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Having a Campaign-Specific Approach to Character Death
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- Опубліковано 12 сер 2024
- Death doesn’t have to work the same way in every D&D campaign you run - so let’s talk about some options!
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Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:10 - Resurrection
06:32 - Back-Up Characters
09:39 - Death in Other RPGs
11:33 - Death in My Campaigns
15:00 - A Word From Our Sponsor
15:56 - Outro
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How do you handle death in your campaigns?
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Coming from Basic and Expert D&D, where Raise Dead had no downside (not even a material cost!) and was available to clerics from 7th level, I've always considered the real cost of death to be what the character failed to accomplish. A party missing a member means they struggle more in the dungeon. Maybe they miss some things they'd rather not have missed. Maybe they fail in their mission. Outside the dungeon, every death means either a delay in getting back into the action, or else a higher risk of failure. If the orcs get to the dragonslaying sword before the party does, that's a major setback if their goal is to slay a dragon. If the party want to save a town from devastation but are missing a member, they may very well wind up with a burned-down, abandoned town, with their favorite NPCs scattered.
All that said, I copied down Matt Mercer's rules for handling resurrection magic and use them. There has to be something preventing the greatest kings and heroes from becoming absolutely immortal, after all, and whether or not the Mercer rules are the most perfect rules ever for the situation, they work just fine. Just like most of 5th Edition.
I really like the Masks example. I think the system does a good job of pushing you to think of consequences that are simply more dramatic and transformative than character death. I've had a Phoenix themed character transform into new forms whenever they died. I had a character go home to their parents who said "I'm not going to watch you die live on the news, you're done being a hero." Knowing death is generally off the table frees you up to twist the knife almost as hard as you want because they have the opportunity to fix it.
Omg our messiah
I heard… someone… suggest the following for D&D:
-Run the rules as they are for death.
-Upon character death, ask the player “is this the end for X?” If they feel like this was a good end to the character’s arc, and they’re willing to let go, they might answer yes, and that’s the end of that character’s story. If they aren’t ready to let go, for whatever reason, the character gets brought back. Depending on how readily available res magic is in the world, and how important the characters are, this might be easy or difficult, but a path *will* exist that brings the character back.
I’ve given it some thought in my current game, and I’ve got a party whose characters are incredibly important to the country they’re operating in, having on more than one occasion saved the capital from some sort of major catastrophe. They’re in good with the major religious group in the area to the extent that one of the characters created a women’s shelter they’re co-running with the church. Another character has been training with the (Paladin) knights and is in deep with them. Nothing would stretch the bounds of credulity more than one of these characters going down and not having dozens of people tripping over each other to make sure they’re brought back. For them, death means your character is out for a session or two tops before one of the many strings you have at your disposal gets pulled, and you’re back on your feet.
For another factor, the game was started in 2020, and for some weird reason, nobody at the table seemed to have much of an appetite for grimdark permadeath. I’m sure for other groups in other times and other places, this would be a terrible gameplay experience, but it works at my table; we all needed some fairly heroic happy ending pulp fantasy, and frankly largely still do.
Ultimately, I’m not particularly interested in running a meat grinder campaign except maybe as a one shot, 2-3 sessions at the most. I could see such an experience being fun as a diversion from what we’re generally going to engage with, just “show up with 5 characters and hope you don’t run out,” but I don’t have a table where that old school death is cheap mentality would interest anyone really.
By and large, I warn people about character deaths and to be prepared. In one game, the dice killed a player after about a year of playing, so we held a funeral for him where the players got to recall their favorite moments with the character. It helped a lot.
This topic actually prompted an argument at one point between myself and another party member, though not for the reasons you might assume. Basically I was playing a bard and the other person was a cleric. The cleric was the dedicated healer of the party, but I already had healing word as a backup spell just in case. The cleric was trying to argue that once I got high level enough, I should be required to also take revivify just in case the cleric was killed in combat. I understood them feeling like it wasn’t fair their character alone would have no chance of being resurrected, but I was annoyed because I didn’t want to play a healer for this campaign. This demand was going to entail two of my limited spells being taken up by healing magic I would barely if ever use. Thankfully the DM ruled that there was no reason for me to be forced to be a discount cleric and that if someone’s character died before they were ready to lose them, we could probably find a cleric in town to bring them back.
My campaign has had 2 player deaths so far. For the first one, the cleric was able to revivify the warlock but had to make a deal with the patron for him to allow the soul to return to the body. The second was the bard who requested a heroic death to retire her character so she could play a new one. The way it played out, she tossed the cleric to a teleportation circle in a collapsing dungeon and didn't make it. Everyone knows she died saving the cleric. Nobody knows the reason why the cleric needed saving was because she took a turn to try and loot while escaping. :3
Well, back in the day it *was* kind of expected you resurrect dead characters if you could, but back-up characters were also easier to pull up mid-dungeon because you had henchmen and cohorts
I'm running Tomb of Horrors as a dream, die & wake up - sleep & dream you're in the tomb again. Eventually PCs find the tomb while awake but now they know most of the traps. working so far, (send thoughts & prayers DMs). Also running them through the Quintessential Dungeon one-shot while their characters are awake, so kinda 2 at a time as well. i really want my players to be able to tell others they played it & re-hash with them. Part of the community feeling if we play these old modules together. i also switch all the genders around to keep my sanity, (so weird how my dungeons became populated with weepy, half-dressed, beautiful men who want to kiss & stab players). P.S. Acererak is a wonderful cvnt! P.P.S. Enjoying your videos Mike. (FYI: P.S.=post script, meaning after you've singed goodbye on paper in uneraseable ink but want to write more).
The last campaign I DM'd, I had a player who decided they didn't want character death or any other lasting effects, but this came up after S0, the rest of the players weren't into having bumper pads where there are no consequences to anything. That player also was a Rules Lawyer (but for an edition we weren't using) and meta gamed. They were asked to leave after about 2 sessions when they wouldn't correct the behaviour. None of the remaining characters died, but they did come close a few times, and the players loved the tension those moments brought.
My homebrew setting has "The Dezirik Order" - an order of clerics who wear clean white robes and are generally the only people able to bring back the dead. Each time a member of the order reaches beyond the veil to retrieve a soul, they bear permanent marks of the other side, and such older members robes often have a series of dark marks/faces/impressions/scars on their robes that prove their prowess.
