The Price of Life

[Mechanize]

I don't always like to flat out kill PCs. Especially at this point in my campaign. I'd like to give them the option of surviving death but have to sacrifice something. Any ideas? Things you have used in your campaigns? Things to avoid?

[Zanos]

Some ideas:

Blatant planescape rip off: Every time you die, you can chose to come back, but someone else dies in your place. The souls of these people would likely be rather irritated.
Chess with death?
A demon/devil could offer to pull you back from the brink, in exchange for a non-specified favor.
The other PC's could literally go to hell to break out the character's soul.
Resurrection doesn't exist, but clones (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Clone) do (http://dndtools.eu/spells/lords-of-darkness--95/stasis-clone--1522/) Several powerful mages have been making a killing(har) by offering life insurance policies to wealthy people, including adventurers.

[Grod_The_Giant]

In Savage Worlds, when you're incapacitated, you make what's basically a Fortitude save. On a failure, you suffer a permanent wound; on a success, it's temporary. You then roll on a table for injuries-- you can get an arm crippled, lose an eye, stuff like that. An idea like that would translate pretty well into D&D.

[Mechanize]

Some ideas:

Blatant planescape rip off: Every time you die, you can chose to come back, but someone else dies in your place. The souls of these people would likely be rather irritated.
Chess with death?
A demon/devil could offer to pull you back from the brink, in exchange for a non-specified favor.
The other PC's could literally go to hell to break out the character's soul.
Resurrection doesn't exist, but clones (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Clone) do (http://dndtools.eu/spells/lords-of-darkness--95/stasis-clone--1522/) Several powerful mages have been making a killing(har) by offering life insurance policies to wealthy people, including adventurers.

I was thinking about the favor to a god/devil idea myself but I'm having a hard time thinking of a favor that constitutes as a penalty, not just another fun adventure...

[evisiron]

I sometimes give players a single free true resurrection spell as a "get out of jail free" card, often with an unreliable time delay. One case after a TPK involved the characters only being restored to life after a necromancer had replaced various limbs with undead grafts.

Good times...

[Mechanize]

In Savage Worlds, when you're incapacitated, you make what's basically a Fortitude save. On a failure, you suffer a permanent wound; on a success, it's temporary. You then roll on a table for injuries-- you can get an arm crippled, lose an eye, stuff like that. An idea like that would translate pretty well into D&D.

I have a friend who likes to do something like this. As much as I like it, I feel like if a two handed weapon spec maims his arm permanently, he is more likely to just remake his character than he is to stick it out and change his feats. I gues that is my only worry with this route.

[Red Fel]

If you want to turn the game into easy-mode, you could give each character the equivalent of the Death Delver's capstone ability, Nine Lives.

Alternatively, there are several items that can pull off a "Whoops, didn't happen" effect, such as the Amulet of Second Chances (redo one round per day), Amulet of Tears (get 36 temporary HP per day, often enough to get back up to not-dead), Mantle of Second Chances (reroll one roll per day, ideally on that Save or Die roll), or Ring of Nine Lives (automatically make a saving throw). There are others, but you get the idea - you can give them mechanical means to "get out of death free."

But here's my question. I get that you, as a DM, don't like to kill your PCs. I agree. Without PCs, there would be no game.

The problem is that sometimes, the PCs really need killing.

Give that dragon the finger? Son, you're dragon chow. Walk into a Wight-ocalypse'd town without energy drain protection? Hope you enjoy pale flesh. Sometimes, the players do something stupid and you can't be there to hold their hands.

Additionally, consider how reckless your players will become if you actually give them plot-resistant armor. Tell your players they have a mechanic to come back from death, and they will exploit it, find ways around the negatives, and basically rule this world beyond the grave...

Sorry. Channeling my inner Lo Pan there.

Ultimately, any price you have the players pay has to be one that hurts. It has to hurt a lot. Because if it doesn't hurt, it's not a price, it's simply a cost of doing business, like the GP cost of items or XP cost of Wish. It's an expense they'll be willing to pay.

An easier suggestion is simply to have a True Rez cleric available in every major town. If your players are able to pony up the cash, they get the rez. That way, if at least one PC survives, the rest will live. And if they can't afford to pay... You have an adventure hook.

[Mechanize]

If you want to turn the game into easy-mode, you could give each character the equivalent of the Death Delver's capstone ability, Nine Lives.

Alternatively, there are several items that can pull off a "Whoops, didn't happen" effect, such as the Amulet of Second Chances (redo one round per day), Amulet of Tears (get 36 temporary HP per day, often enough to get back up to not-dead), Mantle of Second Chances (reroll one roll per day, ideally on that Save or Die roll), or Ring of Nine Lives (automatically make a saving throw). There are others, but you get the idea - you can give them mechanical means to "get out of death free."

But here's my question. I get that you, as a DM, don't like to kill your PCs. I agree. Without PCs, there would be no game.

The problem is that sometimes, the PCs really need killing.

Give that dragon the finger? Son, you're dragon chow. Walk into a Wight-ocalypse'd town without energy drain protection? Hope you enjoy pale flesh. Sometimes, the players do something stupid and you can't be there to hold their hands.

Additionally, consider how reckless your players will become if you actually give them plot-resistant armor. Tell your players they have a mechanic to come back from death, and they will exploit it, find ways around the negatives, and basically rule this world beyond the grave...

Sorry. Channeling my inner Lo Pan there.

