D&D 5E When a PC is dead and gone, what options do the players have at your table(s)?

[grimslade]

I chose ‘Bring your Kid to Work Day’ but I base it on the bottom of whatever tier the party is in. My group is used to harsh death rules and the retainer idea is a good one. 5e is forgiving of mistakes, death saving throws, abundant healing, short/long rest mechanics, but this drives my players to push the limits of their abilities and beyond. I want my heroes’ heroic actions to be weighed against the weight of death if they fail. My players feel the same. There has to be a dialog over death in the campaign. A different group might have different ideas. Like everything else, talk about it and decide before you get too far into a campaign.

 

[clearstream]

It is definitely mechanical for us. There's a sense of progress and achievement that comes with gaining levels, along with fancy new powers that are fun to experiment with. Losing levels (or progress towards the next level) represents a step backwards: a longer period of time before you get new things to play with. The time interval between level ups is already pretty long at my table, so nobody wants to extend that unnecessarily.

Digging into that a bit more, out of curiousity about other ways to play the game, when a player generates a new character are they not getting a burst of new things to play with? Say I die at level 6th: generating a new 6th character is a burst of new things, right? So say, in the same instance, that the lowest level character is 4th. In my campaign (replacement character generated one level below lowest) I'd get a burst of new things being things from 1-3rd level. That's more than any single level gain.

That all doesn't seem to square very well with a motive being "a longer period of time before you get new things to play with" because when you die, you get new things in either scenario. Right?

 

[S'mon]

I normally have a fixed start level for all new PCs. Eg in my Stonehell Dungeon games PCs start at 5th level, bottom of Tier 2. If your example group was in Stonehell the Rogue's player would restart at 5th, so down one. There are PCs of level 5-8 currently, and when PCs start hitting Tier 3 (11th level) I will raise the start level, probably to 8th which I find works well as maximum start level in sandbox campaigns.

If I were running a tight AP type game, 2 or 3 below the highest living PC level works well. So if there are 18th level PCs, new PC starts at 15th.

I try to avoid creating any impression or notion that XP & levels go with the player rather than the PC, so new PC start level is the same for all. I don't want players thinking they are guaranteed
XP/levels through 'time served' or that levels are a pacing mechanism rather than an
earned achievement. But I also want new PCs to be able to contribute.

Had an epic PC death in Stonehell Dungeon today - unfortunate elven wizard-5 Yllorian is looking at old tapestries of the fall of King Magrathor the Sterling Potentate, when he reaches out from the tapestry and squeezes her heart...

22 damage - turned out she had exactly 22 hp.
Death Saves:
Fails the first one.
Rolls the second save with Inspiration - rolls on d20 x2: '1' & '1'. :-O
Arise, corpse-bride of dead king Magrathor...

Somewhat fortunately, the player was just visiting while her regular GM is away this week, and she said she liked the pregen replacement Tiefling Warlock-5 I gave her better, anyway.

 

[Seramus]

That all doesn't seem to square very well with a motive being "a longer period of time before you get new things to play with" because when you die, you get new things in either scenario. Right?

The higher the level, the less likely my players have played with them. Amy has played 12+ low level barbarians, but she has never played a 14th level barbarian. So the latter would have a much higher fun factor for her.

 

[clearstream]

The higher the level, the less likely my players have played with them. Amy has played 12+ low level barbarians, but she has never played a 14th level barbarian. So the latter would have a much higher fun factor for her.

This seems different in our group. Players hardly ever reroll the same class as their lost character. So if Alice lost a Barbarian, chances are her next character is something else, maybe a Wizard. She'll hit new rules irrespective of level the character is reintroduced at. I can imagine that if my players did tend to reroll in the same class then I might feel differently, but this... it doesn't seem so compelling to me. No group I've played in really did that.

 

[Lanefan]

This seems different in our group. Players hardly ever reroll the same class as their lost character. So if Alice lost a Barbarian, chances are her next character is something else, maybe a Wizard. She'll hit new rules irrespective of level the character is reintroduced at. I can imagine that if my players did tend to reroll in the same class then I might feel differently, but this... it doesn't seem so plausible to me. No group I've played in really did that.

I've done it a few times, but not often, and always for one of two reasons:

1. The previous character died so fast I never had a chance to play it (I've had characters die while joining the party!), so I've come right back with the same thing again in order to get to play what I had in mind.
2. The previous character had a hidden class or some other major secret that got exposed at or after its death; and as nobody would expect me to come back with the same thing right away that's the best time to do it: come back with another hidden-class character knowing it'll be a while before anyone suspects anything. (but note this NEVER works twice in a row!)

 

[Seramus]

This seems different in our group. Players hardly ever reroll the same class as their lost character. So if Alice lost a Barbarian, chances are her next character is something else, maybe a Wizard. She'll hit new rules irrespective of level the character is reintroduced at. I can imagine that if my players did tend to reroll in the same class then I might feel differently, but this... it doesn't seem so compelling to me. No group I've played in really did that.

One player always rolls the same class. The rest change it up, but most of them stick to clumps, like one girl always playing martial while another always plays some kind of caster. But that’s not actually the issue. My players have many games and many characters, so it’s not really about going from one character to the next... it’s about higher levels being more fun for my players.