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<blockquote data-quote="Kelleris" data-source="post: 3369619" data-attributes="member: 19130"><p>But a threat is just the chance of a penalty.&nbsp; You can't turn one into another, they're not related like that.&nbsp; The penalty of death without resurrection magic is that you don't get to play that character anymore - but in any game I've ever seen you're free to play another one - whereas with standard resurrection magic the penalty is that you generally lose a level and a wad of cash.&nbsp; You seem to think the penalty for death is both too light (trivializing it) and too heavy (because it causes character parity problems).&nbsp; That's not necessarily an inconsistent position, of course, but it's weird to argue that way - I'm guessing you mean that the penalty is a bad one not because of degree but of type, but I can't see how you can argue that getting killed isn't a penalty of some kind.&nbsp; It suggests to me that you really don't like resurrection magic for some other reason (flavor or verisimilitude or something), or the logical approach would be to find the right penalty to assess for raising someone from the dead and use that rather than banning it outright.&nbsp; I agree that the level-loss thing is not a great way to do it, actually - my approach is to give the affected character a negative level that lasts until they level up again or until a year and a day passes.&nbsp; As a penalty, it's impermanent but still significant enough with the gp cost to penalize death enough to make it a relevant threat in my games, and as a nice side effect it encourages voluntary downtime, the lack of which is my biggest conceptual problem with D&amp;D games.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="Kelleris, post: 3369619, member: 19130"] But a threat is just the chance of a penalty. You can't turn one into another, they're not related like that. The penalty of death without resurrection magic is that you don't get to play that character anymore - but in any game I've ever seen you're free to play another one - whereas with standard resurrection magic the penalty is that you generally lose a level and a wad of cash. You seem to think the penalty for death is both too light (trivializing it) and too heavy (because it causes character parity problems). That's not necessarily an inconsistent position, of course, but it's weird to argue that way - I'm guessing you mean that the penalty is a bad one not because of degree but of type, but I can't see how you can argue that getting killed isn't a penalty of some kind. It suggests to me that you really don't like resurrection magic for some other reason (flavor or verisimilitude or something), or the logical approach would be to find the right penalty to assess for raising someone from the dead and use that rather than banning it outright. I agree that the level-loss thing is not a great way to do it, actually - my approach is to give the affected character a negative level that lasts until they level up again or until a year and a day passes. As a penalty, it's impermanent but still significant enough with the gp cost to penalize death enough to make it a relevant threat in my games, and as a nice side effect it encourages voluntary downtime, the lack of which is my biggest conceptual problem with D&D games. [/QUOTE]

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