My replacement for the revolving door afterlife.

I've said more than once that I hate resurrection magic. I just don't want death to be cheap, and I don't want to deal with the implications of resurrection common enough for PCs to utilize. On the other hand, I also don't want to put the players in a situation where a few bad die rolls will take their favorite character away forever. I think I have come up with a workable compromise between these two desires:

If a healing spell is cast on a corpse that has died within 1d3 + 2 minutes, and this spell raises the corpse's hit point total above its constitution modifier in negative hit points, the corpse returns to life. The corpse may not have more hit points that half it's constitution score in negative hit points when it returns to life, and resumes the dying condition normally, though it does not get an attempt at stabilization until losing a hit point. After 1d3 + 2 minutes, this can still be attempted, but it will likely fail to revive the corpse, and if it succeeds there will probably be brain damage. Whether or not such a late revival attempt fails, whether it does brain damage, and what this brain damage does is up to DM fiat. Once a person has been dead for 1d3 + 7 minutes, the individual can no longer be brought back to life, as resurrection magic does not exist.

This system is inspired by IRL emergency resuscitation, the idea being that, if we can pull it off at times in the real world, why couldn't magic pull it off more consistently? This system makes it so that a fallen PC has a very good chance of getting back up (especially since every spellcaster can heal), yet at the same time there is a sense of urgency involved, as the intended healer only has a few minutes before it's too late. After that, you have either crippling brain damage or, more likely, permanent, irrevocable death. The risk of death is still there, and the revolving door afterlife I despise isn't, but dead PCs will still probably get back up. I can tolerate it under this system, because there is a short timeline in which it can be done, and because it is also possible (though much less reliable) in the real world.

Any thoughts on this system? Any balance issues I haven't noticed?

Hmm. Not a bad idea.

Kelsey,
I've done this before in some custom games with house rules. What I did was this:
You actually DIE at negative your full hit point total plus your constitution---in terms of your soul departing.
Magical healing is required to heal you if you are below negative your constitution.
You continue dying at negative hit points as normal.
Coup de grace and the like are just automatic crits
But no resurrection, raise dead, or the like can be done.

Seemed to work reasonably well. The backstory on it was that the 'Law of Death' (borrowed from Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series) was still in full effect and that because of this resurrection, undead, and the like were not possible.

Kelsey,

I've done this before in some custom games with house rules. What I did was this:
You actually DIE at negative your full hit point total plus your constitution---in terms of your soul departing.
Magical healing is required to heal you if you are below negative your constitution.
You continue dying at negative hit points as normal.
Coup de grace and the like are just automatic crits
But no resurrection, raise dead, or the like can be done.

Seemed to work reasonably well. The backstory on it was that the 'Law of Death' (borrowed from Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series) was still in full effect and that because of this resurrection, undead, and the like were not possible.

I think you have an interesting system. I have a similar divine law forbidding resurrection, but no such law forbidding undead (souled undead do, however, have to be created from a living or VERY [as in, a matter of minutes] recently dead individual, while non-souled undead are created as normal). I worked my system under the idea that, once the heart stops, brain death takes a few minutes, and if the heart can be restarted before it occurs, the individual can be restored to life, as the departure of the soul does not occur until the brain has completely died. It's like defibrillating someone with magic.

Kelsey,
The Law of Death actually wound up getting broken later in the game---I'd planned for the possibility. Most of the inhabitants of the world really wished it hadn't.

Kelsey, for my part I wonder about the sense of urgency. A combat round is roughly 6 seconds; 10 to a minute. So the party has literally dozens of rounds to heal someone up again from the brink of death. Even if you decide a combat round is one minute, that's still several rounds to pour healing into them. But I also don't play in your games, so I'm honestly missing part of the equation :)

We always use the 3 strike rule.

First two times you "die" you instead drop to -1 and stabilize. You don't really die till the 3rd time.