The characters knew going into the campaign that their employment contract included resurrection - it wasn't until they met a member of the order who had gone full Lich mode from the repeated trips beyond did they found out what the cost of a soul was..
Generally speaking, I have always allowed the character to be rez'd *if* that's what the player wanted to do.
If the party doesn't have access to that sort of magic internally, then, they are welcome to seek assistance externally. That may require payment (above component cost) or services in lieu of same (especially for parties that are 2nd to 4th level).
Regarding editions prior to 5E: I don't recall for 3.X and 4E, but, 1E and 2E, "Raise Dead" was the lowest rez spell available.
As to the penalties for being raised, the CON score was permanently reduced by one (1).
13:42 One solution for this problem is the intrinsic properties of the shadowfell itself. When a character dies, part of their soul is transferred to the native shadowfell version of them, who is likely completely different but bears some resemblence and a similar moral compass to their material counterpart, who know nows where they died and that something important is to them is there.
One of the old-school ways of introducing back-up characters I like is finding the new character tied up in the dungeon. Just pop their new character into the next room, explain that they were a hostage of whatever faction controls this part of the dungeon and play continues as normal, because that character will absolutely want to tag along with the party for safety if nothing else.
An idea me and a buddy talked about a few times is to have either the bbeg or some other faction in the world hording all the diamonds, or a curse or some creature eating them, point is you make diamonds super hard to get. So the party either has to quest to get the diamonds before any potentially lethal fight for revivify or after for resurrection, and then maybe a quest to the plane the soul's on to rescue/convince to come back.
The funniest and probably easiest way to make resurrection better in dnd I’ve seen in movies is in Conan the Barbarian. In that movie the rest of the party had to literally fight off the spirits coming to take his soul.
I have to agree with you a point you made early in the video, in a world where diamonds could be used to bring back the dead, you wouldn't just find them in random jewelry. Powerful forces (good or bad) would have a very tight grip around the mining of them. It'd be like Uranium. Your level 5 cleric wouldn't get their hands on them, and most definitely no store would sell them at all, or if they did, it'd be for way more than 300g.
I think it really helps a game work better when the world logically follows what it'd be like if there was magic in the world.
I'm not deep into RPG games (yet), so I don't know if this is handled in any game, but I heard about some house rule that basically let a player die with glory by making a last stand, by allowing the character to regain a few HP (and maybe some perks, I don't remember) under the condition that after the fight that character will die for good. This could be useful in situations where players might be quite attached to their characters, such is the nature of story-based campaigns, by giving them agency about their character's fate.
Daggerheart will have an option where the dying player makes a heroic final action that’s a guaranteed critical, but they will die without a chance to come back. I like it, it gives some final agency to help in a big way, but still has consequence
As I've commented before, I'm interested in one day creating a world with a "Joker's Favor" approach to resurrection: where the only way to bring people back is to owe a debt to a villain and you won't KNOW what that debt is until they come to collect.
People always remember the resurrection rituals, but Critical Role also has an interesting history with backup characters. Without spoiling much, some characters in later campaigns originated as unused backup characters for Campaign 1. One backup character ended up becoming iconic. One temporary backup character became far more popular with both the audience and players than expected, leaving everyone sad when they had to go. Some players set rules for their character's resurrection with Matt in advance, either that they could never be resurrected or that if they weren't resurrected the right way, their soul would refuse to return.
11:24 From what I've read of the Avatar rulebook, characters can't die unless their player CHOOSES to die. This opens up big heroic sacrifices or tragic deaths IF the player feels that works for the narrative, while letting you explore other stakes elsewhere. I feel like if I ever ran something based on a childrens cartoon, like this or Tails of Equestria, I'd operate on the logic of "you can't die (usually), but you'd be surprised what you can live through." Characters in kids' shows get put through the wringer even, or ESPECIALLY, when death is off the table.
11:05 And this just makes me think how cool it'd be to play a younger alternate universe version of a supervillain, and live out the "I'll never become you! (...Or maybe I will?)" arc.
Great video, Mike! This is gonna be an interesting series.
As a DM (on the rare occasion that it happens), my attitude to death is to try and avoid it. The "How do we get a new character into the story", "How do we justify a new character _caring_ about the story," and "Resurrection is either supremely easy or an absolute ballache depending on level and party composition" hurdles make me just want to avoid having to square that circle as much as possible. So I try not to make things too lethal, and I run a "Schroedinger's PC" approach to Death Saves where I put all the agency on the player: They roll their saves in secret, and the final outcome is ultimately up to them. They can choose to live if they fail three, they can choose to die in they pass three. It also adds some extra realism to the situation, as the rest of the party often won't know the status of their fallen friend until they either check on them, or they get up because they Nat 20'd.
The flip-side of this is that, well, if the player chooses death, then I'm going to take that as them wanting that outcome. So external sources of resurrection are harder. Local priests are _priests,_ not capital-C _Clerics_ with class levels, and maybe know one or two cantrips. Communing with gods is difficult, as they prefer to act through mortal proxies to avoid upsetting the delicate balance of things, and entities like Devils, Vampires, the Dark Powers, etcetera that could return someone to life obviously come with giant strings attached.
When it comes to bringing in new characters, that's something I'm less concrete on. Last time I DM'd, running the 5e starter set, the one death that happened outside of the eventual Venomfang TPK was a guy getting eaten by the wolves in the first cave. Happens to the best of us, those dogs are _lethal._ I was following the book fairly religiously, so I didn't see a way to cram in a way to revive him, so I let the player make her second character ASAP and then introduced him as having _also_ been captured by the goblins, alongside the NPC the party rescues in the cave. The guy had a reason to work with the party- they just saved his ass- and that worked fairly well. Until they all got eaten by Venomfang. But that's LMoP for you.
Also, I tend to either reduce or eliminate the material cost for specifically Revivify. This is just because the few times I've had it used on me in other games, we just forgot that it costs anything. It's so limited in the time that it can be cast that we just all forgot that it had another restriction. Now, I'm of the mindset that Accepted Game State supersedes RAW- If a rule is broken, and nobody at the table notices, and nobody at the table suffers for it, then no rule was broken. It's a fun collaborative game, not law school. And I'm generally okay with Revivify being treated this way- It's basically a panic button spell, a magic defibrillator (And yes, I _did_ describe my Divine Soul casting it by rubbing her hands together to build up electricity and then yelling "Clear!" before zapping the subject), its use is very rarely premeditated.
