Unhallowed Rites, Part 8: Plz Rez
Funny old world. A paladin falls, an antipaladin rises, and BBEG pays his contractors. I guess there’s no figuring some people.
While Demon Queen rages impotently from whatever corner of the multiverse she’s been shunted off to, what do you say the rest of us talk about the real conflict at work here? Namely, resurrection magic, and whether it takes all the teeth out of consequences.
Now it’s no secret that I dislike permadeath. I said as much way back when. But I’d be lying if I said the esteemed opposition didn’t make some good points.
If you’ve ever player a roguelike video game, you know that the threat of losing all your precious progress changes the feel of play. Same deal with those hard-won blood echoes over in Bloodbourne or your high-tier gear in Minecraft. When you stand to permanently lose something, there’s an attendant tension that you just don’t get from an easy replay from a convenient checkpoint.
On the TRPG side, it’s tough to argue that emotions aren’t running higher when permadeath is on the line. Each downed PC is a crisis moment; every save vs death is harrowing. While I have no doubt that Inquisitor might tell us that RP consequences remain, they are qualitatively different. The feels-bad of needing to pay for a rez or the shame of letting your dude get temporarily-dead are still consequential, but they don’t have the same sting of, “Sorry, but you have to roll a new guy.”
For me, the question is whether that extra tension is worth the cost. Watching a character arc get cut off in its prime is no one’s idea of a good time. And even if you happen to think “that risk is what makes it worthwhile” in a vacuum, it’s impossible to know whether the calculus will change when the pivotal moment arrives. Even more significant for GMs, it’s tough to know whether your players will have a change of heart about permadeath when it actually happens to them. Tension is all well and good, but I’ve heard more than one story of players getting discouraged and quitting when their precious PC caught a case of dead. That’s why I tend to play it catch as catch can in my own games.
What about the rest of you guys though? Do you have a policy in place for permadeath and resurrection magic? Or do you opt for a fast and loose style, reconsidering how to approach the problem with each unique character death and story beat? Sound off with your own takes on the revolving door o’ death down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
I say dying is scary, even if you do have rez options.
Even for people who shrug off the fright factor, it can be frustrating to be delayed in getting back into the game. (Unless you track their adventures in the Hereafter while they’re waiting to be brought back, of course.)
I like having the option of rez available, but am inclined to make it more difficult. Both 3.5e’s Heroes of horror and Ravenloft offer some creepy ideas about things that could go wrong during a rez attempt: accidental reanimation as an undead, possession of the corpse by a wandering spirit, spiritual trauma from seeing the Giant Koala (no wait, that was ST: Lower Decks…), physical mutation, insanity…
So yeah, keep it on the table, but make it very much a dangerous and risky endeavour. Life and Death are some of the big mysteries of existence, so tinkering with them shouldn’t be like popping over to the supermarket for a fresh head of lettuce.
But most importantly right now: Yay, Magus is back! 🙂 Woohoo!
So rez is available, but you’re going to have ad hoc consequences to make it a more “real” cost than a few gp worth of diamond dust? I can dig it.
Yay indeed. She tied for the win in that popularity contest way back in the day:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/championship-round
No way we’re letting her stay perma-dead!
One thing I suggested when it came up elsewhere was to remove rez spells, and use Incantations from 3.5 Unearthed Arcana instead. You can’t spend diamond dust to bring someone back, but you could have 13 people per hit die, who have never participated in a similar rite, shed tears of genuine grief on the winter solstice and drink wine with bitter herbs, while you recite a hymn to Hela begging for your ally’s return; or travel into the Underworld and compose a ballad for Hades detailing your ally’s life and why it is necessary that they be allowed to leave. Resurrection is still an option, but it’s something big that could be the focus of a major quest.
I‘ve done away with resurrection magic and just slapped on an increasing cost in diamond dust added to standard cure spells to restore HP from below negative CON.
Makes it relatively cheap to use just a healing spell within one or two rounds.
But you still don’t want your Necklace of Fireballs to take your head off when you are at just 1 HP.
So like… Does the party still take death seriously? Do you still have wailing and gnashing of teeth and emotional fallout when it’s this easy?
They party I tried it on still had a very healthy aversion to risk, even though they had a diamond mine.
A TPK is not off the table as a healer needs to be up to administer the spells: Dead people don’t drink potions, so on top of a bag of diamond dust you need a wand if cure spells if the Cleric already used his daily spells to keep combat going.
I bet Ranger is quietly wiping a tear from her eye. ^_^
See hover text. 😛
I categorize permadeath as the sort of thing that’s super cool until it’s suddenly isn’t. As such, I personally really hate it when either the GM or the system goes out of their way to make resurrection more difficult.
While I’ve never seen it actually roleplayed, I really like the existentialist implications of resurrection magic – more specifically the negative levels. Sure, you came back – but not all of you. There’s a big old chunk of your soul that got lost in translation and you’re never getting it back – sure, Restoration can fill that hole, but that’s little more than spiritual scar tissue. This gets more apparent with the Reincarnate and Clone spells, since a) it doesn’t restore your old body but gives you a new one and b) it states that you remember most of your previous life – so not all of it. After you’ve been brought back a couple times, who’s to say how much of the original you is still there, and how much is just a patchwork of healing magic? One character idea I’ve got is a Clone Master Alchemist who, after coming back a couple of times, starts to think of each of her clones as a separate person, her “sisters”, rather than simply different incarnations of the same individual.
