From Hell’s Heart
It was a tough session. Your plucky band of merry muderhobos nearly cleared the Crypt of the Trap-o-Mancer, but that last flight of poisoned arrows was one trap too many. Bob’s bard bled out within sight of the exit. There was much weeping, a somber burial scene, and the traditional looting of the corpse. (“Dibs on the knife!”)
So there you are a week later, happily prepping your session notes when a MyFace notification pops up. And in a raspy voice from beyond the grave, Bob’s bard whispers those fateful words: “Wait! I had cover.”
In the wider world of gaming, there are certain phrases that cover this situation. “You took your hand off the piece!” and “A card laid is a card played!” both spring to mind. If the initiative has moved on through another couple of turns, and especially if the session ended yesterweek, the natural response is to shrug your shoulders and say, “That sucks, but it already happened.” The other option is to declare a full retcon, but breaking the integrity of the game world always rankles. That leaves us with the other other option, which generally lies in the land of narrative shenanigans, e.g. “You wake up in a pinewood box. Roll to attack the coffin lid.”
Here’s today’s discussion question for you guys: In your opinion, what’s best practice here? Is there a statute of limitations on fixing rules errors after the fact? Adjusting a few errant hit points might not be a big deal, but saying that Bob’s bard’s funeral never happened is a bit of stretch. So how would you handle it? You missed a rule, the PC died, and now you’ve got to figure out some way to move forward. Let’s hear about your preferred retcon strategies down in the comments!
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Due to this very issue, I adopted a 1 Round Rule. You have one round to catch a missed modifier. We can’t be expected to go back three rounds of combat just because you remembered a +2 somewhere. Many of us use running totals rather than sheets with calculations for hp loss, and it can be annoying to have to keep going back. To counter this, I’m usually really good at keeping up with player’s modifiers even if they aren’t, and I’ll often ask “Does that include Haste/Protection from Evil/Bless?” on important Saves or big effects. I have actually stopped and recalculated someone’s bonus in front of them from memory before. I’ve always had a good memory.
That being said, I did have one major event like this during my Rise of the Runelords campaign. The players were in an area filled with a lot of Fighter/Wizard/Eldritch Knights, and were staring down at something like their fourth fireball save of the round when my Paladin (my partner, no less), asks
Paladin: “What does Globe of Minor Invulnerability do again?”
Me: “Makes you immune to all spells of third level or lower. Why?”
Paladin: “Cause Greater Angelic Aspect says it acts like a Lesser Globe of Invulnerability out to 20 ft.”
Dead Wizard: eyes bug
Wounded Slayer: “Wait, what?”
Me: “…be glad you’re hot. So None of those fireballs actually do anything as the icon of Sarenrae appears in front of you.”
Paladin: “I saved the wizard again!”
High level play, man. When those buffs start stacking, there’s no telling what crazy modifiers will come out of the woodwork.
This was after my speech at the last time they had a sudden “Wait, I forgot to add the +2 from Protection from Evil”, which was basically “I will do my best to help you with remembering your modifiers, but I have an entire world to keep in my head as well. I need you to be responsible. If you want to survive, you will keep dutiful track of your buffs. I didn’t write this module, it will kill you.”
Wait. Was “be glad you’re hot” to them out of character or in character? Because one is funny, the other is kinky.
I think the most important question here is: does the player want the character back? Do they want it back so badly that they’re willing to do a major retcon? I think it’s important to look at this calmly, after the initial shock of “wait, I should be alive!” wears off. If the answer is positive, the rest of the table isn’t vehemently opposed to the idea, and this is a one off situation rather than something that happens repeatedly, then I see no reason not to let the player have their beloved spreadsheet back.
As for how to go about it? Who knows. Maybe one day the party discover that their friend’s tomb had been vandalized, the body stolen, and the PC wakes up in a Wizard’s laboratory? Maybe as Randy the Recently Deceased is waiting his turn in the River of Souls, he hears Pharasma screaming: “Damn it, Tony! Look at the numbers again, the guy clearly had cover! One more screw up like that and I’m feeding you to the Majora’s moon over there, I swear!”. Perhaps the PC simply wakes up in their bed as if nothing happened, except that they are now being followed by this chatty, slightly perverted floating skull that seems to know more about them than it lets on? And if all else fails, I leave you with this piece of sage advice I once found on reddit:
When in doubt, Doppelgangers.
