Habeas Corpus
There comes a point when death is no longer scary. The precise moment differs between campaigns, but it generally occurs somewhere in that strange, far country known as High Level.
Here’s what got me thinking about this. After five years of play, my megadungeon players have finally arrived at level 15. One of them died last session. So if you’ll indulge me, I shall regale you with a copy + paste from the campaign log. This excerpt comes from a session entitled “A Cherry and Dwarf Snowcone.”
…Yet you could not rest easy, for that was only the opening salvo. Something huge passed beneath the frozen floor, and it was by no means humanoid. A massive orca made from living ice breached. It was decidedly unfriendly.
“Come here ye fishy bastard!” growled the dwarven barbarian Azagar. “I’ll make a snow cone out of ye!”
Azagar brandished the cherry juice he’d purchased to guard against medusa petrification (“It’s good fer the joints! Keeps ’em limber.”). The huge beast was in fact shedding quite a bit of shaved ice every time you struck, so victory snow cones did not seem out of the question… At least until the creature’s next turn.
If you’ve ever been to Sea World and seen a whale jump, the monster’s next attack went a little bit like that. It landed square atop Azagar, crushed him into the ground, and then began tearing at the poor barbarian’s body, trying to drag the chewy bits into the floor. The luckless dwarf was very dead, and his blood mixed with cherry juice across the ice.
It was therefore a Pyrrhic victory when you killed the elemental leviathan the following round.
Exposure to the Elements: 12,800 XP
“Ummm…” said Laurel. “I know it’s a long shot, but I’ve got this amulet that casts breath of life on you.”
“That only works if you’re wearing it when you die, right?”
“Well I mean… technically.”
Your GM, in his infinite mercy, gave it a shot. Each surviving member of the party got a chance to tempt Azagar’s spirit back into its broken body. You saluted his brave spirit, raged at the dead dwarf, and entreated his warrior’s pride. One of you even held out a makeshift snowcone.
“Ach!” said Azagar, who managed to make his save versus death.
As it turns out, a cherry and dwarf snowcone isn’t half bad.
You might have noticed the Critical Role style resurrection in there. It seemed appropriate for an ad hoc this-shouldn’t-work-but-I’ll-allow-it kind of call. My point in relating this silly story is that, at that moment in the game, I didn’t want to deal with death. That’s because there were no consequences for shuffling off this mortal coil beyond “the game slows down for half an hour while we drag the body back to town.”
You see, when you step onto the distant shores of High Level, death is only an inconvenience. You pay your gold, you cast your spells, and you come back with no injury sustained except to your pocketbook. It was then that I realized only a TPK would pose a real threat to the party, and that those consequences for dying we talked about way back in The Worth of a Life were better reserved for significant deaths rather than oops-I’m-dead games of rocket tag.
What do the rest of you guys think? Should death remain a threat throughout all levels of play? Should you shift towards fates-worse-than-death (e.g. zombification or imprisonment in the lower planes) when the players have the means to trivialize their trips to the Boneyard? What I’m asking is this: Should you strive to keep mortality relevant, or does arriving at High Level mean that the dead condition becomes one more debuff to deal with? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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So long as death always has a relatively significant cost, it’s fine, I think – so long as it costs the party cleric high-level spell slot when it counts, or means the lack of a party member for a few encounters, or like problems. It may remain that way – it may remain a debuff – but so long as it’s a debuff worse than most, I think it’s fine.
I guess there are different ways to look at costs, especially when you’ve got that “this may or may not work” element. In my example, the party were definitely losing a Talisman of Life’s Breath…
http://archivesofnethys.com/MagicWondrousDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Talisman%20(Lesser)Beneficial%20Winds
…For the chance at maybe resurrecting a party member. That seems like a fair cop to me, but I’m sure there are other tables where that would take all the drama out of death.