You enjoy death and critical efects that turn your character into a 18th century war invalid, Warhammer. You want to keep your awesome high level character going, standard fantasy rpgs. You want death to hqve little to no meaning, Paranoia.
Ahh Paranoia is such a good stress reliever, especially when one of the players tricks their group into death in name of achieving secret objectives. Or when all the players admit in the initial questionaire to be Mutants, six pack of clones turned into five pack before game even started.
Suggesting that there are circumstances under which games other than Paranoia would be preferable is treason. Please proceed directly to your nearest available termination booth. Thank you for your cooperation. Have a nice daycycle!
Commie mutant traitor? Sounds like heresy!
That is fucking cool. It’s also my favorite thing about worldbuilding in an RPG. You discover a weird little detail, you think about its implications, then you invent a narrative moment that plays with that detail.
I started out playing a variant of Basic Roleplaying. No rez there. If you died, you died. Harsh times.
My one experience with Basic was a Cthuluhu-meet-Hot Fuzz-meets-Narnia game. All our British school children died in the Blitz after a climactic time warp. Deadly indeed!
I think broadly I play with a group of neophiles. Not to the extent of like purposefully getting characters killed, but more like “oh they died? that’s a shame, guess I have to roll up a cool new guy!” That being said, there have definitely been some story arcs or character arcs that would’ve been crushed in the dirt had a character died. Permadeath does kind of exist in our game, but I think that’s more due to people’s general neophilia saying “don’t go on a quest to res me, I’ll make a cool new guy” – just a very different approach to characters than the long arc type.
Looking back on this I’m not sure if this comment has made any sense, I’m knee deep in research projects and my mind is well and truly absent. I guess what I’m feebly attempting to say is that in scenarios where someone isn’t heavily attached to a character (or can go ‘off the rebound’ with a new character real quick), permadeath isn’t quite the twist of the dagger it would be otherwise, and could even be less of a hassle than temporary death when people have new characters lined up, so I guess level of attachment is a bigggg factor in determining whether permadeath is too far or not.
That all said, my DM has done this sick as maneuvre in my current game where one of the characters has been kidnapped after an encounter we barely survived, so they’re still out there for us to go save. In the meantime, the player has rolled up a temporary party member who is going after the kidnappers for their own reasons and has no interest in sticking around with the party after that. Obviously a whole kidnapping plot isn’t appropriate in every scenario (it was very much so in this one, and also was by no means a copout death prevention situation), but my DM’s solution does still lend a significant punishment for cocking up while saving the old character and their arc, keeping the player involved in sessions, and even letting them have a quick new character as a kind of remedy for neophilia. I think I’m just gushing at this point, but yeah, it might be worth considering.
Of course, that raises questions about “why do we quest to rez some of our beloved companions but not others?” Makes me wonder if there should be some kind of in-game explanation. Maybe a divining ritual or an item that turns different colors if a rez is possible?
No, but it works in your particular situation. This is more or less what I mean when I talk about “playing it by ear” up in the blog. You guys have come up with a custom-tailored solution to a particular “death” rather than death in general. That tends to be my approach as well.
One-shot games aside, death – permanent or otherwise – is pretty rare in my group. More often than not though, it’s permanent when it happens, and I think the last time we had a resurrection, we were still playing 3.5e.
I think that’s because even when playing D&D, random meaningless death is something we try to avoid… so when characters do die, it’s a deliberate risk taken by the player, e.g. the kind of sacrifice plays we’ve talked about in previous comments threads. And in such circumstances, players are less eager to bring the character back… they’re already found an acceptable end to that story.
The “oops your dead” of a wrong crit at the wrong time or an unusually powerful monster can be disappointing, but I like keeping them around in my games. Those are the ones where I have less of a problem bringing in “meaningless resurrection” from a simple scroll. It’s the meaningful deaths that seem to require quests (see exhibit A: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/phoenix-downs and exhibit B: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unhallowed-rites-part-6-beyond-the-veil).
Oh, no question, a meaningful death doesn’t need to be the end of the road… there’s room for beyond-the-grave adventures, or for epic quests to return the character to life. But none of us have really opted for that… and I think part of that is a feeling of “ok, I died heroically, was brought back to life… what do I do for an encore?”
That does leave a bit of a storyline conundrum though. See my conversation with Nine-Tailed Cat further down the thread.
Big fan of how 13th Age handles Resurrection. Sure, you can revive someone… but you only get to cast the spell 4 or 5 times. Ever.
The first is easy, the second is annoying, the third needs to be done as a ritual, and the fourth leaves the both of you bedridden for months. If you somehow manage to cast Resurrection a fifth time? You die for it.
What’s more, if you try to revive someone that’s been revived more times than you’ve cast the spell, there’s a 50% chance you suffer the penalties of their number of revives instead of your number of casts. ie, they might just drop over dead for reviving a particularly prolific visitor of the afterlife, even if it was the first time they’ve cast the spell.
In the end, it’s a very possible thing, but… who are you going to get to do this for you, really?
Neat! Attaching specific narrative consequences to a rez sounds like a cool idea. And 13th Age to the big list o’ titles to try out.