My main DM initially wanted to use something akin to Mercer's revival rules, but that kinda went out the window when the Barbarian died in Session 2 because it was our first game and none of us knew how our crowd control abilities worked, or how to position ourselves properly. The circumstances IRL kinda forced her hand to give us a quick-and-dirty revival on the cheap. Subsequent deaths in that campaign were minimal. My Fighter died later on, and got revived through a contract with a mysterious group... that we then promptly forgot about and never came back to because the plot kicked into high gear. Our Bladesinger died to a vampire shortly afterwards, and she then revived as a vampire, which was cool, and also got a Raven Queen-serving Planetar called the Raven Hunter on our case, which was cooler. And then lastly, the Ranger bit it in the grand finale as the final boss had done a sneaky soul-split to make himself immortal, and couldn't actually die unless both Archdevils with a claim to his soul got to take something home, and it was the Ranger who made the sacrifice.
Another game I was in played it _extremely_ loose, in that death was _fully_ optional and only happened if we wanted it to, with resurrection coming fairly easily afterwards too. I had a character die twice, both times to further her own development, and both times she was revived immediately. Our Paladin also bought it once, but due to the circumstances, he had to wait for a Raise Dead instead. And the Druid chose to die and stay dead, which definitely didn't cause any long-standing issues and conflict, stemming from the fact that he died in PvP against me.
I always thought that Venomfang would have fit so much better as the main villain in LMoP than the random encounter he is.
1) Green dragons are cunning and inherently manipulative, and a Young one has already an intelligence of 16, equal to that of Nezznar, that the adventure describes as a mastermind
2) Speaking of Nezznar, being a fluke and a puppet of a stronger being would explain why he's "in charge" , while being weaker than his lieutanant (the king of the Bugbears). I know that in that part of the adventure the dungeon itself is the challenge, but still, it's very anticlimatic that he has the same hitpoints and less AC than the random bugbeat that they find in one of the first rooms.
3) Venomfang can act as a decent bossfight even for level 5 PC if they had spent some time designing a lair, it has some great defenses and it's definetively a step up in difficulty compared to the rest of creatures that the players fares against.
4) You can still use the plot hook that introduces it earlier in the game, and reinforce the notion that even a young dragon is a serious threat for such a small area (as they did later with Dragons of Icespire Peak, where the adventure premis is that everything changes when the dragon arrives). Also if the party decide to go to thundertree at level 2-3 and get their asses handed to them, you're gonna have PCs that want to get their revenge.
4) It is in the name of the game. It's called Dungeons and DRAGONS, not dungeon and weird elves, dammit. Give new players the chance for a epic confrontation with a dragon, instead of having it as a footnote.
@@claudiolentini5067 Yeah, I'm likewise of the opinion that the dragon boss should be the _final_ boss. I love the idea of Venomfang appearing in Thundertree and beating the party's collective arse, only to let them live for Smug Villain Reasons and return as the final boss, where the party can get their revenge! That'd be a brilliant way to close things out!
That said, I also feel like Venomfang himself is a bit too powerful for the point in the game he appears. He's a CR8 and that's a _lot_ for Lv.3-5 characters to beat over. I TPK'd with him, and I wasn't even playing hardball, the party just weren't rolling above a 12. They couldn't get over his AC, so he picked them off one by one. A part of me thinks that a White Dragon would've been a better fit for a low-level adventure.
@@ToaArcanRegarding the white dragon, the aforementioned adventure, SPOILER Dragons of Icespire Peak, does exactly that (albeit making them fight the white dragon at level 6, where he at CR 6 it start to get non challenging)
Personally, i preferred the remake that i saw on reddit, where they put a Blue dragon in lieu of the white one, with the option to give the pcs an extra level
(Because it can also be better and more meaningfully linked to the other plotline of that module)
But i would argue level 5 PCs, with the fist feat/ASI, third level spells, the increase in the proficiency bonus and extra attack, are much stronger than level 4 ones, and so, if they have some resources left, a Young green dragon is challenging, but doable
so many videos recently! I'm loving these thematic mini-dives!
In the french setting of Pangée, resurrection cost permanent Constitution points to the caster. That's explain why resurrecting someone is so rare, because the casters do not want to be permanently weakened
We recently had a TPK scare and the dm decided that having a whole new band of adventures in the middle of Avernus wasn’t fun. He had us make a deal with a red dragon then pretend to get vaporized while we ran under a tunnel the dragon indicated. Our crew also is very RP heavy and had grown very close so starting over didn’t sound fun to us either.
I signed up for a Masks campaign online in a couple of weeks! So excited! Side note RIP to your ‘someday when you have time again’ . I’m not a parent but from what I hear time becomes an even scarcer resource.
~4:30. My first campaign where I died was with 2nd Edition rules.
Every time you were resurrected you lost a point of Constitution.
Permanently, unless magically restored.
I once had a group get their party wiped out when I tried to use a giant to nudge the party into a cave they needed to enter. Instead knowing they had no hope they attacked anyway thinking I’d go easy on them. I didn’t.
So they drew up new characters sent to find the missing party so they could continue the campaign. My favorite part was them having to fight their previous characters who were now undead controlled by the Lich. They loved it.
I like the idea that our original GM had. If there is a body part of some sort to be used in the ritual, Resurrection is absolutely a thing, but it's expensive as heck. No body part, no Ress. In the case of party members that want the chance for their character to come back, we've implemented the idea of a Waiting Room. Death (basically ripped straight from Discworld) will come along and take you to what looks like a modern doctor's office waiting room, with a vending machine in the corner and a table with a bunch of magazines on it. It gives the player character the chance to talk to Death, or their deity if they prefer, about why they want to go back (and gives the player something to do roleplay-wise as well, especially if they died during combat and had to sit on the sidelines for a good ten minutes while it was finished up). Since we primarily played during 3e, there was an experience loss penalty for being ressed, but there was one instance where my character died pretty much immediately after she levelled up, and the Waiting Room scene gave the GM a chance to allow my cleric to be Ressed with all her experience intact, but she had to go do a Thing for her deity in exchange (the Resurrection part wasn't a problem, the party were on excellent terms with the high priest of Moradin and was happy to do said ritual for free)
One of my favorite games I played in had the players trapped in a time loop. At the end of the loop a tower that housed a god would cause the destruction of the world.