Is Tony an inevitable or a psychopomp?
Neither, Tony is a reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocBEaoW5okc
Who is the poor lady in black, grieving over the death of Cleric? An adoptive parent (or adopted daughter, given dwarf longevity), a hopeful lover, or a random mourner?
Laurel likes to leave her own commentary when the comic preview goes up on Patreon. This week’s commentary: “Why is this lady mourning cleric? WHO KNOWS!”
She does look a lot like Barmaid, albeit lacking a mole. Makes sense she’d mourn a dwarf customer given her profession.
Alternately, she’s a necromancer/alchemist, scoping out a new recruit/flesh golem addition.
You know, disguising as a mourner is a really good idea for somebody looking to steal fresh bodies. Hang around funerals crying until everyone’s gone, then break out the shovels
Heh. It’s been a while since I wrote this one, but you reminded me of something. I just double-checked the script for this comic. Here’s what I’d written:
Hmm. Mourner is blonde with blue eyes, while Barmaid is blonde with brown eyes. So not her. (Also, Mourner is not nearly chesty enough.)
Looking through the character list, the only other blond with blue eyes is… Fighter.
So, um…. Is Fighter trying to pull a Wizard in order to sneak into the graveyard and dig up Cleric’s body to take in for a raise? Or is this another Aristocrat? (Wait, Fighter had a ‘tragic backstory’ of his family dying. He shouldn’t have a little sister.)
What happens with the player that can’t come up with his own original idea, so just copies what someone else at the table does?
Can’t be Fighter. You know that blonde chick at the bottom of the page? The one in the Handbook of Erotic Fantasy ad? Let’s just say that the first comic in that series involves a Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity.
In other words, you noted that “Mourner is not nearly chesty enough” to be Barmaid. The same holds true for Fighter.
Joke: she’s Fighter’s mom with eternal youth through necromancy.
Generally, as a gm, if a player’s character dies (when they shouldn’t have), because the player forgot to add X, Y, or Z modifier to their AC, Saves, or Attack Roll, then it is tough luck.
If the player’s character died because I forgot some rule that would’ve had some significant impact on the encounter (such as elves being immune to ghoul’s touch), then the character lives (the character was only mostly dead, or some other form of excuse).
Of course, the severity of the retcon, really depends upon how long the player or myself to realize a mistake has been made. If for example, it has been 3+ sessions and more than 1 month IRL, the character may have survived, but is now effectively an NPC.
Get in here, Miracle Max!
https://alexkourvo.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/006.jpg?w=450&h=253
If the session is over, all rulings stand as is. I have no problem retconing a bit if I made an error and my players catch it. But if it’s a few days later, well that’s just bad luck in that case.
Luckily my players are very rules savy and the most that ever came up after a session was more in the line of “Damm, I could have used X ability here and we would have been fine”
Anything that comes up days after the session will be filed under “We’ll do better next time and remember that rule”
Even if the death of the character is the last thing that happened in the session?
Your statement of “I could have used ability X here” actually reminded me of a similar situation. I ended up putting some custom content in the Rise of the Runelords due to a certain boss escaping both her encounter and the encounter where she shows up next to her superior. (Dimension Door and Invisibility saw her outlive her boss.) So she set up her own ambush in town that I actually built so that our Life Oracle could use one of his stranger abilities that I had noticed gives him Elemental Type for a few rounds. Elementals are immune to Critical hits and Sneak Attacks, and so I had him beset by rogues and assassins after a pretty lady had given him a draught of poisoned wine. instead of rendering himself mostly immune to the rogues with a Swift Action, he basically stood there and healed himself after every round while trying to move for the door and eventually threw himself out a third story window and fled in his boxers.
He was very angry at me out of character until I looked at him and said “Why didn’t you use this ability? It would have literally cakewalked this encounter. Player X even pointed out how it nullified criticals three sessions ago.” He looked sheepish as Player X started laughing.
In general, yes. Although I have to say this situation hasn’t come up yet in my games. So maybe I’d change my mind if it would.