Kelsey, for my part I wonder about the sense of urgency. A combat round is roughly 6 seconds; 10 to a minute. So the party has literally dozens of rounds to heal someone up again from the brink of death. Even if you decide a combat round is one minute, that's still several rounds to pour healing into them. But I also don't play in your games, so I'm honestly missing part of the equation :)

The urgency comes from the fact that unless you want to spend two rounds to revive and then stabilize under fire (which has a spell failure risk worth worrying about, since many enemies won't sit back and allow you to do this), you have to clear the area before you can attend to the fallen. This may not be too bad against one enemy, unless it's really big like a dragon. Against multiple enemies, however, getting a shot at reviving the fallen may be harder.

I've accepted that death is basically just a disease with an expensive cure in my own campaign, but I was recently imagining a "Your Time" rule. Essentially GM fiat, the Your Time rule would grant the GM the ability to flat out tell a player when it was their time to die permanently. Maybe the character's deity is pleased with their work and decides it's time for them to come home or maybe demons eat an evil character's soul, whatever. It would certainly answer the question of why well-loved or wealthy NPCs aren't just raised by their families or allies. To make it more random, a GM could always assign a percentage chance to determine when a character's time was up.

I remember older editions had a Constitution rule where you couldn't be raised any more than your initial CON score. If you started with a 12 CON, that's how many lives you got.

@Kelsey - If intelligent creatures know that death works the way described by your houserule, is it possible for someone to hammer a corpse into meat paste for ten straight minutes in order to ensure recovery is not an option, and do attacks against the helpless corpse count as crits? Say a kobold pokes a body with his spear for 8 points of damage every round for even just 15 rounds doing a total of 120 damage while his buddies keep the rest of the party busy. Is there a point at which no amount of healing is going to bring that dude back?

@Kelsey - If intelligent creatures know that death works the way described by your houserule, is it possible for someone to hammer a corpse into meat paste for ten straight minutes in order to ensure recovery is not an option, and do attacks against the helpless corpse count as crits? Say a kobold pokes a body with his spear for 8 points of damage every round for even just 15 rounds doing a total of 120 damage while his buddies keep the rest of the party busy. Is there a point at which no amount of healing is going to bring that dude back?

You can damage a corpse, which will increase the amount of healing needed to revive it. The attacks are treated as normal attacks, and cannot crit unless you perform a coup de grace. There isn't a threshold that makes revival impossible, but if you do enough damage you can make it so that the enemy doesn't have enough healing spells available, or time to cast them.

The Heal spell will be a big deal. No matter how beat up the corpse is, one cast of heal will revive them (if cast in time). I'm not sure if that's strong enough to bump it up a level, but if you do, you might want to add a new cure spell (or something) to offset the change. Then again, your campaigns might not get that high level.

The Heal spell will be a big deal. No matter how beat up the corpse is, one cast of heal will revive them (if cast in time). I'm not sure if that's strong enough to bump it up a level, but if you do, you might want to add a new cure spell (or something) to offset the change. Then again, your campaigns might not get that high level.

I'm not too worried. A single Cure will do the job a lot of the time. Usually, it's more an issue of fighting your way into position than having the right spell.

I've said more than once that I hate resurrection magic. I just don't want death to be cheap, and I don't want to deal with the implications of resurrection common enough for PCs to utilize. On the other hand, I also don't want to put the players in a situation where a few bad die rolls will take their favorite character away forever. I think I have come up with a workable compromise between these two desires:

If a healing spell is cast on a corpse that has died within 1d3 + 2 minutes, and this spell raises the corpse's hit point total above its constitution modifier in negative hit points, the corpse returns to life. The corpse may not have more hit points that half it's constitution score in negative hit points when it returns to life, and resumes the dying condition normally, though it does not get an attempt at stabilization until losing a hit point. After 1d3 + 2 minutes, this can still be attempted, but it will likely fail to revive the corpse, and if it succeeds there will probably be brain damage. Whether or not such a late revival attempt fails, whether it does brain damage, and what this brain damage does is up to DM fiat. Once a person has been dead for 1d3 + 7 minutes, the individual can no longer be brought back to life, as resurrection magic does not exist.