The party had a god on their side who brought them back 4 days earlier with there memories so we could try again.
So in this case death was coming one way or another but the real consequence of us dying was losing progress and information. Then later on when it turned out more gods were getting I solved it raised the stakes again, despite the fact that player death couldn't truly happen
So many videos, have I died and this is heaven?
Great video, as always!
In my campaign (although we luckily only had one actual player death so far), I handle it in a mix between rules-as-written and a Mercer-esque ritual: Revivify, since it has to be cast within a minute of death, works everytime, unless the character (ergo the player) has decided to move on, since the soul hasn't crossed over into the afterlife yet.
Every spell cast after longer than that minute has a ritual attached to it, and the DC is set together with the player of the dead character (between 5 and 30) - that way, they can decide for themselves how hard it would be to convince their character to come back.
Late resurrections are also a way pople explain horrible things like early deaths etc., since rebirth is an option a dead characters can choose.
In my campaign setting it depends on where in the world the party is at and who the party tries to do the revival.
For example in one of the kingdoms in my setting the church will revive someone but it will most likely be at a price the party can’t afford let alone the common people, if they go through with the resurrection the party will find themselves in heavy debt to the church either requiring a sort of payment plan, being sent on jobs for the church of worst case scenario they repossess the person who was revived which would either just kill then again or in worse cases lead to indentured servitude
What I have been doing recently in my current game and I find works pretty well (for a high adventure, swash buckling sort of campaign) is sort of a 'two strikes' system. If players 'die' they become critically injured, suffering major penalties and taking a permanent scar (this being a pirate game, think eye patches, peg legs and hook hands) and the penalties last till they have the equivalent of a resurrection spell used to fully heal there wounds. In my game normal healing magic works more like a sort of super advanced band-aid, keeping the body patched up long enough for natural healing to do its thing while still letting the characters do there regular adventuring. Also damage is treated more as 'luck' with most HP lost coming from near misses and shallow cuts before your near death and something hits home in a way that would be properly life threatening without medical attention. So when someone 'dies' its basically them taking a wound that simple 'first aid' healing magic alone cannot fix, they need the magical equivalent of an expensive major surgery.
The 'two strike' part of the system then comes as players CAN keep trying to push through and fight, especially if its in a dungeon or a really dramatic moment and they want to risk it all to help their friends or stop the villain, but not only are they suffering penalties, if they go down again, that's it. They did the dramatic, "I'm going to put everything into this last attack" moment and now they are going to dramatically die... And resurrection magic is already set up as advanced healing and can't really help.
Obviously if players really want to go on a big quest to bring back their friend then that's fine, that can be arranged, but that's less of a, "Make some rolls to have a chance of failure" thing and more of a, "Time to go to hell to make a deal with the devil!" Kinda commitment.
Also I generally keep the 'Chunky Salsa' rule in play, IE. If something happens to a character that would reduce them to the consistency of chunky salsa, huge hit point total or no, second chances at life or not, that just kills you. It doesn't matter how mad the barbarian is, if they are dropped into a volcano with no fire protection, they cannot just tough it out by going bear mode and swimming fast. (Especially if the Barbarian player willingly jumped into the volcano after being repeatedly told that it would kill them regardless of how many healing potions they drank to counter act the DOT.)
I’d love to see a video about your Strahd campaign if you’re ever looking for something to post. The unskilled teenager premise sounds so cool.
I definitely plan to do some videos about it at some point :)
Last year during a Halloween themed session I had my first character death. The character was my first rogue and his whole schtick was that he wasn't really an adventurer, but a failing locksmith that just really needed money to help his family out. So when he died, I proposed the idea that I could play a new character and let the party decide if they wanted to bring back the old one or not. The group as a whole kind of fell through not much later with scheduling conflicts and such, but I thought it was a pretty good approach.
It depends but the one I remember is that your con is reduced permanently and there is a point where you don't have enough score to be resurrected. Elves and a few others also did not have souls like humans do and couldn't be resurrected.
My party have made a habit of recruiting/adopting npcs, which I then give to the players to run as a secondary character. If main character dies, the backup character is already a part of the story. Haven't needed to use it... yet...
So I’m going to attribute this to Matt Colville? Circa 2021ish where he spoke on having a character death as a catalyst for the party’s call to action. And (spoilers) Critical Role campaign 3 started that way. So the influence was obvious. But looking back now, Matthew Mercer seemingly on accident did this in campaign 1 as well and that’s crazy.
A fun game might be to get everyone to role up their 1st level characters, have them TKP in their first fight by a force orders of magnitude more powerful than they are only for them all to get reincarnated by the enemy of the person who killed the party.
Make everyone roll on the table and you're good to go. That Gnomish Illusionist is now a Drow Illusionist who can't speak Elvish or Underconmon. The end of the campaign can see the party switched back, or maybe they are happier in their new body?
I do my best to keep character death in the hands of the players, usually giving as many options as I can for a player to be removed from combat, if not the campaign, with the door still open to save them. Wolves might drag a character off to eat later or feed to their young, or a vampire might decide to make a downed player their thrall, or the evil wizard might only need you out of the way long enough to finish his ritual, still keeping the stakes high and meaningful, while giving players the chance to rally and make decisions.
Resurrection itself is a highly regulated and closely guarded practice in my settings, with diamonds being a very rare item, primarily available from powerful NPCs or the black market. Criminals and VIPs bodies are closely guarded to prevent the return of a crime spree, or the raising of a hostage or rival. The evil prince killing his father for the throne means nothing if the court wizard can spend gold from the treasury to bring him back. Or ask him who killed him for free. Executing a criminal would simply be an inconvenience if one of his henchmen could pay 500 gold to bring him back. So the ritual is guarded by the churches, which try their best to remain neutral and devoted only to their gods, and diamonds are heavily regulated by the governments.
Yay! For the Masks plug so love that game. I discovered it earlier this year and just love it. I have been plugging in to the Community Play Days at Magpie Games' discord. I also have a backup for my dnd game, I use it if more than one person cannot make it but there are enough folks who can. I set that game in City of Heroes' Paragon City. It is a blast.