Most of our PF1e games lack permadeath, usually when we reach the rez-is-available levels or accumulate the funds for it, assuming there’s no horrible monster that increases the stakes by enabling permadeath (e.g. soul-eating horrors, body-destroying baddies, or nasties that flat out delete you from the timeline).
At early levels, it’s okay, as most plotlines/backstories haven’t developed yet, the party is still ‘open’ to new adventurers popping in, and there’s plenty of opportunity to introduce new characters. Plus, low level characters are generally easier to generate.
At higher levels and time invested in characters, you get attached to your PCs (individually or as a cohesive group), making a new character becomes an actual chore (varies with the level of crunch in the system, but it’s generally annoying if you didn’t prep a backup), and introducing new characters can become jarring or disruptive (‘why yes, there is a lvl20 gunslinger with all their gear in the final dungeon, willing to join you and completely trustworthy’).
Ideally, you can simply ‘retire’ a character that needs to be changed or whos story you wish to end, or plan out a dramatic death and replacement in advance.
When it happens due to dice hating you, mistakes or other reasons nobody saw coming, it becomes a problem you’d be motivated to give out a chunk of your funding to just not have to deal with, IC and OOC.
Plus, when it comes to PF1E, death and situational permadeath, or even fates worse than death (petrification, polymorph…) is absolutely plentiful – the modules are written with extreme lethality in mind for even optimal characters.
It’s been interesting to see the Glass Cannon Podcast deal with this at high level. A roster of characters that have retired, resurrected off-screen, or served as temporary backup have been pressed into service as story-appropriate backups in the finale. Makes me think I might have been smart to ask for two PCs apiece in my megadungeon.
Wow, BBEG paid the BH team, even after the ritual got botched by one of them? Quite a surprise there. Magus is probably lucky Demon Queen didn’t straight up nom her soul as well, or some other metaphysical-oblivion level shenanigans that crop up when you’re dealing with post-mortem existence and high-level or mythic/deific-level threats.
My word! It would certainly seem that you’ve discovered an oversight on my part.
*smirks knowingly behind GM screen*
Oh, crap. 0_0
I can’t tell if that’s a ‘other handbook’ smirk, or a ‘schemes and plots and catgirls smuggling ultimate evils in their head’
*smirk intensifies*
You can tell true love by how okay Magus is with what part of her clothing/body Inquisitor is grasping/exposing. That outfit must have a high DEX value.
Now the question is, are Magus/Inquisitor/team BH going to have a little ‘grudge’ against Miss Gestalt…
Her armor has plot armor.
If only there were another badass lady with a grudge against vampires to team up with….
What’s the opinion on ‘not-permadeath-but-enough-to-retire-a-character’ happenings, or events where a PC is taken out of commission and have to wait a significatn amount of time before they can rejoin the game? Things that come to mind with this are:
Injuries or conditions that makes the PC unable to perform in combat
competently anymore (e.g. loss of limbs, blindness, losing their class abilities, debilitating curses) and can’t be fixed easily.
Permanent alignment shifts (PCs become hostile/enemies).
Being captured, kidnapped or plain teleported to somewhere where they can’t be contacted with, leaving them unharmed but also removing them from the session/leaving them stuck until fixed.
Being transformed into a DM-controlled creature or otherwise have their agency stolen from them for the long haul (domination, baleful polymorph, mind-swaps, possession, doppelganger replacement…).
Fates worse than death (baleful polymorph, petrification, soul imprisonment…).
Unplayable reincarnation/race-changed into something that breaks your build.
Players making a grave mistake of judgement (soul selling, ill-worded wishes, Deck of Many Things).
Did that one back here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/permanent-injury
Speaking as a player, I feel like fate-worse-than-death is part of the challenge. If I make a narrow character that must have sight / two hands / their original species to function, then trying to overcome those conditions is part of the adventure. Not everyone feels the same way:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/white-haired-witch
At the moment in my world, proper resurrection is something that was possible but isn’t any more, unless you have a very good relationship with whichever god you’re badgering. There are those that are trying to fix that, or at least find a creative work-around, but there hasn’t been much progress.
Isn’t that a big part of the storyline in Tomb of Annihilation?
Sort of, yeah, but mine is more ‘back in the annals of history, mortals abused this power so the gods took it away.’
I think level has a lot to do with it. It’s harder, by design, to do any kind of resurrection when you start out, and soon the only option available becomes reincarnate.
This usually runs parallel to plot progression. Hopefully, your level 2 players aren’t so invested in their backstory, that they feel robbed when they die just before hitting level 3. Comparatively, one of those players goes down at level 18, they are probably a well-loved character with a nearly completed arc. I’d say it deserves a rez.
Now, if the players start abusing it? That’s when you introduce new perma-death mechanics that make resurrection more difficult, or even impossible. Although for my part, I usually just make them think that it will be next to impossible, just to get that tension back.
I find that players are less prone to abuse that we fear. That’s part of the calculus with this biz: it’s not like anybody is out here wanting to die. The basic fantasy is to be an invincible badass, and catching even a fleeting glimpse of the “game over” screen tends to be its own deterrent.
I welcome resurrection magic. It means I can take the gloves off without taking away the character someone is invested in.
I’ve only killed 3 PCs, two of which were at the beginning of the campaign and were unrecoverable, and one of which was in the climactic final battle, but got rezzed afterward. The player got to play as one of the baddies in the interim.