A couple of years ago if you had asked this question, my response would’ve been to play an E6 or E8 game. If you are not familiar with such, in layman’s terms you level up till only 6 or 8 (depending upon what you choose), and every level thereafter, you gain only bonus feats. Playing an E6 game does one of 2 things, 1st) it maintains the Caster/Martial disparity at a low, manageable level; 2nd) it maintains a death as an actual consequence, and one that isn’t easily dealt with.
Ofcourse, now that I have been associated with Spheres of Power, it can be handled differently. With SoP, a properly built 1st-level healer can a slain creature back to life provided they heal them w/in one round (very similar to Breath of Life). The downside being that all the Raise Dead/Reincarnate/Resurrection spells are locked as Advanced Talents (which explicitly require GM permission for players to take). This means that in a game where advanced talents are restricted, dying is still a serious matter even at level 20.
It’s nice to have a system in place for this sort of thing, but it seems to me that this solution still requires a GM to decide how to implement death. Will an NPC with resurrection magic live in every town, or nowhere in the world? In practice, gating things behind GM permission isn’t much different than gating access to diamonds or Miracle Max NPCs.
So let me ask you: How do you decide whether your PCs have to those Advanced Talents?
Most games I play in don’t allow ANY advanced talents (they are usually mid-low magic worlds). These restrictions are placed across the board between monsters, npcs, and players alike. Player death, outside of Resuscitate (which is Spheres of Power’s Breath of Life), is therefore permanent, making traveling with a healer a very good idea, if not mandatory.
In high-magic games where advanced talents are allowed, we have a homerule that players are usually allowed to pick a single sphere from which to gain they may take advanced talents (and even then no more than 1 advanced talent per 5 or 10 character levels). So even in these situations, finding a caster who is capable of raising the dead is not an easy task (because unlike vancian-casting clerics, you can’t just rest and prepare different spells).
Crazy how much the game assumptions change when you tweak the system. That’s why I was always intrigued by the notion of “the game within the game” that is E6. It seems like an entirely new experience based off of similar but non-identical mechanics.
You could leave it to the players. By that I mean you could dangle a prize in front of them that would be worth it to risk afterlife and limb for… an epic or gestalt level for bringing down a demigod or actual deity…
I remember one use of Use Magic Device, was to not only activate a magic item, but to “convince it” of something that was not true, such as “I am the owner of this device whom it is bound to.”
So the first thing that came to mind above was them trying to convince the amulet that he was wearing it and that he had just died.
All I can picture is a guy wearing this amulet, and the amulet thinks the whole party is somehow wearing it at the same time just because his UMD is so stupidly high…
I think that questing for a rez is the ideal, but if death becomes commonplace as the upper levels approach, the game becomes side quest city. That’s why I went for the “yes and” on this one. It was not the most plot-consequential fight in history, so it didn’t quite feel like it was worth the hassle.
UMD would have been a great call though. 🙂
Player: steals Sir Walter’s intelligent sword
Sir Walter: “HA! My blade answers to me alone knave.”
Player: “Sword, grant me your power.”
Sword: “Okay!”
Sir Walter: “SWORD WTF!”
Sword: “Look, we all know he’s not you, but he’s just so damn convincing.”
*takes notes for Mr. Stabby*
Death should have a significant cost, but at different levels the definition of death should change. There are always bigger worse curses to make sure people can stay down, it makes for an interesting world with such relations to death.
Any examples of “bigger worse curses” from your own games?
There are fates worse than death. DM’s should always keep a few written down on sheet in a back pocket for when the party gets cocky.
I’m always reminded of the priest from Caddyshack in moments like that.
I remember running a session for a bunch of first-time players. They were in the ruins of an ancient floating castle and met some hostile plant people. The fighter went down trying to rescue one of the unconscious party members, and eventually succumbed to death saving throws.
I could tell he was broken up about it, and that’s super not fun for your first session ever. I had to make something up quick.