But as I mentioned, most of my players are very rules savvy and have no problem poiting out when I f*d up. I’m also quite lenient when char death happens, so if they want to scour the rules for 10 minutes to save the char I’ll happily let them.
I don’t do hidden rolls in my games, due to using FantasyGrounds, so all deaths so far always came down to the dice
Personally I am on the side of changing it if it’s on a short enough time-scale that it is easy to change, but if we have moved on to the rest of the battle, much less on to the next session, then it is too late.
Yeah… I was getting quite a few, “Sorry, it was actually 37 damage, not 35,” at my table. For minor stuff like that, I was quick to institute a “no take-backsies” clause just to keep the game rolling. When it comes to character death and big-deal outcomes, I tend to be more flexible.
I think I’d have to look at it on a case-by-case basis.
I suspect most of the time, unless an untimely death was the last action in combat, it would be hard to argue that the PC should be brought back. Sure, they had cover for that attack, but if they were on single-digit HP and the fight went on for four more rounds there’s a good chance that they weren’t long for this world anyway. Also, if the fight went on for four more rounds, it’s impossible to know exactly what would have happened, and that’s too much to worry about.
I think HadACookie has a good point above though; how much does the player want their PC back, and how excited are they to play their new character?
That’s my response to character death in general: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-worth-of-a-life
My party mostly agrees with the “once its done, its done even if it was wrong” code, with the caveat that any and all treasure on an adventure comes with a resurrection tax before being divided, so if anybody does bite it, and they want their character back, the option is there. The idea behind the tax being that survival is a team effort, so if the fighter gets killed by a trap, the rogue doesn’t then get to have a big monetary windfall while the fighter loses everything he would have earned to paying off the cleric.
I don’t mind metagame policies like that. Sure it breaks the integrity of the fiction a little (“He’s dead! Why shouldn’t I get to spend his loot?”) but I think it’s well worth preventing hurt feelings.
On the other hand a shared agreement to pay for each others needed Resurrection could very well be an in-character thing, similar to other more mundane work related accident liability contracts.
It can even be justified with the exact argument towards not giving incentives towards hurting the interest of the group for a chance of a greater payday..
If ever there were something that would animate a rules lawyer with such burning passion as to bridge the veil of death and return the spirit to the body, it would surely be a single point of bonus. Even if that bonus would not have affected the outcome.
Zombie Cleric is a curious one – how would that work in Handbook-world? Would his god still accept him? For that matter, if we are talking about a self-motivated undead, as opposed to one created through necromancy of various forms, would they necessarily be considered Evil? No desecration has occurred, the spirit simply returned to its body like with Discworld’s Reg Shoe.
If you follow the Way of the Rules Lawyer, dying to an improper ruling is a mortal sin. That’s plenty of motivation to become a Rules Revenant.
It could open up a side quest.
An agent of one god knocks at the door.
A god of fate has cheated. Your friend should have lived, but the rules were bent so he would fall.
To set what has err’d back on the correct path, you must go forth to reclaim his soul.
The “god of fate” is named Phil. Dude picks his die up before anyone else can read it.
I’m with the “1 round/turn” crowd. If you realize you could have survived due to something not having been calculated or accounted for properly within a round (or two, sometimes I’m generous†), good on you, you’re saved.
Otherwise, to bad, that time has passed.
† Likewise if the death happened “off screen” (down in pit trap, in a side room, in the belly of a beast, etc) and they could have just missed out on the intervening time somehow, I’m also lenient on a PC’s survivability. In other words as long as it doesn’t disrupt events that have transpired since the death, I’m okay to a Character surviving an ‘accidental’ death of that nature.
I know what you mean now, but I would like you to know that my brain saw the phrase “1 round/turn” and I found myself sitting here like, “How can you do something one round per turn?” It may have been minutes or hours before my eyes uncrossed. Derp. 😛
I love to cause brainlock. Especially when I can do it at 10ft/yard.
So I was in a sticky situation, the last remaining player a wizard had a way to teleport a short distance and a cantrip to fire a bolt of fire. He repeatedly teleports from a charging plant triceratops and each round it tries to attack but he teleports away. But he can do this a finite amount of times and they’re counting down hit points and by the end my math told me that the creature had like 5 hit points.
