The Worth of a Life
Raising the dead is an expensive business. You’ve got to strike dark bargains with unsavory entities, shell out for a king’s ransom worth of diamonds, or spin the reincarnation wheel and hope you don’t come back as a lizardfolk or some crap. But no matter how you make your way back from death’s cold domain, there is always a cost to the process, and you can count yourself lucky if that cost is in gold.
Sound fair? Well I hope so, because here comes the controversial part: as a GM, I don’t like permadeath. Or rather, I don’t like permadeath without player buy-in. I’m running on the theory that tabletop role-playing games are an act of collaborative storytelling. Sure the guy at the head of the table has the lion’s share of narrative control, but the lowly players ought to have some input as well, especially where their characters are concerned. Players, after all, are the people you as a GM are trying to entertain. If their entire experience of the game world is bound up in the trials and tribulations of a single character, why in the world would you unilaterally decide that character is no longer a part of the story?
OK, sure. It “takes away from the realism” and creates players who “aren’t scared of consequences.” But you know what? We’re in the land of action, adventure, science-fiction, and fantasy. There are a thousand different ways to justify miraculous returns from the dead. That’s why, when a PC in one of my games dies, I immediately ask them if they’d like to roll up a new guy or help me come up with a reason to resurrect their character. There will always be consequences, and in many cases these will be worse than death. For some that might mean swearing allegiance to a new deity. For others (cough Thief cough) it might mean losing out on 5,000 gold.
So how about you guys? How do you handle it when players kick the bucket? Do you go with permadeath, willy-nilly resurrection, or some balance of the two?
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In one campaign, I’ve been saved from the brink of death a few times, actually brought back from death by our cleric, I owe that guy so much diamonds, thank goodness we killed a dragon shortly beforehand, and have one character “lost” to another plane- and have no idea if she will come back at any point in time as a baddy, but for now she’s basically dead.
“Basically dead” is the best time for a dramatic return.
I’m on the same page here. Heck, it’s less fun for me as a GM if a good characters dies and I suddenly have to abandon all my character related ideas and quests and make a whole batch of new ones. It’s just more fun to come up with an interesting cost than toss out a good character because of a single bad call or an unlucky dice roll or two.
I guess I’m less controversial than I thought. When this mess comes up on forums I always hear, “But consequences! Teach them to respect the dungeon!” But I don’t think anybody wants to die, even if it is only temporary. It’s a pride thing first and foremost, and even if you can’t “win” an RPG, dying seems a whole lot like losing. Nobody likes that.
Actually, Lizardfolk is like the best thing to reincarnate into. Natural AC and good racial abilities? Hell yeah.
Indeed it is. However, it is hard to win fair maiden with scaly visage, and adjusting your armor can be a pain in the purse as well as the tail.
Nah, fair maidens dig scaly visages! That’s how Half-Dragons happen!
I choose to believe that alter self is how half-dragons happen.
I had a player who was a druid and only showed up twice. Conveniently, the only two times that the barbarian outright died. So, naturally, the druid resurrected him. We did the spectacle, dimming the lights, playing ominous music, and chanting some B.S., culminating in the player rolling to see who re reincarnated as. And the first time, our half-orc reincarnated as… a half-orc. So, effectively, himself. Disappointment. He was thrilled. The second time, same thing. And he resurrected as… D.M.’s choice.
I made him a gnoll. And the third time he died, he was fighting a necromancer, and they ran away. Sometimes, dead is better.
If your buddies left his body behind after fleeing from a necromancer, I somehow doubt that he’s 100% dead. :/
I don’t mind PCs coming back from the dead, I really only object when it’s becomes so easy that it removes 90% of the feeling of danger from the game. I know different systems handle it differently, and I lean more towards the ones where it’s possible but requires significant effort (consecrated ground, occult paraphernalia, a dozen acolytes chanting hymns, etc) rather than the ones that give it to players as an at-will mid level spell.
I think we’re on the same page here. Whether it’s an up front cost in terms of difficulty or an after-the-fact cost in terms of deals with the devil, death should be a big deal.
Any especially cool modes of resurrection in your group?
Q: Any especially cool modes of resurrection in your group?
A: Not really, now. The group I played with most often tended to do a lot of one-shots, so in the rare occurrences of character-death it was quicker to roll up a new character (frequently by promoting some NPC to PC status) rather than spending half a session dragging someone’s carcass back to town and then scrounging up the reagents needed to rez them.
The first time my group did reincarnation, we actually RP’d finding the druid, grabbing the reagents, going through the whole ceremony… It was actually a nice little moment with the druid calling this gnome’s spirit back from this strange green realm where it was floating. The gnome came back as a halfling, so it was a relatively minor issue mechanically. You pay your gold, you adjust your stats, and you move on with life.