This system is inspired by IRL emergency resuscitation, the idea being that, if we can pull it off at times in the real world, why couldn't magic pull it off more consistently? This system makes it so that a fallen PC has a very good chance of getting back up (especially since every spellcaster can heal), yet at the same time there is a sense of urgency involved, as the intended healer only has a few minutes before it's too late. After that, you have either crippling brain damage or, more likely, permanent, irrevocable death. The risk of death is still there, and the revolving door afterlife I...

I would strongly advise that you consider that high level D&D is balanced on the assumption that you can be raised relatively easily. The game gets progressively harder as you gain levels, and by CR 11+, death can be a pretty frequent occurrence. If there are no suitable resurrection magics in your campaign, then you'll probably want to re-examine the number of special individuals, and you ma run into verisimilitude problems. For example, by nature of this change high level individuals would become far rarer because to achieve high levels you usually have to do progressively more dangerous stuff and survive. The odds are against you surviving (not only do you have to survive more and more dangers, but those dangers become greater and greater).

Now that might not be a bad thing in and of itself, but when you run a game with either no or drastically penalized revivals, you will need to keep spare characters around. This causes it to become more difficult for most people to become attached to their characters and think of them as more than a game piece for very long. It also contrasts the above problem, when you realize that not only is your world going to have far fewer high level individuals, but that you will also need to cycle through more high level individuals to replace dead party members. This causes all sorts of fridge-logic problems.

It will also generally encourage far more power gaming (which may or may not be desired) as a form of defense. Every little +1 will be counted, and counted tightly, because anything that could mean the difference between rolling a new character and not will become more important. Most people can deal with a negative level that only provides a small penalty to their stats for a while (until they get the negative level removed), but re-rolling is often a huge buzz-kill for many players.

There's also a pretty strong possibility of brain damage resentment, especially since the effects of the brain damage are entirely up to the GM. One thing that concerns me about this is also the fact it's based off real-life resuscitation. Magic pretty much owns our medical capabilities. This seems like a really awesome house rule system for Heal-checks, but rubs me the wrong way when you can regrow entire limbs and cure someone infected with aids, leprosy, and cancer all at the same time in the same trip with the same procedure. If you can get a sword run through your body and healed up in 3 seconds by a novice healer, and regrow the lower half of your body from scratch, and so forth, why is it so hard to resuscitate somebody when you can do so with CPR, drugs, and electric shocks?

EDIT: Incidentally, there was another concern. The idea of repeatedly dealing damage to the corpse, yet being able to heal said corpse. At some point the corpse would simply cease to be a corpse. It would be destroyed. It could be melted, torn to shreds, burnt to a crisp, disintegrated, and so forth. At some point, the corpse would cease to be. If any old healing spell will cause the body to regrow anew, then what is the point of regeneration? Surely everyone and their neighbor should be able to chop their hand off, hold it to the stump, and cast cure light wounds and make it jump back together, no?

I would strongly advise that you consider that high level D&D is balanced on the assumption that you can be raised relatively easily. The game gets progressively harder as you gain levels, and by CR 11+, death can be a pretty frequent occurrence. If there are no suitable resurrection magics in your campaign, then you'll probably want to re-examine the number of special individuals, and you ma run into verisimilitude problems. For example, by nature of this change high level individuals would become far rarer because to achieve high levels you usually have to do progressively more dangerous stuff and survive. The odds are against you surviving (not only do you have to survive more and more dangers, but those dangers become greater and greater).

Now that might not be a bad thing in and of itself, but when you run a game with either no or drastically penalized revivals, you will need to keep spare characters around. This causes it to become more difficult for most people to become attached to their characters and think of them as more than a game piece for very long. It also contrasts the above problem, when you realize that not only is your world going to have far fewer high level individuals, but that you will also need to cycle through more high level individuals to replace dead party members. This causes all sorts of fridge-logic problems.