So I mentioned that one of the other PCs (who had originally come from this ancient castle and had been sleeping in stasis for 1000 years) knew how to operate an ancient Resurrection Machine in the castle. All it required to operate was a diamond, which would be consumed in the process. Luckily the ancient character also had a tiara with such a diamond (since she came from royalty). She sacrificed her diamond and resurrected the fighter, and you could tell that the whole party felt like it was something really epic. High-fives all around.
So yeah, I think I did a good job of turning a really low point for the group into a high point. More experienced role players would’ve easily known that I was winging it, though.
Well done you! So many of these decisions are contextual. That call would have felt cheap to a different party, but it was full on high fives and Booyahs for your guys. That makes it the right call.
Knowing when to make that decision is the real trick. For what it’s worth, it sounds to me like you nailed it.
I’ve three groups who all play with a homebrewed ‘karma points’ system; you slowly accumulate them over multiple sessions of gameplay (typically rewarded for amazing roleplaying), and they only come into effect when your character dies.
Default when a character dies is that you have to roll up a new character; karma points affect what you can do with your new character. For instance they can purchase extra attribute points, or a handful of extra hit points, or additional character traits, DM-granted story-linked feats, etc.
What you automatically get without spending any karma-points at all is the ‘Destiny Dream’; this is where the last actions of your previous character’s spirit (before moving on to whatever afterlife) is to seek out a suitable hero and give them a dream of destiny which is designed to encourage them to take up the threads and goals of the previous character (gives a nice simple way to get the new person into the old group: “Hey I had this REALLY WEIRD set of bizarrely lucid dreams and a bard told me they were about you guys; am I going crazy or did you set a curse on me, or…?”).
Obviously if the player wants a change of alignment this can be a hilarious RPing opportunity (former paladin has an insight that a dubious rogue-type has the capability to finish the mission and restore the rightful ruler to a kingdom; rogue does it not because it’s the ‘just/honorable’ thing but because ‘I could have a ruler owe me a huge favor! Jackpot!’).
Anyhow. If you accumulate enough karma points, you can instead spend them to have an Outsider (of a type matching the character’s alignment) show up and restore that character to life (often with an additional quest-hook debt built in).
But Death still has a major penalty even if you have and use that option: you lose a unique form of accumulated wealth, and have an opportunity cost of whatever interesting character concept you wanted to try out next being boosted by that karma.
The system has been gaining popularity, locally, as one group tries it and then a player from that ends up DMing elsewhere. So the ease of gaining karma, and the value of what it can purchase, has varied a lot in my experience.
But I really like the dynamic it adds.
There’s one group which adopted it but also adopted a houserule that no one dies until hitpoints get to negative three times constitution, and murder is a serious crime with massive in-game penalties. So far it has only come up once in that game. (Which is also a game with a LOT of recurring villains, obviously. After our first session, when we realized what we were getting into, the entire group took a mulligan, as it were, and redesigned their characters. Now everyone has some way of dealing subdual damage, and it’s not just the one player who invested in diplomatic skills!) The player had enough points to save his character, but wanted to use karma points on a new character instead, so I think it did the job of making death’s penalty into an attractive notion. It has consequences, but it makes those consequences interesting enough that it doesn’t ruin play.
And three sessions into playing with that new, karma-boosted character, so far it also seems pretty balanced. He had a LOT of karma built up, but since you have to work with the DM to spend karma, the character ended up still pretty balanced. He just has a higher-than-the-usual number of background flavors that are reflected with actual crunch behind them. If you’re already going to spend a feat and a trait and max out linguistics on languages, for instance, it’s not really unbalancing to spend the karma to get another dozen languages known. Especially at a level with translation magics available. But he is SUPER EXCITED about playing a ‘forensic linguist’). I mention it specifically because that was the highest amount of karma points I’ve ever seen spent at once. (When you use the points, they’re gone. So normally no one ever stockpiles quite that many… but that game has been running for eight years now! So there were a lot!)