Ultimately, any price you have the players pay has to be one that hurts. It has to hurt a lot. Because if it doesn't hurt, it's not a price, it's simply a cost of doing business, like the GP cost of items or XP cost of Wish. It's an expense they'll be willing to pay.

An easier suggestion is simply to have a True Rez cleric available in every major town. If your players are able to pony up the cash, they get the rez. That way, if at least one PC survives, the rest will live. And if they can't afford to pay... You have an adventure hook.

No no, I think you misunderstand. I do want death to be a part of the game...There needs to be a penalty for reckless behavior, I just think "you die, reroll a new pc" is boring. Especially in this group where no one has a backstory. It is no big deal for them.

I'd rather have a penalty for dying that allows them to come back. Definitely no get out of jail free cards, those annoy me.

[Red Fel]

No no, I think you misunderstand. I do want death to be a part of the game...There needs to be a penalty for reckless behavior, I just think "you die, reroll a new pc" is boring. Especially in this group where no one has a backstory. It is no big deal for them.

I'd rather have a penalty for dying that allows them to come back. Definitely no get out of jail free cards, those annoy me.

Ahh, I see now.

So what's wrong with just the town cleric method? Half your party dies, stuff the corpses in a bag of holding and head back to town? The penalty there is the cost - at low levels, that means selling a lot of your stuff. At higher levels, hopefully one of them will be playing some kind of cleric who can cover that, but will likely demand payment.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I have a friend who likes to do something like this. As much as I like it, I feel like if a two handed weapon spec maims his arm permanently, he is more likely to just remake his character than he is to stick it out and change his feats. I gues that is my only worry with this route.
A few options, I suppose:

Regenerate (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/regenerate.htm).
Let the player pick his injury. That'll mean no character takes incredibly crippling injuries, but you'll have to be really careful to make all options equally bad.
Accept that sometimes character will retire after getting seriously injured. Even if that happens half the time... hey, you've still got a big improvement over the current situation.


I still think something like that is your best bet. Giving arbitrary extra lives is... weird, and inconsistent, and video-gamey in the worst sense. Maybe you could do it for one campaign, if you build it around the idea, but it's really not sustainable. "Back from the dead, but with MORE PLOT THIS TIME" is, similarly, something that you can't really keep doing.

[Maginomicon]

Resurrection doesn't exist, but clones (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Clone) do (http://dndtools.eu/spells/lords-of-darkness--95/stasis-clone--1522/) Several powerful mages have been making a killing(har) by offering life insurance policies to wealthy people, including adventurers.

I do this with stasis clone as a government-run business, and it works pretty well in practice as a way to curtail earning too much.

As for other ideas, Spoony (I think in this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNrU0_A-PFk)) describes having two of his players absorb GM-run curses. The first was in response to the character nearly dying. Mechanically, the character gained a penalty to saves vs poison, but could periodically use the curse to his advantage in a fluff fashion.

[Slipperychicken]

A demon/devil could offer to pull you back from the brink, in exchange for a non-specified favor.

1 life >> one favor.


Considering the things which people are willing to do IRL to extend their lives, any demon worth his salt should be able to score at least lasting servitude* (and probably install a magical killswitch/soul-recall magic to boot) in exchange for reanimation.

*Said servitude would be on the scale of years of direct control at least, if not decades of "live your life, but you do everything the demon says or go directly back to hell". It would scale with the creature's natural life expectancy, of course, to make sure it's just palatable enough to seem worthwhile at the time. An Elf with his 400+ years of life ahead of him, for example, isn't getting off with just 40 years of servitude. And fiends are some of the universe's cruelest tormentors; in addition to serving their cruel ends, they will do things like make you murder your own children (or torment your spouse, or push people into traffic, and so on) purely for the lulz.

[Zanos]

1 life >> one favor.


Considering the things which people are willing to do IRL to extend their lives, any demon worth his salt should be able to score at least lasting servitude* (and probably install a magical killswitch/soul-recall magic to boot) in exchange for reanimation.

*Said servitude would be on the scale of years of direct control at least, if not decades of "live your life, but you do everything the demon says or go directly back to hell". It would scale with the creature's natural life expectancy, of course, to make sure it's just palatable enough to seem worthwhile at the time. An Elf with his 400+ years of life ahead of him, for example, isn't getting off with just 40 years of servitude. And fiends are some of the universe's cruelest tormentors; in addition to serving their cruel ends, they will do things like make you murder your own children (or torment your spouse, or push people into traffic, and so on) purely for the lulz.
If you can't figure out something absolutely awful for a devil to do for an unspecified favor, you run devil's very, very wrong.

It's supposed to look like a good deal to those who haven't dealt with devil's before, which is the point. Then the devil comes to collect, and he can make you do anything. You basically signed a blank check for him.

[erok0809]

There's always Ghostwalk for mechanics after death, if you have access to the book.

[Slipperychicken]

If you can't figure out something absolutely awful for a devil to do for an unspecified favor, you run devil's very, very wrong.

It's supposed to look like a good deal to those who haven't dealt with devil's before, which is the point. Then the devil comes to collect, and he can make you do anything. You basically signed a blank check for him.

That is true, but what I mean to say is that a fiend should be able to extract much more than a single favor out of the mortal.

[lunar2]

in the group i used to play with, every character got 1 "god call". one time during your career, if you were to die, you could call out to your deity, and they would save you, putting you back at full HP, all spells prepped, etc.

also, you weren't allowed to replace characters W/O DM approval. if you didn't want to play the character you had, then you didn't have to play at all. players were easily replaceable.