For similar reasons when the Paladin said they were looking for a Necklace of Prayer Beads I jumped at the opportunity to give him one that included Greater Restoration so that if the Cleric was petrified or something they could be saved, meaning I could attempt to petrify/whatever the Cleric in good conscience. Then during a fight with a Beholder I had learned that the Paladin gave the necklace to the Cleric for attunement reasons. It was a very awkward moment until the Cleric cast Freedom of Movement on herself so she couldn’t be hit by the Beholder’s restrain/petrify.
As a player, the moment resurrection magic became available we had an in-character conversation aboot how was comfortable being rezzed under what circumstances.
Sometimes characters get replaced because they die, sometimes it’s because they ride off into the sunset.
I think those conversations are a good idea. I also think that they shouldn’t be binding. In my mind the gentlemen’s agreement of, “No rez? Jolly good!” is something that can be renegotiated depending on circumstances.
One session away from the final boss? About the achieve your dude’s quest objective? You’ve somehow maneuvered yourself into a “chosen one” plot? All reasons to go back to the drawing board.
I generally prefer to have resurrection available, with permadeath being an opt-in thing. If you like the risk and having to face consequences, or you simply feel your character’s arc is done and you want to try a new one, you can always just refuse to be resurrected. However, losing a character you’re invested in with a lot of untapped story potential just feels bad, especially when you couldn’t have reasonably avoided it. Having a character die as a heroic sacrifice is fine, and as a consequence for extremely poor decisions does make sense, but killing off a character because of pure bad luck – or worse, the actions of other PCs, whether malicious or stupid – just strikes me as unfair, and in any case, the player should have some say in the matter.
That does leave a bit of a storyline conundrum though. Remember the ranger from way back here?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/no-quest-too-small
That was a great death for a character, and the player didn’t want him to come back. The character, however, was questing for a sacred herb to heal his dying backstory PC. How do you justify a character not wanting to come back? I wound up saying “the diamonds you use in the attempt are not consumed” and then ignoring the dead quest hook. Still a point of discomfort from a narrative perspective though.
As a GM in that situation, I’d say that a death god or similar entity intervenes and doesn’t allow them to be revived, since you can only be resurrected if your soul is free. Pathfinder 2e specifically mentions this possibility in its resurrection spells and rituals, which is something I like (I don’t like how the rituals are frustratingly unreliable, but that’s a different matter).
I don’t GM myself all that much, but I did have a bit of a resurrection scare in my first 2e Pathfinder game about a month or two ago.
Wymond Dwerryhouse, my farm-boy-turned-hedge-knight paladin fell in battle against an evil wizard after a Thief-like streak of bad luck. The party was devastated, since he’d been a core of it since the beginning, so once they finished the wizard, I continued to roleplay as Triath, Wymond’s pig-familiar-turned-wild-boar-animal-companion (the game had started as 1e, where he was a familiar, but at the time of 2e’s release paladins didn’t have a means of getting familiars, so we converted him to an animal companion in the transition), as we exited the dungeon and made for the surface.
Since we were a 4th-level party, true resurrection spells were out of our price-range but thankfully a Reincarnate ritual is relatively cheap, so after everyone in the party made a little speech about how much Wymond meant to them that made me feel really great, I rolled the dice to see what he’d come back as…he was reincarnated as a dwarf (he was human initially), his mustache transforming into a full-on beard! I can’t wait till we get another break from dungeon-crawling so he can start learning what being a dwarf is all about!
I’m pleased to hear that your dwarf reincarnation went better than Laurel’s:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/white-haired-witch
The neko is back! Huzzah!
In our setting, “resurrection” spells- except Revivify- are not featured. However, there are methods of returning the dead to life. They’re not something which has been fleshed out, but the process is probably a story arc unto itself, and can potentially become a shaggy dog story if their soul decides to reincarnate before you finish.
That sound pretty close to my “play it by ear” style.
Among our game night group, despite the availability of resurrection magic and the amount of loot floating around to fund it, we’ve usually worked hard to make sure PC death doesn’t happen. One fight took a time-out while the DM and other players rechecked notes and determined that my halfling rogue had ONE MORE ROUND before checking out the other side of the sod. (I remained stoic, it would have been a heroic death and a really good story.)
Months or years later, the debt was repaid as the rest of us rechecked notes and advised the (different) DM and player that the human rogue (played by former DM) actually had made that all-important saving throw.
When as DM I actually let my players fail their cleric and let the big guy die, they all took it much harder than I expected. When the cleric returned (thanks to a wealthy patron), having visited his pantheon’s afterlife, he was different, more contemplative, and saw an eventual alignment change from CG to LG.
When death is on the line, time functions differently. These are the moments when it’s worth slowing play to a crawl to make sure all the forms are being followed and every possible chance is given.
Honestly, it feels like a form of gambling, with all the negative aspects that entails. Some people enjoy the thrill of real risk, with real money on the line. Going all-in, and risking losing everything.
Personally, I don’t like that. Losing a character that you’ve developed over months or years means all that time and effort gets flushed down the drain. Playing with the risk of permadeath is like writing a report during a thunderstorm, and never saving. Sure, you can re-write it after the power comes back on, but why set yourself up to be forced to re-do all that work?
But some people like that tension, and gambling is big business all around the world. I can acknowledge that such people exist, but it still feels like catering to fools.