Is there any “official karma point document” out there? It sounds wacky enough that I’d want to read the rules in full.
Personally I actually think death should be more risky at higher levels.
I imagine that a level 1 fighter would be chump change for a god compared to a level 20 paladin.
That’s an interesting idea. It also makes some sense from a gameplay perspective – Level 1 deaths tend to involve bad luck, whereas high-level players have so many options and HP that death seems more like “their fault.”
The gods might also be a bit more cautious about letting effectively-immortal Level 20s run around, ESPECIALLY if they are murderhobos.
That’s an interesting thought from a worldbuilding perspective. Conversely however, the play experience might suffer. High level characters are more difficult to play, build, and work into a story.
That makes a lot more sense for the “quest to the underworld” style of resurrection – a level 1 character isn’t well protected from resurrection, but a high level character is worthy of the gods attention and heavily guarded.
It also helps make sense of the fact that you wouldn’t want to send low-level players into the afterlife to retrieve their companions soul, and that if you did it would make no sense for them to be successful.
So I’m of the stance that having a consistent cast of characters is better for the story than a a meat grinder where the people who finish the jorb never even met the people who started the jorb. (Typo is an Wintentional reference)
At the other end, shit like this is really incongruous:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/send-in-the-clones
So we’re gonna meet Fighter 39?
Tell you what, Gabriel. If you keep track of which Fighter # we’re on, I shall bequeath upon you the title of Keeper of Souls and award you level-appropriate XP.
You mean we’re not doing Milestone leveling?
Checks archive No new deaths between the linked comic, and this one. Does this one count, or will he get an actual res?
This one counts.
Well then the next one is 39.
ALL HAIL THE KEEPER OF SOULS!
I remember, back when i was a kid a cartoon i dont liked in it almost every season finale te protagonist summon a giant dragon and they ask him for the wish of resurrecting all the dead people. Death must be important, in D&D, pathfinder, even exalted you are telling the epic lives of these heros called player characters. Their actions and lives are epics, so mast be their death, the heroic sacrifice, te last stand and all that. Like in the old cartoon, if death is cheap then is not death. A dead hero is no less epic than a living one. 0 HP or -20 or whatever dosent need to mean 25000 GP less or a new sheat, death must be DEATH. It needs to be a hook, and epic hook, or a roleplay opportunity. “Yes sure you can resurrect fighter, but first you need to sacrifice a kid… to the forces of good.” “Well fighter used to be dead, now is better and hungry of flesh.” death must be as important as life, resurrection needs to be at least a equivalent exchange, so now lets make death great again.
…Well, there WAS that time Fighter died, got reincarnated as a Bugbear and had to go on a quest to fix that, so it’s certainly happened before.
I am perpetually amused at the accidental continuity going on in my comic.
Dragon Ball Z is an interesting case study. There was an epic quest when Goku died. He had to run across Snake Way, fell into Hell, and then had to study under King Kai to save the Earth. So even though the death was easy to reverse, the stakes were still real.
I think that’s what we mean by making death important in adventure stories. Death itself doesn’t matter as much as the stakes at play.
Of course dying just when you are already late to save the world raises the stakes. In Blades in the Dark, i think, when you die you become a ghost, and then you continue playing to become a robot or a vampire, it makes sense in context, but you are already dead. One less man for the job at hands, one more problem to resolve. This is a situation complete different to just scrap 25000 GP in diamonds and instant resurrection. It is not to make advertise of other comics, but when [REDACTED] dies in the order of the stick that was a hell of a quest to bring him back. That is the kind of good roleplay death that keeps things interesting. Not the “I search my pockets for resurrection chips” or “Mr, jeweler, can you give me three of your best resurrection-grade diamonds, we are going to a dungeon”.
About continuity, have you considere make a few comics like the assemble of the evil party but with the main party traversing a dungeon, or a great Free-for-all between the partys in an epic season finale.
Well I am now.