This looks interesting!
I usually figure out a vague idea for a backup character myself but I haven’t actually needed one before but have seen two pc deaths in the parties I was in. Both were wizards and oneshot kills and both wizards don’t regret it due to their characters needing to be where they were and doing what they were doing. Both times we, the party, worked on reviving them.
For the first one, we used a mechanic that existed for that timeframe in that world our party was in. Basically the border between the living and dead realms were very thin. This meant the soul could be recalled so long as the party could convince the soul. We also needed to find a cleric later to finished the revival process. Which we did by finding a patron for the long term since we didn’t have anyone with reviving spells.
The other time I had a pc death is actually recently. The wizard needed to close a portal so a corrupted fey couldn’t be released. She managed to come out of the portal and killed him (but got pushed back). The party is now on a mission to go to a dragon’s hoard (with the dragon’s permission) and retrieve a diamond of the correct value as they aren’t sold just anywhere and so aren’t, otherwise, accessible to us. Of course this means sneak past and killing some cultists and other dangers that have taken up residence there and also getting out of town which is currently locked down and under martial law due to a recent assassination attempt on the “leader” of the town (let’s just say there is a lot of tension between the locals and him which is why we opted to not steal a diamond from him…this time). Anyway, in the mean time our old wizard is playing a paladin to lead and assist us until he gets his character revived. It’s a temporary character but suitable for our needs.
Anyway, that’s how character death goes for us. Depending on the value, certain ingredients may not be accessible which sounds fair. And honestly, it’s war time in those campaigns which makes it make more sense why such things would not be readily accessible.
Can't stop looking at your calendar lol .
My group’s Curse of Strahd game has some homebrew elements to it. So far each character has died once but we’ve been brought back. We don’t have backup characters and there’s a narrative reason behind it so any furthur deaths will be treated the same way from what I understand. I think we have that campaign on hold rn because we’ve switched to something different.
I haven't used it or played the system yet but fabula ultima has a system where basically if you would die you can choose to either surrender and suffer a loss at the gm's discretion or you can sacrifice yourself and you can accomplish one great deed before you die.
I ran a 3.5 game where they TPK'd vs a vampire. I ran an epolog for them where they got to enter the after life and be judged on where their characters ended up. From events that happened veccna offered the monk to live out as the vampire his body became in exchange for his services in his new life. The elan soul knife and druid ended up on Mechanus, and the rogue sold their soul to become a barbed devil after lemure stage.
Masks is so good. My favorite supers game besides Marvel Heroic/Smallville. Thanks for the shout out.
In my 3rd session as a DM, I TPKd my party. It was at the first boss at least (a necromancer), and i knew itd be challenging, but i didnt realize how lethal it was going to be. I asked the players what they wanted to do, saying that this is their story as much as mine. So i wanted to know if they wanted to continue with that party and have them be saved by another adventuring party who got to the dungeon after them, or if theyd prefer to bring in entirely new characters. They chose the latter, i think because the other option i suggested sounded like a deus ex machina- if I'd thought more about it i may have been able to come up with a more satisfying option but they all seemed happy enough to roll new characters.
Bonus: i got 4 new bad guys to add to my story 😈
This is a good channel. I like Mike.
Just started re-listening to The All Guardsman Party and I love how brutal it is. Death being around every corner really sells the feeling of underdogs fighting against impossible odds
I really liked this video, the last one I saw about death from SGM treated getting upset about your character dying like not much more than a temper tantrum or some reason like "my new character won't be as invested" and stuff like that and almost felt like it completely disregarded the idea that someone would be upset that their character died because....they liked that character. No, "if my character dies, I quit" is never an appropriate ultimatum to give a DM, but also there seems to be a lot of players (like it's suggested, more tenured players) who find anyone who does want to stay as one character or doesn't have 10-50 backup characters at the ready as weird.
And maybe it is weird to DnD, I'm literally just breaking into the realm of fandom this year, watching CR, playing Baldur's Gate, sitting down and having long talks with a couple of my friends who DM that are trying to get me to sit and play a game, but as an outsider looking in, *not* getting attached to your character and reeeeeaaaaaally wanting to only play as them feels like the weird route.
The one modification I make to resurrection in D&D is by placing a soft limit on the number of times it can happen. Resurrection spells other than Revivify already have a penalty that goes away over time, so what I've done is shift that penalty to being exhaustion levels, and making them gain more exhaustion the more times they've been resurrected by those spells.
But Miracle Max said that Westley was not _completely_ dead, just _mostly_ dead. Mostly dead, he can work with. With completely dead, all you can do is rummage through pockets looking for spare change.
Pre 5E I was stick another quarter in a slot for another life. Just pay the priest for the cost and no additional quest. I did do System Shock Survival and Resurrection Survival rolls. Which was basically a con save to see if your soul or body could withstand coming back. Back up PCs was always a thing since my groups were more “This is a game” players.
I avoided DMS who did no resurrection and met very few before 2000 when I started lurking on the internet.
The Current Adventure League rules is free resurrection between sessions. And most bodies are recovered by the Scooby gang. I think I only had two deaths where the body could not be recovered. I have died 4 times in AL games.
I have 477 AL sessions with 114 deaths. And I am known as the fair dm.
Checking my notes. During Tomb I had 12 PC deaths, 4 souls never coming back, and at least 274 monster kills. I think I recon 2 of those deaths.
I’m currently playing through Tomb of Annihilation and we’ve lost a total of 6 player characters so far and it’s something I enjoy. Though I understand resurrection I personally like the perma death mechanic as it brings real stakes to a campaign about death
In old school play, characters are more transient. The throughline is the world, not the characters. Since it's much more focused on emergent play, characters are seen as almost expendable.
I had a character die in my last session this weekend. I asked them how they felt about it, and they said they were fine with it because it allowed for real character growth for one of the other players. I love my players.
Mike, I need to focus and get laundry done... Why do you distract me like this?
I've had two PC deaths in the campaign I'm DMing so far. The monk died to a goblin's arrow. The wizard froze his body to preserve it, and after delivering him to his family's home, his father revealed he knew the location of an ancient dragon he used to study under, who would have the power to revive him. This led to an arc of the campaign consisting of finding this dragon, then doing some dirty work for him involving slaying a young rival dragon in his territory. The quest complete, the ancient dragon brought the monk back to life. However, the monk's player had been playing a new warlock in the meantime, and decided to continue playing her instead.