What we’re really talking about is alea vs. kairosis:
https://sites.google.com/site/amagigames/the-what-i-like-glossary
These are both completely valid ways to play. The trouble comes in when they’re both at the same table together. That’s why I tend to run a “death is serious” game in terms of tone, but will cave on this “policy” the moment a player asks. It gives the appearance of permadeath without the teeth.
No doubt serious gamblers would object to this cheap trickery, but it seems to work OK at my table.
I’m generally squarely in the death has consequences camp because I think if you are given infinite chances to retry failure has no consequence, but I also totally get the desire to see an arc go through to it’s conclusion. Though more and more I believe it goes to what the narrative demands and then making the mechanics slaves to the dramatic stakes. Once the GM knows that they can use or ban mechanics that support or don’t support those dramatic stakes, and then communicate clearly to the players what mechanics are at play, if not always why.
I think the fatal mistake is for the players to assume and feel entitled to a mechanic. Curse of the Crimson throne explicitly calls Teleport out as a fantastic mechanic and actively encourages the DM to use that to facilitate the players being involved drama in Korvosa. While Jade Regent actively tells GMs to ban teleport and other long range travel because it has a segment where the players are trekking across a giant icecap and there are major themes of getting lost, stranded, running out of food, and isolationism are at play, with no ‘return to the old world’ written in the AP. In both cases the narrative stakes demand changes to the assumed set of rules.
Resurrection has similarly massive narrative altering stakes. The real challenge is getting players onboard with a DM rule change that they perceive to be slaughtering their sacred cow with incomplete information.
For resurrection specifically – if I’m running a game where the game only works because the heroes are these heroes – resurrection of some kind needs to be assumed. If not, death is final – and the methods and resources of cheating death are tightly controlled because NPCs with power and influence want to stay in influence.
Great examples. I wrote about this exact Jade Regent example way back here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/travel-time
…And my Crimson Throne players are still in Book 2. Good to know that “do what serves the adventure” is the lesson rather than “pick a policy and stick to it no matter what.”
In my games, as I put it, death is cheap. Raise dead is half off, I am perfectly fine with someone saying “Hey, if I die, can I get raised as an undead ?” I have to review it and ok it of course, but that’s how I roll. I’m running a crazy fantasy world where death has a revolving door if you’ve got the coin.
I also have a player who is completely stressed out about it.
He’s a good player-makes strong builds, is one of the top damage dealers in the party, is fair at not getting mulched in a situation gone wrong. I think his former position in the ranks of national service however have made him feel like he needs to protect everyone, and that any death in the squad is somehow his fault.
Guy suffers a lot of stress over this. And to make matters worse, we have a few people in the table who make bad tactical decisions, others who make daring and dramatic tactical decisions, and some people who are just prone to getting Nat 20’d into the dirt. So any time someone is knocked “into the red” as I put it, even if they don’t go down, even if it’s not him, he gets a bit of an anxiety attack.
Now… I’m going to assume he is in fact NOT a super unique, ultra special snowflake and there are other players who see their groups the same way. That band of family that must be guarded and protected at any cost, and that failure in that duty is personal failure for them.
…would you knowingly submit those people to perma-death for “drama?”
This is the trouble. You want to serve all players, but occasionally they have different needs.
See a little further up the thread for my response to David. I think it’s relevant here too.
Our GM’s Pathfinder Steampunk setting was low magic — zero magic, if you asked most of the PCs, but they happily pulled off alchemical nonsense that would make a real-world physicist blow a blood vessel — and the gods, if they actually existed at all, kept a very low profile.
But whenever someone significant died, before they even got a chance to FIND OUT if there was an afterlife, they had to run a gauntlet of mad scientists, both evil and goo…er, not as bad as those OTHER bastards. Your eventual form and quality of life might vary wildly, depending on how much of your brain was intact, whether any of your body was still salvageable and attached to said brain, what cutting-edge discoveries your attendant mad doctor could bring to bear at the moment, and what scruples, if any, they had about using this knowledge.
So a player whose PC had died could always ask the GM to place a thumb on the scales of probability (“Hey! Do you even know where that thumb has been? Whose thumb IS that, anyway?”) and give them a fighting chance to come back in a more-or-less playable form.
One thing that would NEVER happen was a perfect, consequence-free resurrection or cloning, because the whole theme of the campaign was the tension among the various factions HOPING to achieve that goal, and the cloak-and-dagger skulduggery of piecing together the incremental discoveries they each had made.
So hit me with the examples. Who died, and what did they come back as?
The looming threat of permadeath can be good even if it never happens. Lets say that the force of Fate decides when someone dies, they got a certain date of death. Now if they die before that they may get resurrected, if they don’t get resurrected Fate adjusts plans and keep rolling. You got death and rez but also permadeath for the pc don’t know when their pc death may be the pc death. On Cultist Simulator Winter Names got something like that. They will die for sure at some point, but until that point they can’t be killed no matter what. Conniving the two systems makes thing still tense but allows to forgive errors 🙂
I know there’s a certain archery charm in Exalted. You shoot an arrow and, if it hits your target, the arrow disappears. The target is unharmed. The arrow only reappears (and rolls its damage) at a “dramatically appropriate moment,” potentially many sessions later.
swordOfDamocles.exe
Ssshhh!!! Shut up, Colin or Arcane Archer will try to do that trick 😛
My DM in our curse of Strahd campaign handled it pretty well (don’t know if it was written into the module or his own invention, but it worked well). As a reward for a certain quest, we got a set number of rezzes to use. So an ill-timed death wasn’t the end of the world, but it did cost us a precious resource.