We just finished Iron Gods this last Saturday (first adventure path I’ve finished since Red Hand of Doom a decade ago) and we were absolutely playing Rocket Tag from about 14th level on. More specifically, my ranged Inquisitor was playing Rocket Tag, with a bow in a laser gun fight. The various antimagic fields were horrifying.
But our DM made the rule thus: You can be resurrected/reincarnated 1+your original Con mod times before you have to remake your character. Having started with 12 Con and died once to a stupidly lucky Disintegrate already, approximately 8 rounds over the three final boss fights were me casting Burst of Speed, then running far away from the melee brute battle fiend who’d closed on me, then casting Heal on myself. The DM enjoyed it, because I was killing his monsters too fast, I enjoyed it because that knife edge of ‘Make the wrong decision and suffer’ is nice and tense, and although we had plenty of diamond dust in our pockets (I was carrying it, to occasionally dip into for Restorations) we all knew that it was only a free ticket for the first couple of punches.
Did breath of life and similar quick-fix solutions count against your total resurrections?
Breath of Life did not, no, as long as we got to it on time. Thing is with the rockets, there’s no guarantee that BoL will actually work, what with being -70 and all. Good times.
I think it’s fine that death becomes basically equivalent to a hockey penalty at high levels. My reasoning is thus:
First, if you’ve been playing a character from low level on, you’ve likely gotten attached to the character. You have plot hooks you want to explore and stories you want to finish telling. It’s not fun to permanently lose a character you’ve likely been playing for literal years. It’s not fun at low level, either, but it’s a lot less of a blow when you’ve been playing the character for weeks or months.
Second, it fits into the progression of the game. Characters are supposed to get more powerful as they progress in level, and what better foe is there to conquer than Death? When the Grim Reaper is nothing more than an inconvenience to your character, that’s when you feel like you’ve made it.
How do you challenge such powerful adventuring parties?
At higher levels it’s a lot harder to justify finding a replacement character in the story. I think it’s fine to make Resurrection harder or less accessible than it normally is in the system but by the time the party becomes some of the most powerful people in the whole kingdom, bringing the dead back to life feels like less of a cop-out than conveniently finding some other equally powerful stranger who happens to want to join your cause in the next town over.
Any interesting quest-related resurrections to report in your games, or do your high level dudes just come back like it ain’t no thang?
In my first Pathfinder game, it was in a homebrew setting, and my DM had decreed that dead was dead. You didn’t come back. Resurrection magic was incredibly rare, and always had DIRE CONSEQUENCES for attempting it, because Death did not like people messing about in her territory.
And I felt a lot more risk whenever I did something stupid and my kobold fire/stone spirit shaman was put in danger, knowing that a diamond and a spell weren’t going to be able to undo it. This also left some interesting moments like my shaman attempting to resurrect an NPC, and having to explain himself to Death (They were on amicable terms, the party had helped clearing out some undead earlier in the story and Death considered the undead totally unacceptable to exist ever under any circumstances,) and having to actually convince Death to LET HIM resurrect the NPC.
It just felt so much BETTER that way than having easy access to get-out-of-spirit-jail-free cards.
How many deaths did you have to deal with in that game? I ask because, if death is a very frequent occurrence, I could picture the calculus changing a little.
We played pretty carefully, since we were worried about dying, so the only times it happened were planned for plot. Our DM could have been a lot more cruel, but we were also looking at some pretty solid strategy and forethought and careful play for a lot of fights.
I‘ve just dumped resurrection and such spells and replaced them with a 1GP worth of diamond dust per 1 HP cost added to cure and heal spells. loosing 1HP per round below 0HP as per usual.
I… What? Are you saying that all cure spells can bring back the dead, but that every minute until you get resurrected costs an additional 10 gp?
exactly, so you better have diamonds ready or else it’s 600gp per hour.
one day costs 14k which is slightly more than ressurection+restoration
but if you’re too scroogy to invest in some scrolls of gentle repose, you should probably stay at home.