The second death is still unresolved, but it happened in the feywild to an ambush of giant spiders and ettercaps. The bard fell, but the party was already on their way to visit a friendly(?) archfey, who then offered to revive the bard for one of two prices - either solve the monster problem (that the party was already on their way to solving, though they don't quite know it yet) or someone in the party become her warlock. The party chose the former option. The bard's player said she doesn't mind if the bard experiences some... changes... after being resurrected by an archfey. In the meantime, the bard's player is playing an explicitly temporary sorcerer.
In summary I like to resolve character death by attaching a quest to their resurrection, rather than a simple spellcast, and needing a powerful being to perform the deed. However, the body needs to be intact and preserved for this to happen. If not, revival won't be an option. In my setting, resurrection magic isn't really available to mortals.
The first full campaign I tired to run was something I put a lot of effort into.
The concept was simple. 100 years before, the ruling empire convinces everyone that dragons are so evil that they need to be eradicated. Then they wage a war against them all and win. During present day the adventuring party stumbles across a goblin village deep in the woods and learns that the empire lied. The Shamon of the village turns out be an ancient green dragon in disguise and has been hiding in secret this whole time. After learning this, the party is given the task of guarding her eggs as she was mortally wounded in the battle against the the party. Yes the party just received dragon eggs and now have to unravel the mystery of why the empire tried to kill them all.
Sadly after three session the players had life happen and we never got continue that home brew.
My end goal was to have the eggs hatch and, similar to Eragon, bond with them. If they let their dragon hatchling die, they go "crazy". I was really looking forward to flipping the narrative on its head and make all the "evil" characters in game just misunderstood, while the BBEG the one leading the empire. Ending in an all out revolution against the him. Wanted to start out with something simply 😉
I've only run 2 one-shots for teens, and in the second, I had prepped for a party of 3-5 at levels 3 or 4. I wound up with 3 players, and I think they were all level 1 or 2. When one teen said they were unconscious, I literally went "Nah, we're ignoring hit points now. You dying isn't fun, I want to see how you figure out this haunted house."
I disagree with you saying no resurrection means that life is cheap. I actually think it's the opposite, it makes life incredibly precious. It also adds a lot tension to dangerous situations, and I've noticed in general that once my players have gained a level or 2, and a bit of gear, they're far more cautious in systems with no resurrection, since they don't want to lose what they've work towards.
I run a ShadowDark campaign, and have only had 1 PC death so far, but also a few almost TPKs, but the dice were in the player's favour.
It was a small 2 player session with my brothers, one played a level 2 wizard, and the other was new to the game and was playing a level 1 bard. The players were grave robbing a burial mound of a great barbarian warrior, which angered the guardian wight that had been sealed within. The wizard ran away, moving beyond the rune inscribed cairnstones outside the mound that served to seal the wight within, the bard chose to stand his ground and fight. The bard missed with his shortbow, then was subsequently crit by the wight. Given the threat of the wight, the wizard played it safe trying to fend off the wight with magic missles before the bard's death timer ran out, but he didn't make it in time.
We had a short intermission where I asked the bard player to roll up a new character, to which he rolled up another bard. The wizard continued on through the wilderness, and encountered the new bard sitting in a tree surrounded by rabid dogs that were barking and growling at him. They fought off the dogs, and the wizard recruited the new bard for his mission.
For ShadowDark in particular, I think just dropping the backup character into a nearby explorable area that makes sense for the game world is for the best. If a character dies in a dungeon, just have their backup be in the next room or 2. Maybe they were captured, or maybe they've already been exploring the area themselves, the reason doesn't really matter, as long as it makes some reasonable sense. ShadowDark is intended to be a simple, ruleslite system, so getting the player back into the game asap is always for the best.
currnently I'm running a campaign that is set partially in the land of the living, and partially in the land of the dead. So... how death work is you go from one world to the other... and maybe need a replacement body :p
There are some items that can damage the soul however... so not everything is easy to come back from.
I recently started my first campaign and in session 3 one of my PCs died.
I decided to bring him back, but this saturday he´s about to learn he has been living on borrowed time, it´s just that the god of death needs the aid of a mortal to avoid someone else from dying but when he either helps that person survive or avoid the request, he´ll die for good.
This character is very abrassive and I wanna see what this does to him. He won´t know when the moment will come until it does so I wonder if she´ll have a change of attitude or double down on it. I think this can result in something interesting.
My approach to character death in D&D is that unless you get brought back from the dead by a spell, you roll a new character.
I personally prefer death to be hard (but not impossible) to overcome, to give it weight but also a chance to "fix" a potential problem. Maybe there should be a short quest or a big sacrifice must be needed, maybe a deal is struck with consequences for the character or another, I just prefer there to be something if the death itself won't be the real consequence.
In my current game (in which I'm a player), character death's been treated a few different ways - my 1st character was the first to die, and the DM told me after the session that she'd work with me so I'd be happy with what happens next, offering the possibility of bringing the character back as a revenant or otherwise, or letting me make a new character. While I liked the character, I'd also felt a little constrained by some of the choices I'd made, so wasn't enjoying them to the fullest, and liked the way they died as a capstone to that character (as well as the fallout for other characters that we got in the following session, which mostly focused on funerary proceedings and simply the group dealing with what happened), especially as I'd had a feeling he might die soon, so I'd had him write a little "goodbye letter/will" off camera in a prior session (I told the DM what I was writing, and provided her with a digital file between that session and the next one, before his death ever played out) motivated by his fear it might happen without saying some things. My 2nd character eventually died but for timey-wimey reasons came back just slightly rewound (we'd already known that was potentially coming when my character was killed, so it just upped the reasons for the rewind), and he remains my character to this day. Another player's character ended up dying partly through their own choices and they were allowed to go out in something of a "blaze of glory", but the player was saddened by the loss and his missing the character grew over time, so the DM set up some stuff to bring back the dead character but with consequences. Since then, our characters have hit such a high level (we have been in something akin to the "final stretch" for a bit, but keep detouring) that death doesn't pose as much of a threat both because it's harder to kill us but also the magic we have, and I kind of miss those earlier days (not just because of this aspect).