End result was that my paladin got to come back from a stupid, pointless death, only to later end up dead for real when we ran out of rezzes… but it was a narratively satisfying death at that point.
It gave us some insurance against bad luck or dumb choices without taking the bite out of the threat of death.
As others have pointed out, this also allows your DM to take the gloves off and play monsters smart without worrying about crashing the story.
I’ve gone back and forth on this, but generally fall on the side of death having consequences.
In my current draft of reworking my home setting, resurrection magic is rare and explicitly something that nearly all deities disapprove of. Similar to necromancy, it damages the fabric of the afterlife which the gods have barely managed to patch back together.
So while not explicitly banned, resurrection is not something that can be guaranteed and would require bargaining with forces who don’t operate openly in polite society.
The exception to this is celestials/fiends. Dying to them is basically permadeath, as even the weakest among them claims the soul of anything they kill on behalf of their aligned plane. Basically, part of what makes demons/devils/etc. scary compared to more “normal” monsters is that they deny your normal afterlife and directly send your soul to hell/abyss/etc.
I expect that means plenty of “razing of hell” type storylines and quests.
I play a game to have fun, and I don’t have fun if I have to worry about my character getting permakilled. Simple as that. We’ve played with permadeath, and it wasn’t fun – we took no risks, we always played it safe – it was boring. Without permadeath, we have adventures. We don’t need to shore up every weakness, we don’t need to inch out the last bit of DPS, we don’t need to minmax. We can just have fun. And losing a character after you invested time for the backstory and made the character sketch and everything isn’t fun.
To those who say the risk of real consequences adds to the fun: Would adding an actual monetary cost to character loss add to the fun? Whoever loses a character pays 50 bucks into the pizza fund? What about a hundred bucks? Where is the line where it stops being fun?
Nice to see this point come up in the thread. It’s not just a matter of “consequences make the game feel meaningful.” Permadeath also affects play in a very direct way.
Weirdly, I’d be down to give it a try. Remember that alea is a thing, even if it isn’t your thing.
https://sites.google.com/site/amagigames/the-what-i-like-glossary
An old school D&D tournament with actual prize money would feel different than normally D&D, same as high stakes poker feeling different than playing for bottle caps. Fear and greed are part of the “””charm””” in those games.
I’m not talking about adding prize money – I’m talking about adding a higher cost. My question wasn’t “Would DnD be more fun for you if you could win money” but “if DnD is more fun for you if you can lose a character, would it be even more fun if you could lose money in addition to that?” without any additional reward. It’s not about greed, simply about fear.
To further explain: I and someone play the same adventure. They risk permadeath, I don’t. The rewards – finishing the adventure – are the same. If they have more fun playing with the fear of losing their character compared to my playstyle, would they have even more fun if their risk were even greater? If not, why not? Where is the line where people go “this is too much of a risk”?
You’re talking about stakes. You and your hypothetical partymate are both playing for something. By avoiding death you get to avoid the stigma of letting your character die, the inconvenience of a diamond dust tax, and the possibility of additional in-game complications in the form of negative levels or a bad roll on the reincarnate table. They get to keep their money. You both “gain” something by avoiding death. In that sense, it’s hard to take “greed” off the board entirely.
Some people play Russian roulette. The psychology of gambling isn’t my specialty, but I suspect that certain personalities get more of a thrill from larger stakes. For the average gamer though, it is less extreme. You don’t want to risk without reward, and so it seems strange to want to risk more for no gain (let’s choose to play a permadeath game!). But I’d contend that the reward of ‘finishing the adventure’ is not the same. It becomes more socially valuable if it’s rarer (I made it to the end without dying!) and the subjective experience is more intense (walking sedately to the end of a tunnel vs. running to beat an explosion).
It’s an interesting design question, but not one that’s going to have a “one true answer.” What I can say is that different gamers will have different breakpoints where the risk stops being worthwhile. If my dude dies and I have to Black Leaf, I’m probably not playing that game. But if I have to buy pizza next time or take a shot or GM the next one shot? Could be a fun house rule depending on the group.
By your logic D&D players shouldn’t be the relentless optimisers that many are. Trust me, as someone who doesn’t see “creating the perfect build” as the goal of my fun, it’s hard to find a D&D group that will accommodate that.
Honestly I’ve only had to deal with it myself twice (kinda) and once with another party member. My first character (ever) Lini died at level 2. We didn’t have a way to bring her back. We had been given a Res scroll by an NPC (We were playing Iron Gods) but it had been used already when the barbarian tossed the halfling rogue onto the top of a ledge in a cave. Let’s just say I learned to always have multiple damage types in my arsenal. And a cold iron dagger. So when Lini got full attacked by a magus, she was gone for good.
Later, while playing in a different group as Irlana, Mick got killed. Irlana didn’t have Res Companion yet, so our local warforged wizard did it for her. And that was the last that I had to deal with death so far.
Always weird to be at the mercy of GM fiat. If it wasn’t for that random NPC’s rez scroll back in Iron Gods, the option would not have been on the table at all. I suppose that resurrection is just one more of the levers that GMs get to pull to tailor a game to their playstyle. That does make me wonder how much power players have to pull on those levers in turn. Like, if you’d really wanted Lini to stick around, could you have collaborated with the GM to come up with a solution?