Well damn. If gentle repose halts this process, it suddenly becomes a mandatory spell. Interesting little tweak!
Does that feel consequential enough to your players, or do you find that you lose out on that fear of death that all the cool kids are talking about?
I felt they where still extremely reluctant to get even a scratch on their sensitive skins.
I felt they where still very reluctant to get even a scratch on their sensitive skins.
Funny, since I’m playing a Goliath Paladin who swore to purge the world of necromancy, going as far as to refuse to use revival spells and burying the dead, both allied and villainous, as he cannot discriminate who he buries. This mean tat if he is given the chance to bring a teammate back from the dead in the near future, he will refuse.
Will he stand by and let his allies resurrect one another, or will he step in to stop the action? I ask because I can picture that causing some friction in the party.
Currently trying to work that out, but will probably try to stop everyone from reviving and raising dead unless his god tells him it’s ok. Even then, it may be tricky, considering he’s sticking to his oath incredibly strictly to prevent himself from being tempted into performing necromantic acts. Mainly does this because he’s a veteran soldier who lost a LOT of friends and was slowly driving himself mad until his god showed up and offered him another way to remember his friends.
That can be a cool character moment, but if the rest of the players aren’t on board it could also throw a major monkey wrench into the party dynamic. If you haven’t done so already, I strongly suggest running that one by your fellow players between sessions. I imagine that you could keep the shtick if the other players had the chance to plan around it. I’m imagining resurrected characters coming back in disguise or through reincarnate.
I actually haven’t dealt with a PC Death in 5E yet. My GMs are always so afraid to kill someone’s character off that they put time into developing and building.
I have had one party member be irretrievably petrified though.
I told him there was a Medusa about, and the stare at his feet, he didn’t listen. Now he’s a facepalming statue.
Things will probably be more lethal once we enter the Tomb proper.
I’m empathize with that fear. You don’t want to unilaterally end someone’s doorway into the game, you know? That’s why I tend to prefer consulting with the player when it comes to handling death: Do you want to find a way to bring this guy back or is it time to move on?
What is your overall impression of Tomb of Annihilation, btw? I’m interested in the WotC-official hex crawl, but between the riddles and the petrifaction I’m having second thoughts.
The Hex crawl has some interesting locations in it, but it can start to drag. The lost city is amazing. I’ll tell ya aboot the tomb proper once I’m in.
I for one love riddles.
i’m sure I probably said something similar before, but the answer to your question is… “depends”. Depends on the game. Depends on the group. Depends on what the GM is going for.
Trying to have “the one true answer” to bind them all will just result in sadness and frustration (and people being thrown into volcanoes) more times than not.
I always appreciate a little Benjamin Franklin in these scenarios:
In that sense, I always appreciate it when people respond to these discussion questions with, “My group does this because of [reasons].” That seems like a better way to talk about the hobby than one-true-wayism. I know it makes me more receptive to new ideas.
We have a standard rule of if you come back to life you loose a point of Con permanently as your spirit has a little bit less of a grasp on this plane of existence. It affects every character equally but doesn’t make them useless until a high amount of con has been lost We’re working on in-game specifics currently dealing with deformities/madness/soul is now owned by a specific outsider/haunted ect… Each of my campaign worlds has it’s own set of what exactly happens as your soul starts rotting inside your flesh because it has been exposed to some terrible environ in the hereafter. For example in one game I’m about to return to each time the characters die their souls are plunged into the river styxx which causes them to have less of a grip on reality, it also gives a set time limit of bringing characters back after which their souls are irretrievable short of an outside source stepping in on their behalf.
Neat! Any chance you’ve got a write-up for the mechanics of the River Styx rules? I’d be interested to know what that looks like in practice.
I find it funny you mention rocket tag in this one because I was playig Pathfinder Society on Sunday and the table was discussing how high-level D&D/Pathfinder is like a game of rocket tag: the real determiner is initiative. Whoever hits first wins.