It will also generally encourage far more power gaming (which may or may not be desired) as a form of defense. Every little +1 will be counted, and counted tightly, because anything that could mean the difference between rolling a new character and not will become more important. Most people can deal with a negative level that only provides a small penalty to their stats for a while (until they get the negative level removed), but re-rolling is often a huge buzz-kill for many players.

All of this is why the revival system I wrote is so forgiving. It may not be easy for the party to fight their way into the position to heal them, but it will generally be doable.

There's also a pretty strong possibility of brain damage resentment, especially since the effects of the brain damage are entirely up to the GM. One thing that concerns me about this is also the fact it's based off real-life resuscitation. Magic pretty much owns our medical capabilities. This seems like a really awesome house rule system for Heal-checks, but rubs me the wrong way when you can regrow entire limbs and cure someone infected with aids, leprosy, and cancer all at the same time in the same trip with the same procedure. If you can get a sword run through your body and healed up in 3 seconds by a novice healer, and regrow the lower half of your body from scratch, and so forth, why is it so hard to resuscitate somebody when you can do so with CPR, drugs, and electric shocks?

The resuscitation system I have here seems pretty easy. I don't see brain damage getting brought into play much (I think most times the 3-5 minute initial deadline will be met), so I don't see it asking for too much resentment.

EDIT: Incidentally, there was another concern. The idea of repeatedly dealing damage to the corpse, yet being able to heal said corpse. At some point the corpse would simply cease to be a corpse. It would be destroyed. It could be melted, torn to shreds, burnt to a crisp, disintegrated, and so forth. At some point, the corpse would cease to be. If any old healing spell will cause the body to regrow anew, then what is the point of regeneration? Surely everyone and their neighbor should be able to chop their hand off, hold it to the stump, and cast cure light wounds and make it jump back together, no?

That could be fixed by ruling that, in the case of fatal dismemberment, it takes a Restoration-type spell or Heal to revive the character, and in the case of non-fatal dismemberment a non-Restoration spell won't fix the dismemberment.

Maybe leave the resurrection magic where it is except material components are x10?
50,000 GP for a Raise Dead;
100,000 GP for Resurrection;
250,000 GP for True Resurrection.
The sons of the assassinated king will prefer to save the money this time, uh?

I also feel the 'revolving door of death' is problem, actually less so for the players coming back but with regards to NPCs it's very difficult for the players to care about the fate of NPC's when they can just be raised if anything happens to them plus easy access the resurrection can end some story-lines very quickly (murder mysteries for example).

I've just finished running the last Council of Thieves adventure and this came up then, the bad guys had destabilised the city by murdering various prominent people (nobles, the guards captain etc.) so the PC's just rezzed them...problem solved. It wasn't too much of an issue as I came up with a few ways to complicate the process of getting certain NPC's raised (Quieting needles FTW :-p) to provide a bit more of a challenge rather than just solving the problems by throwing money at them.

Anyway my idea for handling this in the next game I run comes from much earlier in the CoT game I was running. The stories pretty long but if you want to read it it's below

Basically when I next run I will let the players know early on that none of the three spells that raise dead are freely available either to have cast by NPCs or to take as PC's. The idea of returning from the dead is not unheard of but is something very rare and special that has happened only a few times under special circumstances (players can make knowledge checks for specific examples).

So basically if a PC (or possibly an NPC)dies either the player playing him doesn't mind and gens up a new character or the player tells the gm that actually they were really enjoying playing that character and they'd like to continue doing so. In this case the GM agrees to whip something up to give the party the chance to bring back the slain character. Maybe they need to perform a difficult quest to obtain an powerful one shot artefact with which to bring the dead PC back, or maybe they make deal with a powerful outsider who wants something from the party somewhere down the line.

These 'resurrection quests' can be as difficult or as easy as the GM would like. Of course if the quest has to be completed before the character is bought back then the player with the dead character might need to play a filler character for a little bit but they shouldn't mind if it means getting their beloved character back.

