hopefully between them they can keep everyone alive.) We'll have to see how it goes.

Johnathan

 

[jasper]

This has varied during my 40 years of gaming. I changed the order of the questions.
1 New PC. Rolled Or Backup? Then and now this varied with the player. If someone was playing 2 PCs generally, they brought a new pc the next session or after chow break. Most players had a binder of pcs.
2.Joining? Then and now they are slotted in before the next combat and as soon as possible. How they got in did not matter. They just popped in.
3. Level of new pc? Then 1 level below the lowest level PC. Changed to 1 level below average level. Now same level as old pc. Never at first level.
4. Equipment? Then full equipment for their level and some magic items. Changed to full equipment and 1 magic item. Now. Full equipment base on level of pc.
5. Dropped Loot? Varied with group but BEEP wills.