I've had a few ideas for games bouncing around my head for a while that I tinker with when I (rarely) have time or an idea, haven't thought about this aspect yet, may just bring it up with players if we get close to/prepare to play those.
The part about the non d&d campaign was very interesting! I only know what I learned from CR and other d&d shows. Do you have other content about different systems?
Mike tries to keep his advice applicable to many systems, but he's talked about West Marches (Marshes?) before, though I don’t remember which vids.
West Marches is a style of game, not a game system, for clarity
I've been playing since 4e, and I love it when my character dies randomly.
I have atleast 100 replacements that are nothing like the original with completely different goals.
As a GM, when my players try to revive another character, I have that player's character encounter Gods of their alignment petitioning them for a favor. Depending on which one they accept, it alters their story and abilities.
*If they don't accept any of them I have the Raven Queen take them away, and the resurrection fails...
6:42 For me is the exact opposite. I think removing resurrection magic make deaths feel far more impactful since, like in real life (and a lot of the most popular media nowadays), that character ain't coming back. That's why i'm not a big fan of high level DnD, your life feels super cheap. As long as you got the money, you can keep coming back.
The ship of Theseus party is very awkward in modern play.
I often have the underworld like in dragon ball or mythology.
People CAN get back in some circumstances. Sometimes even by themselves.
But i usually don't like Revivify and etc.
Story driven death is much more meaningful and interesting to me
TBH, I like having plenty of options for Resurrection. It is an amazingly useful tool for several reasons. It can bring party members back, of course, but so it can be used for recurring villains, and even NPCs of note. An entire market based on "life diamonds" can be set for the campaign world, with certain factions actively trying to hoard them as a powerful blackmail/safety measure to allow only those they want to be brought back. That can be a powerful indication of how "good" or "evil" a kingdom is: do they allow Resurrection only to the rich and powerful? Is there a system in place to allow innocent, people to be brought back by the government or the churches, or is it the typical "haves vs have nots"?
I think it gets too much hate and not enough worldbuilding around it. Simply limiting it for "stakes" sake is saying that the only stake at the table is death, and there are many, MANY other ways to take a character off the game in ways that will, practically speaking, be worse than death. Brainwashing, plane-ban, inescapable prisons, etc. All of them give the same effect: the character is now unavailable, they simply move through different paths, and create different stories around how the character can be brought back to who they were.
(As usual, coming from a person who was heavy into gaming in the 80s & 90s, but never liked D&D and rarely played it). For a lot of non-D&D games back in the 80s & 90s, it wasn't uncommon for character death to be a more serious, narrative thing, and far less arbitrary or left up to the dice than in early D&D or in a lot of the OSR. Heck, even in games that theoretically should have a high mortality rate, like Call of Cthulhu, you usually had to consistently F-up and not listen to the GM's warnings to get killed. Later games like Deadlands (which evolved into Savage Worlds) gave you in-game currency to spend to avoid damage or death. I feel like this obsession a certain element has with "life is cheap" styles of play and the so-called OSR, are trying to recreate a style of gaming they THINK used to be popular, as opposed to how a lot of gaming really used to be. Or they've just read too much about Gary Gygax and his crew and their con-games, which by the late 70s was not really all that big a part of the hobby and by the 90s, was largely forgotten & ignored. People care way, way, way more about Gary Gygax and the origins of D&D now than they did for...like 30 years of the hobby's existence.
Though I agree that it very much depends on the game, the group, and the campaign. Like when I've run DCC, part of the fun is seeing the insane ways your PCs get killed. So, yeah. Death is common. But in a Call of Cthulhu campaign, where some level of character consistency is needed to keep the investigation going, I might give PCs more ways to get out of getting killed.
I played in some fairly combat heavy, long term (2+ years of Earthdwan, for example) games where only maybe one or two PCs ever died.
I am desperately trying to figure out how to handle it in my game right now. I am running a Dragon Age campaign which does not offer any ressuretion in it by default. I don't know if I like that though because I want moments more along the lines of CR1 where the characters are all very part of the story, and bringing people back is a big moment in games like that. I don't know if I want to add a resurrection possibility or if I need to accept it, but I do know that what I am currently doing (just fuging rolls so no one dies) isn't working for me. It's only happened a couple times so the players just think they have had close calls (I have an incredible poker face) but at some point, it WILL become clear that there are no stakes if I don't be careful.
In the last game I played with this group there was death more along the lines of what is in D&D in that it wasn't permanent per se but BOY did it have consequences, both mechanical and story. It was World of Darkness and we were starting with an Innocents game (children) and growing with them. And through a series of events, my girl wound up dying really horribly at the hands of a friend. She became a Sin Eater, a character held to life by a ghost with powers to interact with the world of life and death. But that moment of tragedy shaped the story direction and character interaction for basically the rest of the game. It was one of the most powerful and memorable moments in roleplay I have ever experienced. And I don't want to deny characters the story of the heroic or tragic death. But I don't know how, after a series of bad rolls a character just can't make it across the falling bridge for example, their falling just wouldn't derail their current mission.
I am really looking forward to this series of videos so I can attempt to string together a solution I feel happy with.
For D&D specifically, yes, there needs to be a threat of death.
For other games, this isn't always true. For stories to work, at least in the Western storytelling tradition (and... Not all games are about creating stories at the table! Some games have a more 'slice of life' approach), there needs to be stakes, absolutely, but those stakes don't have to be life and death (And, there are some interesting games in addition to Masks. In Briar and Bramble, because of the subject matter of the game 'death' is opt-in because, well, most people struggle with animal death in media more than human death so the consequence of dropping to 0hp 'unable to continue the journey' leaving what that looks like specifically to the player (who should be taking into account the lines and veils established at the start of the game). Mechanically it's death, narratively, it's not _necessarially_ death. Or where it's up to the player if their character dies, in both a mechanical and narrative sense - Fabula Ultima has an interesting thing that if you go down you can either have your character sacrifice, in which case they will die but will be able to do something that significantly helps the party's goal in the process, or survive in which case whatever happens they will live, but there will be negative narrative consequences.