I was off by a little bit what with the creature being a bit more vulnerable so the party is retreating essentially upset about the loss when they correct my math. I have the creature go very still for a long time then suddenly explode as I have a horn from the triceratops land at the wizard’s feet which I say has magical essence and could be made into a powerful staff. I screwed up and wanted to reward them properly
Different rules apply to GM screw-ups. Good on ya for making it right!
I don’t quite get what the screw-up was though. Did you forget that it was vulnerable to fire or something?
I simply added the damage up wrong forgetting to add an intelligence modifier. I thought he dealt 112 damage not 120 which was the creature’s hp
Nah, it may be expensive yes, but you can kill three guys with one shot and have them pin-up into a wall, or the ceiling. In any case try to stuff a potato in it 🙂
I recognize individual words in this statement, but whatever those words are trying to do together as a group is beyond mortal comprehension.
Eh? What do you mean?
o_O¡
Kinda i send the wrong comment. It’s not eldritch gibberish but information without context. Its about a rifle that can pin-up people to the walls and ceilings, even three at the same time, f they are lined up. And that people could find useful to put a potato on the rifle. That should give the context, its about a game 🙂
Now about today topic, since i am lay enough to not bother to search for the misplaced comment i will just give up the minute. There will be not retcon. Retcon is a story tool not a rules one. Once the turn of a player is finished, BUT Before the net player turn begins, is allowed to say: “Holy dice, DM, i forgot about cover”. Then, IF, the DM allows it, the player can redo the math and fix the causality of the game. ELSE, he isn’t allowed to do that since that could, and WILL, interrupt the flow of the game and create tension among the player. In other words, Screw you it’s my turn now so stop whining 🙂
My rule. I’m a person, I mess up. But the game goes on. If I mess up and you don’t catch it by the end of the session, it’s done.
I figure, I may be a person, but if at least 6 people all nod and agree and go along with a person dying for 6 hours, the guy is dead Jim, nothing to be done.
If I’m wrong, the guy jumps up, possibly from the grave, possibly from the casket.
My mental image: https://www.dustygroove.com/images/products/m/meatloaf~~~_batoutofh_101b.jpg
I don’t know why, but there is something just hilarious over how Lauren depicts horrified/shocked individuals facial expressions (see the ‘tumor familiar takeover’ and ‘chop treant in front of druid’ comics for more examples)
I do:
https://www.scad.edu/academics/programs/sequential-art
Girl’s got skills AND training. 🙂
Who’s the mourner?
I’m a little too on point with remembering rules for that situation to happen. I’ve actually gotten allies killed by pointing out rules. We had a guest player. Against my warnings they ran ahead. They met an ambush of 10 Quadrones. Each one has 4 shortbow attacks at +4 for 1d6+2 (5) damage.. 40 arrows later they were down.
Them: All right, I guess I’m making death saves. Someone come get me.
Me: Wait, I assume some of those hits were after you were down. If you take any damage while you’re down that’s a failed death save.
GM: Yeah, you’re dead, sorry.
Laurel likes to leave her own commentary when the comic preview goes up on Patreon. This week’s commentary: “Why is this lady mourning cleric? WHO KNOWS!”
Hmmm, I’d probably handle it on a case by case basis. But if the player is attached enough to their character, you can always pull the old “you only appeared to be dead” thing. Because hey, that happens IRL so it’s not THAT unreasonable.
And there really are any number of ways to excuse someone being dead coming back to life in a game if it was established they were for sure dead.
Just a player coming to a new session where their last had died and bringing a reason why they didn’t die instead of a new character sheet is probably proof enough of their attachment to the character. And boy is it a lot easier to say “they got better” than it is to tell someone to make a new character right then and there while everyone else tries to play. Or just as likely the session gets derailed as everyone else screws around while waiting for the new character to get finished.
See also the Marvel universe. 😛
Have you ever made up a narrative reason for someone to come back in a game? Was it straight “they got better,” or did you go for wacky afterlife subplots or other narrative tricks?
Marvel was exactly what I was thinking of there, yeah. Heh.