Still, going through the whole rigmarole made the death feel meaningful, even though it happened due to this random encounter jerk stealth-pouncing a level 3 bard:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/animals/felines/cat-great/lion/dire-lion/
In my current game, we have had a few PC deaths. Our Fighter was resurrected, our Mage decided to stay dead, and our poor Rogue was resurrected 4 times. For me personally, I don’t like switching out a character just because, but I can also get tired of playing the same one all the time. So while I won’t cause my character to die on purpose, if they do I can just bring in one of my other characters. Of which I have quite a few. I plan to use my Kitsune Warpriest if my Hunter dies. The hard part will be figuring out the macros because we play online and he has multiple natural attacks. Bite/Claw/Claw/Gore/Talon/Talon/Tail Slap to be specific.
How do you guys justify your PCs electing not to accecpt the rez? That bit of fiction always gave me trouble.
The mage was an Oread and when he died, he turned into lava. My Hunter has simply told the others that she doesn’t want to be brought back. But if they do, she’ll repay them the cost then go retire.
The “found your comic way too late guy” commenting again years later…
Depending on the character that died and his beliefs the afterlife may be rather enjoyable…like imagine beeing in heaven which in itself is going to be really hard. But if I had to I’d imagine a place where you are happy to be, without any worries, filled with an innermost peace and serenity, somewhere you happily spend a literal eternity. Beeing called back into the normal world after beeing there even for a short time is a call I could not personally answer with “Yes I would go back!” without any second thoughts. So from that point of view I could understand when a player rather likes to roll a new character, that he says “No he/she/it does not want to come back…”.
Don’t ge me wrong here I am by no means the religious guy. But I can very roughly imagine how hard it must be to leave a place like “heaven” again…
That’s fair. Justifying the decision seems like it has as least as much to do with the player’s headcanon as the setting description.
Welcome to the comic, btw. Please enjoy your archive binge. 🙂
For my paragraph style no rolls rps, I go with the idea of the player doesn’t die unless they either have fair warning that the action could lead to death or they otherwise do something so stupid you just stare, jaw gaping (e.g. One player pissed off a god in it. Outright attacked the god unprovoked)
Never makes sense to me. I mean, are players imagining that they’ll amuse the god with their daring?
“You have fire, mortal! Here’s some sweet stat increases.”
Like… what are people even thinking in these scenarios?
They actually were aiming to kill the deity. I was a bit too lenient (a friend of mine who has DMed much longer basically told me later, “Really, don’t bother giving them a chance to abort by having the god even entertain the fight”), but partly because the god had other things to worry about before he was about to basically torture the mortal for their insolence. Specifically, outworlders coming in and threatening his very domain
He’s currently in a, “I will fucking electrocute the next mortal to even LOOK at me funny” mood so if the guy is stupid enough to try again, well… He’d probably just be nuked for even being on the same island as the god ever again
Permadeath. Kill’em all. No coming back in real life, no coming back here.
Is it the whole “raise the stakes” thing, or are you just a fan of the gritty style?
I may have something of a surface reputation as a hard-arse as a GM, but I actually veer heavily away from permanent death. If a player gets heavily invested in theor character, that’s a good thing – I don’t want to dissuade it! Ideally, I make it hard to bring the dead bak, or otherwise I make there be Consequences. But I will never write out a player character without the unforced agreement of the player.
The concept of “consequences” is a tough one in this hobby. On the one hand, we’re a pack of would-be storytellers trying to make collaborative fiction together. On the other hand, we’re playing a game where bad stuff can happen.
I’ve always wanted to run a character funnel, just to get a taste for some truly gritty gameplay: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/51227/what-is-a-funnel
Like so much, it’s all about the style of gameplay you’re trying to deliver. And by “you’re” I mean “the group.” Buy-in is especially important when it comes to deciding how to handle perma-death.
The funnel seems like it would be very hard to manage! Could be fun, but I wouldn’t be able to find enough players to do something like that.
My understanding is that every player manages 5 PCs. The last one standing gains a character class and becomes their dude for the campaign.
…Unless you meant that no one you know would volunteer for that experience.
In our groupe we like to avoid player death if the players don’t act right out stupid, like “I Jump into the volcano!” or other things that will absolutely gonna kill you.
Our GM handles it that way, that if a character receives a fatal last blow, he does not die outright no matter how hard the hit was. The HP “magically” always ends up in the single digit negative numbers so that you get a chance to stabilize or be stabilized by someone in you group that is still alive. So that you have a small timeframe to get said character back into the positve HP area by healing him by spell/wand/potion whatever is available. Sure it can happen that you are just spread out too far and the player misses all his stabilize rolls. But most of the time it ends up beeing a close call without a character death. Of course this “rule” only applies in normal situations when the player did not do something totally stupid ignoring the GM’s warning that he should maybe think twice before doing it.
An example would be:
Player: “I jump into that hole in the cave we can’t the see the bottom of!”
GM: “You got anything that can slow your fall?”
Player: “Nah…it won’t be that hard of a fall got many hitpoints, I jump anyways.”
GM: “You sure? That could be your end.”
Player: “I don’t care, I jump.”.
In such super rare cases the rest of the group has to find a way how to carry their dead companion with them to get him ressurected somewhere.
Well now you’ve got me curious about the exception to the rule. Has anyone actually died from the very-stupid-decision clause?