That’s why I think a surprise round is the most powerful buff in the game.
I play a lot of systems, but I like making death matter. It is, however, a hard balance to strike. Video games have struggled with death for years, and still there is no “best practice”, even within defined genres. I mean, do you go full on Rogue, where death means you lose all progress, start from level 1, and even have to re-discover what potions and scrolls do? Do you go the opposite and make dying a 5-10 second rehash, where the only penalty is having to redo a room of orcs you just did to have another shot at room 2?
It doesn’t help that different players, no matter how compatible in style and scope, have different expectations and baggage they bring into this discussion. Wizard, the friggin’ drama queen, may love a good death, but Fighter will either demand resurrects because “it’s in the rules. You’re cheating! Agin.” a la gamers, or he’ll just show up with an identical character sheet min-maxed to death, and demand his old stuff back because why not, the other members don’t use swords, etc.
I’ve shared tables with both extremes, and daresay I’ve been “that guy” at somepoint, to someone, because a certain death style didn’t sit right with me. In the end, I think it comes down to knowing your players, like most things in rpgs.
First of all, I appreciate your understanding of Fighter’s character.
Secondly, you seem a level-headed fellow with a healthy dose of perspective. That’s got me curious what kind of death system would bring out the “that guy” in you.
I feel like death at high-levels would be more entertaining if it had different outcomes and different sorts of solutions. The only real way to KEEP someone dead (in 3.5 at least) once you pass the level where Resurrection and it’s ilk start to come online is to imprison their soul (usually in a gem of some sort), and the only way to get them back is to find the baddy that did it, kill them, smash the gem, then take a resurrection pill and call your Cleric in the morning. Repeat ad nauseum.
Maybe if there were more different-ways for death to play out and for it to be well-and-truly permanent and/or lead to a sort of came-back-wrong type of plot, people would see it more as part of the story as opposed to the GM just giving you a time-out.
I appreciate solutions like this:
http://www.archivesofnethys.com/EquipmentMiscDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Quieting%20needles
Those needles don’t rewrite the base resurrection rules, but build upon them to make a more interesting situation within the system.
As a followup to my previous response, I feel like there should also be more ways to defeat death at high levels besides becoming a lich. Timeless Body should be available via questline or simply as a high-level feat. You should be able to swap your soul around while maintaining your status among the living (which can still be pretty evil but at least you can stay pretty). How about a tree bearing peaches of immortality? Where’s the ritual that lets me become a force-ghost? What about turning yourself into a Warforged? (which I guess i kinda like the lich-thing except you’re not evil and undead) Where’s the ever-sleeping king who will arise again when the land is most in need?
I never hear about these sort of options in most campaign-logs.
You make a good point. I know those things exist…
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/3t3r7e/how_to_become_immortal/
https://www.reddit.com/r/exalted/comments/5xdxgo/what_does_eating_peaches_of_immortality_do_to_a/
…But they don’t seem to come into play on the player side. Immortality is more of an issue for NPCs, since their stories aren’t contained in nice little months or years-long snippets. I think you’ve got to make mortality matter within the gamefor it to matter to the players.
That’s why I play GURPS. You don’t just jump back from the dead in GURPS
Now with that attitude you don’t.
But my understanding was that you could tweak everything in GURPS. Surely there are alternative resurrection systems?
It depends on the setting. In GURPS Magic rulebook, mostly used for fantasy settings, resurrection is a ritual magic with very high cost, meaning it requires several mages to cast. Players are unlikely to be able to do it (unless you have large party that specifically built for that)
In futuristic cyberpunk setting there can be an alternative to resurrection via clonning. If you’re playing historical setting, however, people die when they are killed, just like it should be.
The point is, I mostly play settings where death is final, and I see no problem with it. Is it better then “death is cheap?” Depends on how do you prefer it.