I probably might have but I was so new at the game that I couldn’t think of anything. I have remade her build so it’s better now. I haven’t had the chance to replay her yet though.
Depends on the genre. For Dungeon Fantasy I say give them a Wand of Resurrection… for something that is serious and has drama, I’d lean more towards Iron Man Mode.
But there are some high drama games that make murdering off characters very hard, giving Players all sorts of narrative control and other such protections… and some ‘Back To The Dungeon” beer and pretzels Dungeon Fantasies that reward death with a brand new ‘paper mans’, just slot him right into the action, no muss, no fuss.
So really, it depends on the game, genre, crew.
You want a pile of dead bards? This is how you get a pile of dead bards.
http://mydnightshobbycorner.blogspot.com/2013/05/theres-37-more-of-me-asshole-yea.html
I have two thoughts on the matter.
First, D&D handles it terribly by default. At low levels, all deaths are perma unless the DM fiats otherwise; no low-level PC can raise anyone from the dead, and they couldn’t afford to buy a scroll if they pawned all their gear and sold the bard into slavery. At high levels, all deaths are temporary if the players care; the diamonds are an annoying expense, but nothing that you can’t pay by emptying the party’s petty cash. Whatever playstyle you prefer, there’s a whole swathe of levels where it only works if the players at the table bypass or ignore the rules.
Either give the PCs a fairly easy way to return from the dead at all levels (without requiring the DM to provide a high-level cleric ally who could probably solo the adventure if they prepared combat spells instead), or make it so resurrections require some epic quest or sacrifice at all levels. Or do something in between and make those extremes optional rules.
Second, the question doesn’t matter unless the players have some investment in their characters, and I can think of one time that’s happened with my current gaming group over the almost a decade I’ve played with them. And that character watched another PC join a heroic sacrifice because the player didn’t want to replace his gun (which would have been expensive at that level, but doable).
Might as well give an actual opinion. I like death to have some sting without being permanent. 3.5’s level loss is a decent example of what I’m talking about; you have a strong incentive for caution, but your character’s stories can continue if they’re cut short by a bad roll of the dice.
Is there no merit to the idea that you’ll be less attached to your character at low level? This style does incentivize players to try out multiple new characters, which is a legit design goal.
Incentivizing players to try out multiple characters is a legit design goal, but I don’t see why it would be level dependent. That’s the crux of my argument—that the way D&D handles death varies so much by level that it doesn’t feel like design driven by goals so much as design driven by “This is how the game has functioned for the past half-century, we can’t change it now”.
I can’t say that there’s no merit to the idea that you’ll be less attached to your character at low level, because I’m not sure what merit there’s supposed to be in that idea. I guess it’s kind of supported by how lethal combat is in the first couple of levels, but I’m not sure what those design decisions would be leading to.
It’s especially awkward since it would most likely (and, in my experience, often has) lead to one or two players with characters who the players are connected to because they’ve been with the party since the beginning, while the others have characters they care less about since their characters keep dying (either because they’re not as good at creating/playing characters who survive or because the party collectively puts more effort into keeping the legacy character alive than the new guy).
Again, while the design is kinda pointing in that direction, it doesn’t feel like a conscious creative choice so much as the fallout of other decisions they made by default.
KAP (King Arthur Pendragon) has a different way around Permadeath. In it you play knights. However, as the full campaign spans anywhere from 70 to 90 years, you do not play one knight. You try and make a name for yourself as the first knight, and start a family. Hopefully either marrying into a powerful family, or starting one yourself. QAnd after your first knight dies, you then go on the play as his/her son, daughter, nephew, niece, brother, sister or what have you. In other words, you play not the characters but the family or clan, and you get glory, and family characteristics and such from each other. As is shown in the Matter of Britain, in which there are several generations within the same clan that continue to feud with each other across those same generations. I concede that this is not for everybody, but at least your death will be remembered, and has a purpose, if only to fuel the next round of the feud.
I do appreciate that family connection. So often when dnd characters snuff it, their bodies explode into a cloud of useful items before dissolving into obscurity. This way another character is actually invested in your legacy.
Dangit, both DQ and Magus have yellow eyes, so we can’t get an easy tell if she’s possessed yet.
To be fair, I’m pretty sure all cats a possessed by demon spirits. I’m still pissed that my Karn, Silver Golem EDH decks smells like ammonia.
I’ve not had a chance to bring it up yet, but this splatbook brings another angle to the sacrifice play, or indeed just the dramatically appropriate curtain call:
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/242601/Last-Stand-A-Worthy-Death?term=last+stand
When your character’s going to go out with a bang, why not at least enjoy the fireworks?
Can I get the cliff’s notes version of the mechanic?
Basically it’s a whole heap of post-mortem power-ups to choose from for each class, with the trade-off being once you cash in, there is NO coming back. Permadeath is a guarantee, but it also guarantees the fight gets a BIG upswing in your favour. For example the Barbarian could choose this tasty little morsel:
Final Rage
The scent of your own blood unlocks a clarity of purpose
that your kind are rarely afforded. Kill and be killed.
