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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5635580" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think anyone ever has a right to be miffed.  The belief that you have a right to be miffed is one of the three or four most important sources of evil in this world.  There is no evil a man will not do if you tell him he has a right to be angry.  So, I'm not going to tell you that.   Being miffed does no one any good.How I handle player character death depends alot on the group.  Some groups I've played with expect to start over from 1st level.  The general feeling is that if you played a character, you had to earn it.  However, I really haven't seen that as the preferred way of play since 1e, when the XP system was set up to handle it (the XP required to go from X+1 was the same as the XP required to get to X) and players had a more Hack mentality.   In modern groups, I typically try to have the 'death tax' be roughly equal to what you'd suffer if you underwent raise dead.   Death has to be unpleasant in order to be meaningful.  Otherwise you'll get players hiding behind the stack of dead Bards.  I try to do whatever I can to make the new character's introduction to the group as logical as possible.  Converting NPC's with an existing relationship to PC's has been one preferred method, provided that the player is intrigued by the NPC's character concept.  Converting henchmen over to PC's has happened several times.  Otherwise, you try to work something out and spend at least a little time RPing the introduction of the new team mate to the group.   With good RPers in the party this usually isn't a problem.   But generally speaking, I don't do, 'You meet this new guy in a bar and suddenly you feel like he's your life long friend'.   After a recent multi-PC death, I had the new PC's be members of another adventuring party who had been on the trail of the bad guys from a different angle.  After a session or so, the two groups met up and agreed eventually to join forces in pursuit of a common objective.However, I think your anger with the DM is misplaced.  The real problem her is that the party apparantly had the resources to raise a PC from the dead and choose not too.   That's unbelievable to me.  One of the unwritten rules of social gaming is that regardless of how greedy your character is supposed to be, you find some sort of cover that explains why your character always helps the other party members when push comes to shove.  In that situation, I'm not sure that the DM had any other choice but to increase the death tax to something higher than the cost of Raise Dead (-5000 gp, loss of one level) because it seems to me like the party was at the very least metagaming the death on the assumption that party resources would increase more by forcing the DM to introduce a new character than they would by taking care of an existing one.  I've seen things like that happen before.  In a group where the DM was somewhat stingy with treasure and player deaths were high, the party began ghoulishly looting their own because new characters where introduced with significant resources.   The DM ultimately had to crack down on what was essentially treating suicide as a means of character advancement.</blockquote>

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