What happens when a character dies in your campaign?

[Dirigible]

His body is ritually quartered and devoured raw by his companions. With a nice red wine.

 

[arwink]

My baseline is the average party level, but that's entirely variable. Someone who started at a lower level, or is choosing this option because it'll net them a higher level character than the one that died, is probably going to be dissapointed.

My only other rule is that you don't ever start lower than the level you would have come back at, given the nearest reasonable raising magic for your parties APL.

On the whole, it hasn't been a huge problem.

 

[Argent Silvermage]

Oh right! Like I'm the only one who will tie a person up to a pole and shoot him/her. You're all liers.

 

[Neo]

My Rule has always been replacement characters are 3 levels below the highest level in the party.

However for the current campaign the players persuaded me to change it to 2 levels below the highest.. though noone has died in the current one yet so it remains to be seen wether or not I keep the change.

 

[Darklone]

Oh right! Like I'm the only one who will tie a person up to a pole and shoot him/her. You're all liers.

I voted for the same option ... though we don't shoot him, we hack him to pieces with tomahawks.

Guess we should have done with the last few...

Ehem.

Ok. If a PC dies, he gets raised (happened once in 3 years now) or he starts with a new char at half the average group XPs. He catches up soon enough with the new XP system. Ah well, and the big chars die too.

 

[Cor Azer]

Well, often the other players try to get the character raised.

If that's not an option or the dead PCs player doesn't want to be raised, the player usually makes a new character one level lower than his old character, or one level lower than the party average (whichever is higher).

This is to keep PCs who die a lot from falling into a vicious circle of dying, and then coming back at progressively lower levels which cause them to die again, and on, and on.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

I forgot.

Sometimes we just sacrifice them to Santa (and his evil elves).

But that's just trying to live up to media stereotypes.

 

[diaglo]

all characters start at lvl 1.

edit: and Morrus the player is required to commit sepaku ala Blackleaf. we don't ever shoot them.

 

[Desdichado]

Pretty easy for me; I keep all players at the same level.

 

[Liolel]

Average party level is what my group uses, but It has only come up when someone gets tired of their character for various reasons.

The only time a character has died in our campaign the character was raised with a raise dead spell.