The only time I can recall where I was in a game where a character died and the player didn’t also happen to just vanish from the game (not because their character died I’m pretty sure just… life) was in the big Star Wars game trilogy. And this doesn’t really count because they died off-screen post-game.
After the first game in our trilogy my character and their partner in jedi-crime (also other crimes I suppose) faked their deaths and eventually died for real. But they’d well prepared for that and were sort of force user geniuses so they figured out all sorts of ways to manipulate force-ghosty stuff before they eventually dis-incorporated as powerful force users are wont to do.
Mine had become part of their home planet’s unique massive force crystal and could force project themselves wherever they needed to be (though at that point they mainly operated as planetary father-figure/myth with a guiding hand).
My partner had in turn figured out a method of getting others to go through a ritual that would bring them physically back to life.
…Which unbeknownst to us was the main plot of the second game in the trilogy. Because the GM apparently really wanted to play into our desire to have those original characters have a real legacy. Also on point there, the character I played in the second game was a droid created by both our old characters, in part for this very reason (again, unknown to me).
Good on that GM! I feel like half the trick of sitting behind the screen is paying attention to what your players want and then giving it to them.
My theory on this is that things like that are going to happen. If we don’t catch them, I’m not rewinding time for you unless someone either has time h4xx or a wish spell. Even then, rezzes are inexpensive at my table. Five thousand gold gets you a Get-Out-of-Hell Free token, complete with a trip straight back to your body!
That said, I am ENTIRELY open to someone, with enough preparation and clever use of their powers/skills/magic devices/scrolls/etc doing something like that… and if they just want to TRY to manipulate the forces of time in an area of high magic concentration for whatever reason, I am likely to let them ATTEMPT such with a caster level roll, or even a good old ‘roll the bones of fate’ attempt.
I tell my players every so often that I don’t want them to be afraid to just TRY things. Obviously, it should make logical sense that whatever they’re going to try is at least plausible, but ultimately, I want to see them get creative when things are bad. That kind of stuff leads to great stories to share with friends and strangers.
So in other words, when PC death is on the line, the PC gets a narrative stake in what happens with resurrection? If I’m hearing you right, then I subscribe to a similar philosophy: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-worth-of-a-life
So right now, one of my players died. N20 x3 crit from an ‘all the crit features’ magic weapon. Completely metal death scene-Bloodrager Lizardfolk in Bloodrage speared through the heart. Peel of thunder rings out… and the party tank is on the ground, leaking blood.
After the session ended, the player and I talked about how we wanted to resolve the situation-which I feel is the most important step there. It may be my game, but it’s about how they play it. And they threw me a bit of a curve ball and asked if they could keep playing the character, but come back as a different class because ‘death changes a person.’
I mulled it over… my world is a pretty big place with a lot of possibilities. They were a Bloodrager with the Demonic bloodline, and they wanted to respec to Oracle. Thought about it… and realized pretty quickly that not only could I MAKE that work, I could make it work very well in the framework of my entire setting.
So yes. Let’s be enablers of imagination and unique character ideas. Sometimes things may get a bit weird, but it’s role playing-if you can’t get a bit weird in RP, where does that really leave you to experiment?
I think I have mentioned this before, but there was once a fight where, at the end, the party Barbarian de-raged and fell over, unconscious, at -6 HP. Now, this wasn’t a super-big deal because we had healing right there, but right after this happened we remembered that he had DR 1/-. Some quick counting later and we concluded that he had probably been hit 6 or more times in the fight (all enemy attacks were physical). So the Barbarian wins the fight, falls over from exhaustion, then remembers that he is tougher than that and gets back up. Which was way more amusing than just remembering the DR to begin with.
You know? I’d never thought of it before, but I really like “You wake up in the coffin.”
I like this. As long as it was an oversight that would have clearly changed the encounter in their favor, I’d allow this as a solid compromise for letting them not be stuck with the missed rule.
I’m fine with a character death coming from an unlucky dice and bad circumstances, but I hate the idea of a death caused by meta-incompetence. The d20 provides half the reality of a game as it makes the different between expectations and execution, but the rules are what create a consistent universe that allow a sense of “reality” Without the rules, you’re just a bunch of guys circlejerking each others improv writing skits.