FINAL RAGE
• Enter a Persistent Rage for one minute. During
this rage you may act normally, cannot have fewer
than 1 hit point, and are immune to all involuntary
conditions.
• You may ignore any effect which would reduce the
damage of your hits, and are immune to the effects of
exhaustion.
There are minor versions of these for low-level campaigns as well, but the epic play to payoff versions are persistently insane!
I understand the ideal behind getting rid of resurections, but in the D&D systems, they’re often built into the game balance. You have to rebalance a lot of the “Save or Die” abilities and spells and be generally more careful about events.
So these abilities are a hedge against bad dice rolls? I could buy that.
Permadeath is one of those things that’s only interesting when it’s purely hypothetical. Most character deaths aren’t the result of overly reckless actions or natively appropriate heroic sacrifices, they’re caused by simple bad luck.
As D&D has moved away from a simple dungeon delving wargame to one more focused on storytelling more mechanical buffers have gotten added to prevent the kind of cheap out of the blue deaths that littered early editions. Nobody ever talks about things like death saves or regaining hp on a short rest or max hp no longer capping at level 8 as cheapening the threat of death even though they all make adventures objectively less deadly.
Personally, I dislike the way D&D handles resurrection more for narrative reasons than gameplay. I fully agree that it’s good to have a way to ensure that you don’t lose a beloved character due to unluckly dice rolls, but the problem is that making resurrection magic as readily available as in standard D&D just completely reshapes the world. For the simplest example, it means that you will never have a story which begins “when the old king died in the Battle of Batok’s Pass”. By the same token, assassination becomes almost pointless: In such a world, the country doesn’t go into mourning when JFK is shot in Dallas… it criticizes him for being a narcissistic slacker when he refuses to respond to the raise dead spell. And it only gets weirder from there.
One idea I’ve been playing with is replacing all the standard resurrection spells with a homebrew spell I call revivify: a low-level spell with a standard action (or at most full-round) casting time and no material component that can raise someone from the dead… provided the body is still mostly intact, you can touch it, and you can get to it within ten minutes of death. And of course, revivifying a body gives it a couple of negative levels (which would be cumulative if things go so wrong that you need multiple revivifications) and only restores a small fraction of full Hp. That gives a decent safety net against characters dying for stupid reasons, while still leaving plenty of ways in which characters can die and stay dead if that is what the plot requires.
Er… There’s already a spell in D&D 5E with the same name that does exactly that, but the time frame for resurrection is 1 minute instead of 10. It also has an expensive material component that it consumes, but nowhere near as expensive as other resurrection magics.
The pathfinder equivalent is called “breath of life” but the time frame is only 1 round and it’s 2 levels higher putting it at the same level as the much better “raise dead” and making it almost completely useless by comparison.
On second thought, dropping the time limit from 10 minutes to one works a lot better for the “emergency resuscitation” feel I was shooting for, so I think I will go for that. But the absence of a material component is completely deliberate: this spell needs to be easier to use than standard resurrection spells because if it can’t be used the character is gone and there’s no way of getting her back (except possibly plot-level magic).
Yes! So happy to see Magus is back, you had me worried for a bit!
On the subject of character death I’ve played and enjoyed both sides of the divide, and I feel they both have their place depending on the games themes. I have played several long running campaigns where potential character death, especially in our longer running games (some of which have gone on for ten or more years) has added a certain amount of tension. I am however strongly against regular and frequent permanent character death, as I feel it cheapens the drama of the moment.
At the same time I usually don’t enjoy games where resurrection is too common or frequent, or that there isn’t the threat of death and consequences. I feel it robs the struggle of any weight, and makes the triumphs a little hollow. I’ve had moments where GM’s have made decisions that break the usual style of the game, and, with opposite effects. We once had a cool quest into the underworld in a Werewolf game to rescue the souls of two pack members just before our final plots after a negotiation over a kinfolk went bad and we acted completely against what our GM expected due to character backgrounds. (My character the silverfang ahroun alpha had scars from his relatives losing control, and, his secret lover the chav bonegnawerer philodox beta had accidentally crippled one of her children in rage before, we oddly enough were the ones that died.)
I usually prefer limited death avoidance mechanics like fatepoints and the like in permadeath or hard resurrection games, or returning from death or near death has consequences (werewolfs battlescars). I like to make it a plot point in my own games where its part of the setting.
Magus literally tied for “best girl.”
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/championship-round
There’d have been riots if she was permadead.
My experience has taught me that when people make a character, they want to play this character. Death is just a time out.
Death only seems to stick when it’s A) the end of the campaign or B) the natural conclusion to a character arc
It depends a lot on the focus of the campaign. How important are character arcs? In most campaigns I would never even consider permadeath. But my long running old school megadungeon game has it, and it works very well. This is because the campaign’s plot isn’t really about the characters and their arcs. It’s about exploring this ancient dungeon, and discovering long buried secrets about the setting. One could almost say that the player characters are just vehicles for the players to discover things. It’s expected that the players will each change their characters several times, either due to death, reaching a place where they naturally retire from adventuring, or the player just getting bored of them and wanting something new.
That doesn’t mean that character development doesn’t happen. Or that we don’t see character arcs. And if a player provides the opportunity, I will happily tie their backstory into the dungeon and setting. But it doesn’t matter as much if they get cut short, because they were always secondary. The death of a long lasting character will make everyone sad, but it won’t harm the main plot.