What do you do with the dead guy's stuff?

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Depends on the dead guy in question, the stuff on the dead guys corpse, and variables inherent to the particular campaign.

In other words we divvy it up or sell it almost without exception.

 

[Aaron L]

In my game, PC death is generally a light exp penalty (100xp per level) and starting gold appropriate for the level. But it just dawned on me that my players could all kill themselves one at a time and double the party money. So I need a better solution

If this ever happened in any game I was involved in, I would immediately walk away in disgust and tell everyone involved that they are completly ridiculous.



When a character dies in one of my games, the party decides what happens to his belongings based entirely on thier characters personalities. They may donate his wealth to his family, they may take it for themselves. They may sell it. Setting up some kind of metagame rule to cover this totally in-game situation seems kind of repugnant to me.


If someone tried to come in with "my old characters brother" and expect to get all of his old gear, well... that wouldnt happen, because I wouldnt play with the type of people who would try to pull something like that. New characters start out with appropriate gear for thier level, at eaither party average level or one level lower. Im not going to penalize people for thier characters dying, losing a character is penalty enough already. I think trying to give more "encouragement" for them to avoid dying is a bit uncalled for.

 

[Thurbane]

Funny thing is, I was suggesting the "older brother" option from a DMs perspective, yet everyone seems to have assumed it is some kind of con that players would pull. It was just a suggetion for limiting an influx of magic by keeping the existing amount of magic for the players new character rather than giving the new character WBL.

I never thought the idea could raise such hackles.

OK, now to REALLY open myself up to a public beating...I think WBL is one of the worst things to happen to D&D in the new editions. Instead of magic items and treasure being a reward for good adventuring, they have become merely standard wages. Magic items have lost their wonder and mystery, since anyone with a few levels and feats can sit down and churn them out wholesale.

...which will of course meet with howls of "OMFG but you MUST slavishly obey WBL to make sure encounters are balanced!". Which I have never quite understood. Sure, the CR system is a good guideline, and the CR systems assumes a certain level of wealth, but come on. Why not trust your DM to excercise a bit of common sense with encounters without needing a strict mathematical formula to do so. The whole CR/WBL vicious circle reeks of video game logic to me. You can't fight the end of level boss until you've got the Green Key and Red Key from rooms 22 and 23...

Here's a poser for you: say no one in my party has a ghost touch weapon, and the party does not include a cleric, and I throw a group of Spectres at them. They might well be within WBL and CR parameters, but will most likely annihilate the party anyway.

Bottom line - CR and WBL are wonderful guidelines, but it irks me when players demand their DMs follow them to the letter of the law, else they are horrible DMs who hate their players, apparently...

Or maybe I'm just a crusty old man who can't let go of previous editions.

 

[Kmart Kommando]

Our Age of Worms campaign has never had a cleric. The undead we encounter all have to be beaten down, not scared off or exploded by turning. And there is quite a lot of undead running around. We have had the wizard making the biggest dent in incorporeal creatures with magic missile, but it was still a balanced encounter.

 

[Thurbane]

Our Age of Worms campaign has never had a cleric. The undead we encounter all have to be beaten down, not scared off or exploded by turning. And there is quite a lot of undead running around. We have had the wizard making the biggest dent in incorporeal creatures with magic missile, but it was still a balanced encounter.

OK then, party with no cleric or arcane blaster...and believe me, I have seen such parties...

My point stands - irrespective of the CR/WBL/ECL system, a savvy DM must still exercise some common sense and forethought into encounters...he cannot simply assume that anything that follows the letter of the CR system is neccessarily balanced for his particular party. CR/WBL is not a replacement for a good DM.

 

[Kmart Kommando]

Actually, we have 1 arcane blaster, 1 arcane melee masher, 1 psionic blaster (who isn't always there), 1 psionic/arcane blaster, and a Healer, total of 9 characters (and 9 players). The Healer can actually keep up with the party's healing needs most of the time, though we do tend to burn a lot of Revivify spells. We miss the cleric buffs sometimes, but we manage. One person made a cleric, and found she didn't like it and tried to suicide. Which was amusing, but totally impossible while buffed. The only guy with UMD got lost when I swapped out to play a swordsage when B9S came out.