Really interesting video and topic but one thing I will disagree on is the concept that limited resurrection highlights a "life is cheap" attitude. In current 5e a life is 300gps. A level 2 character probably has enough cash for that. Life is heap in high res games, not low res ones... after all who cares if you die, you'll come back. Low res games emphasize the value of life. Do you really need to fight those orcs for the jewel encrusted idol? You might die. And it's only money. Maybe you should only throw yourself into danger if the risk is really worth the reward. What are you really willing to risk dying for? Also... having characters die and not be able to come back, not be able to pick their death, maybe dying to something random or beneath them without any strong narrative purpose.... that's like life. Without wishing to sound too morbid... sometimes people die and it's not convenient or heroic or memorable.... it's just awful and really, really, really sad. If you play games because you are interested in the emotional aspects of roleplay or investing yourself in another, albeit make-believe, life then death, especially permanent death, is source of some of the rawest most emotional roleplay possible. It's emotional resonance that will always be utterly dispelled by "They've only been dead 37 seconds, hold on, I'll crack out the diamonds". Which, to be fair, is both an argument for and against resurrections. People being gone and them never coming back is a horrible thing and not everyone wants that in their escapist power fantasy (not saying that judgementally by the way, it's as valid a way to play as any other). But it's important to not dismiss low res games as "Life is cheap, we'll find a new wizard" or something that has more of a place in older, kick in the door and steal the treasure games.
Mike is admitting that his CoS campaign is based on D&D cartoon show.
1000% 😂
I agree that resurrection shouldn't be so easy/cheap that death becomes a mere nuisance, but I hate it when a character dies and it makes zero narrative sense, so I'm pro-resurrection in that sense.
If resurrections are allowed for player characters, should they also be allowed for NPCs? There's an instinct to say no because the player characters are more important, but what if the party is a scrappy group of lvl 5 adventurers and the NPC in question is the ruler of a nation or some other important figure? If resurrection is available to adventurers, surely it is somewhat available to those in positions of power. The internal logic of the setting might demand it. And yet, how can a DM drive a narrative if they can't keep characters dead?
My current campaign has fairly easily accessible resurrections (you simply need to go to the nearby temple and give up enough of value in exchange), but the entire inciting incident for the campaign was the public assassination of a great leader. I handwaved the possibility for a resurrection, which has worked fine so far because none of my players have really tried to interrogate the point, but it does kind of break verisimilitude and force contrivance right into the heart of what makes the story possible in the first place.
Do this rarely. I have done this maybe 3 times since 1980. You have to play the NPC so it is going to very loved or hated until you die.
How little the PCs in Critical Role stay dead is actually my largest (or at least, near the top) complaints about the series. I don't think the way it is set up is bad, but boy... it bugs me.
The Resurrection spells dont cost gold. They costs diamonds.
Which may or may not be easy to come by. Like how many shops in a town might have 1000 gold worth of dimonds? Or in raise deads case One singlar Diamond that is worth 500 gold. Given that quality of diamond is not actually easy to come by. In fact it could be the treasure of a low level (1-5) hiest. If you look at the DMG for stores they dont stock that high of a price point of diamonds all that often.
The gaining of the amount of diamonds needed for such a resurrection spell could easily be a quest in an of its self. And then there is the fact that you're then casting a spell for 1 hour that then destories these diamonds... you honestly think thats not going to attract bandits and thefties? And that there in an encount.
Thats not easy to pull of.
Also I hate the Critical Role Resurrection Ritual stuff. It is a nerf to the clases that cast those spells. No one at any point is stopping play mid way through to tell the Wizard he now needs to roll different dice and do a whole ritual where the whole party has to give something over just to cast Fireball or Disintegrate.
Well poop, I just had a whole comparison with a point and question, but the whole thing was just one big spoiler. So I guess I'll just leave this
5e to me is basically dnd easy mode. I really don’t like it and that’s largely because characters are essentially gods by lv 5 and there’s no real sense of danger…. So me and my friends still play 3.5 BUT I’m not saying 5e is a bad system just bad for me 😂😂
Death saves and bringing people back with a 3rd lv spell… just not my jam
In what plane of existence are 3.5 characters weaker than 5e?
3.5 PCs absolutely OBLITERATE 5e PCs
@@unexardiximarion1920 that’s right they could but the monsters are stronger. In 5e everything is a joke
Vecna a legendary lich?
Counterspell? GG
Tarrasque? I got flying
GG
Etc etc
5e is easy mode and you are in struggle denial if you can’t see it. It’s a great system as I said but not great for me
New player opinion. With DM's "fudging" roles behind their DM screens, with "quantum ogres" that just happen to show up, with railroading and DMs on the fly changing DCs, this game isn't actually a game. It's improve theater. So DMs should be willing to let characters completely opt out of complete character death and instead accept maybe some temporary penalties. Some people, myself include, have and struggle with anxiety and depression. If we get emotionally invested in a character and layout a personal narrative and backstory only to have a DM pull out an over tuned encounter that blows our character to bits, this really sours not only the experience but life in general. I think character death does the opposite intended effect and makes you NOT care about your character or the story cause whats the point if in a couple session your character gets incinerated. Some of us have past trauma, lost loved ones and are so sick of thinking about death we would much prefer some light hearted adventures. And these OG DND people being shitty and saying "This isn't the game for you." are NOT doing your community any favors by being so uptight on something, just as you mentioned, does not even effect the "game" mechanically.
Yeah I agree that DM's who change stuff on the fly like fudging rolls, hit points, AC, ect. probably should avoid permanent PC deaths since if a PC dies, it's most likely due to the DM's error, and not the player's choices/rng of the dice.
That said, I think if a DM is transparent with their rolls, and knows the system well enough to make reasonable encounters, then PC death should be on the table since it adds narrative tension.
Also I don't mean to come off as an ass, but the OG DND people do have a point. Death is a part of DnD, it's a built in mechanic. Sure there are ways to circumvent it such as resurrection, but as the rules are written, when you run out of hit points, you either die outright or are in the process of dying. To get rid of death from the game requires the DM to remove a core mechanic and add houserules. Once the DM starts altering the game, there's a line where the game stops resembling DnD, that line is going be subjective, but I'd guess for those OG DnD people, that line is when death is removed.
By them saying "This isn't the game for you" I'd take that as them saying that there are other tabletop systems where permanent PC death isn't a factor, so rather than trying to change core mechanics of DnD, just try one of those other games instead.