PCs and Death

D&D 3E

PCs and Death

21st-Jan-2005 02:25 pm

When a character dies, what do you do, or perhaps, what do your players do?

I can think of many possibilities.

a) Ressurection/Raise Dead - Person's back. Not much else to this.

b) Reincarnation - Person's back in a new body. (Ever had someone be reincarnated as something besides a humanoid?)

c) Rip up character sheet and tell them to make a new character.

Has anyone done anything more interesting, like run the character as a ghost, or perhaps have them travel as a petitioner in the outer planes, trying to convince a god to let them have their body back?

Just curious how you handle this concept of death.

Mood:curious

Comments

21st-Jan-2005 10:42 pm (UTC)

marphod

The short-lived Ghostwalk campaign setting was entirely about this.

An issue with dealing with PC death is that if you have any intersting ideas, other than glowing-ghost-body or similar, you need to set your campaign on hold and deal with that PC specifically. You could do it as solo adventure, but I play RPGs for the social aspects, and the one-on-one PC/Dm thing isn't the social aspect I look for. If I wanted to do that, I could write a novel with someone, again.

You can have a lot of fun with the options, but it does mean everyone else is halting the forward progress.

You could have the other players play aspects of the dead PC, in their petition. Parts of the character's psyche they need to overcome or come to terms with, before they can move on. Or, the other players could play spirits of those wronged by the character. or advocates from people they've helped.

21st-Jan-2005 11:23 pm (UTC)

27outs

I pretty much leave it up to them. the standin arrangement the current group has is raising someone fromt he dead is the first priority - any money is spent on that, and if that's not enough, they sell the person's magic items to get enough. The person has to pay them back before he can take from the treasure split.

depends on their level a lot, too. higher level pc's have more options. If they are totally screwed, and the person does want to play the same character, I will make the next adventure the quest they have to do to get the priest to cast raise dead.

one of my happiest times was when they went through hell and highwater to get a PC raised, and the player turned around after he had been raised, thanked them, sold all his stuff to pay them off, expect for about a 1000 GP, and told them he was giving up the adventuring life to be a farmer. It was cool.

21st-Jan-2005 11:32 pm (UTC)

emagius

I like choice "c" best by a large margin. If you're dead, you stay dead unless raised for some truly infernal reason by a blasphemous ritual of foul necromancy.

21st-Jan-2005 11:42 pm (UTC)

foxsable

First you have to decide if the character would want to be brought back or not. It is a character's choice whether or not they want to be ressurected. If they don't answer the call, they don't come back. There were several times when someone didn't want to be brought back. It was against their character's nature or some such...

22nd-Jan-2005 12:11 am (UTC)

the_never

The players work out for themselves what they'd like to do. Sometimes they decide to raise/resurrect. Sometimes they decide to come in with new characters.

For new characters the rule we use is the average party level -1. The new character is at the midpoint of the avg party level-1. Equipped as the player likes with the money from table 5-1 (DMG).

22nd-Jan-2005 12:39 am (UTC)

nviiibrown

I ran a pirate game where one PC's betrayal killed the other PC and all the NPCs capable to continuing the plot of the campaign. So I followed them into the afterlife, detailing a very Dantean Hell for the pirates and as they were being thrown to their terminal damnation they were snagged as booty by Githyanki pirates, who immediately gated to Sigil. From there the PCs had to collect Genesis clay from Celestia, and blood from the river Phlegethon to build new bodies for themselves, then once they possessed these bodies and the right spells were cast, they had been rebodified and had to travel through the elemental plane of Water in order to get back to their seabound campaign world.

(Deleted comment)

22nd-Jan-2005 12:50 pm (UTC) - Re: well...it's not in websters...

nviiibrown

If D&D can't be about making up new words then nothing can.

22nd-Jan-2005 09:19 am (UTC)

strippingpope

the course of action all depends on how the character died... was it cause of the player being stupid (and is that a common trend for that player)

if it was in character and with good roleplaying and still ended up dying then i would allow a storyline to help bring the character back if that would be within the character and the players desires... hell that is part of the reason why i love the risen martyr prestige class...

but if it was just the player screwin around and his character died because he decided it was a good idea to try and take on the pit fiend alone and hope for natural 20s...

...

option c.

22nd-Jan-2005 06:24 pm (UTC)

ryukiri

Character death? Pfft. PC's die all the time, it's in the job description. It's entirely up to the player as to what they want to do.

A lot of people don't want to make a new character, so they get themselves ressurected.

In the game I'm playing in currently, I'm on my 3rd character. The first one died fighting against the NPC that was helping the party. (This is an evil campaign, don't be surprised. :D) The second...I kind of got tired of playing him and sent him on a suicide mission to assault the Prince's Manor. (Got the manor nice and messed up too, I'm proud of him.) And the third is still alive and killin'.

So far in the group, everybody (other than the new people) has died at least once. One game session, three players died because they fell in an acid trap while I and another player (who wanted nothing to do with something that we all already knew was trapped...) stayed out of the way. Both of us being spell-casters, we raised them from the dead right there with a nice use of Dork d20 cards to suppliment it. xD It's an interesting game, just don't ask for the specifics.

In anycase, I've played in a game where a friend of mine was killed by a wraith and 2 rounds later, the DM let him play as the wraith-ling spawn. It was cool stuff.

24th-Jan-2005 04:00 am (UTC) - HAHAHAHAHA

bouncingassasin

I am still laughing about this. One of my charecters was fighting a giant hairy Orc that was about 40 feet tall. Well, Gank decided to jump on him and climb to his back and start hacking. He did well until he reached his back and got tangled in his back hair. After a while he died of lack of air. Quickly the druid in the party cast reincarnation. He rolled a 100 and I got to choose. So I had a little fun with it. He awoke in the hair still and wielding his axe as well. He pulled of the last blow by jumping higher than he had ever done and bashing the things skull open. However than everyone saw him for what he was. A 6'bunny. I created several feats like "Hoping Mad" and such, but it was just funny for the rest of the campaign

24th-Jan-2005 06:04 pm (UTC)

trekspert1

In the campaign I was playing in, every player except me, by dumb luck (and by being a wizard/cleric/mystic theurge and therefore staying the heck away from melee while visible) had at least one character die. We started at level 1, so it wasn't until our last few fatalities that we had even the chace of being able to afford a 'raise dead', let alone ressurection, etc. As long as the player was planning on staying with us, they gave the DM their character sheet (there was a cult of body snatchers that liked to raise people to fight for them), rolled up a new character. Our DM also encouraged us not to play the same class twice- to avoid 'twin brother/sister' syndrome. The one session where a PC died when the player was going to be leaving shorty, he did allow the 'twin sister'.

I've had no fatalities in the game I DM, but I will probably lean the same way- unless the party has the resources and desire available to raise a PC quickly, I plan to encourage them to roll up something new that they haven't tried yet.

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