As I say I've yet to implement this but hopefully it will reintroduce the fear of death at mid to high levels while avoiding the game balance issues that removing or heavily restricting coming back from the dead might cause.

I've said more than once that I hate resurrection magic. I just don't want death to be cheap, and I don't want to deal with the implications of resurrection common enough for PCs to utilize. On the other hand, I also don't want to put the players in a situation where a few bad die rolls will take their favorite character away forever. I think I have come up with a workable compromise between these two desires:

If a healing spell is cast on a corpse that has died within 1d3 + 2 minutes, and this spell raises the corpse's hit point total above its constitution modifier in negative hit points, the corpse returns to life. The corpse may not have more hit points that half it's constitution score in negative hit points when it returns to life, and resumes the dying condition normally, though it does not get an attempt at stabilization until losing a hit point. After 1d3 + 2 minutes, this can still be attempted, but it will likely fail to revive the corpse, and if it succeeds there will probably be brain damage. Whether or not such a late revival attempt fails, whether it does brain damage, and what this brain damage does is up to DM fiat. Once a person has been dead for 1d3 + 7 minutes, the individual can no longer be brought back to life, as resurrection magic does not exist.

This system is inspired by IRL emergency resuscitation, the idea being that, if we can pull it off at times in the real world, why couldn't magic pull it off more consistently? This system makes it so that a fallen PC has a very good chance of getting back up (especially since every spellcaster can heal), yet at the same time there is a sense of urgency involved, as the intended healer only has a few minutes before it's too late. After that, you have either crippling brain damage or, more likely, permanent, irrevocable death. The risk of death is still there, and the revolving door afterlife I...

I love it!

Arcanis had the "sunrise" rule for death. The time limit for raise dead was the first sunrise after death. Bringing back someone after that point required unspecfied special means.

Or if you really want to take the big step.... Dead is dead. take resurrection out of the game entirely. Plenty of rpg's don't have such a mechanic.

One thing that I remember is that, typically, when a person dies in this game it goes to a place that is perfect for its soul. When one uses any of the raise spells it assumes the soul wants to return to a world of pain, misery, of discontent. I think most people would be done with doing that and only a few rare individuals, PCs, would have the drive to move beyond that contentment.

It worked for dealing with the NPC raise issue. If you are on Golarion, someone can only be rezzed while in the Boneyard. If Pharasma judges you, well, you are on to the big sleep.

You could always have second set of characters that works for the church to go out and find materials needed to cast raise dead. or look at it from Dragon Ball Z and say you need to gather certain items every time you want to raise someone and thus you have to adventure to find these items. Like above a character can always have a character backup tied to the church that is sent with the rest of the Living pcs to help gather what is needed to cast the very hard process of resurrection.

You could use a Favor system where each play has a Deity and a favor rating depending on how well they honor their deity. When they die they confront their deity and either accept their fate and pass their soul for reincarnation (PCs next character) or Plea for another chance (Favor rating) if they fail the roll the deity might request a him or her to go out and do something of great good in their honor before a certain amount of time is up. If they fail it makes the next plea very hard to win.

Just something different than just " Grab a finger we will just rez when we get back to town"

Give a chance for mutations or flaws with each resurrection one could be you accidently come back as a female twin or something.

While your system my be forgiving there are a number of situations that can arise that can make retrieving a body within the specified time impossible, if it can be done at all. Since the consequence of this if permanent character death I would rather not play with those rules myself. A few examples include falling of a cliff, falling into a pit of lava, being completely disintegrated, teleported into a trap, or plane shifted to a hostile environment.

The main problem I see is that as characters get higher and higher level the chance for something like this happening to them continues to increase. If I played a character to, let’s say 15th level, and then got plane shifted to the plane of fire by a prismatic spray and died permanently as a result, I would not be happy. The longer you play a character the more you tend to get attached to them (in my experience anyway). Normally, high levels means you can usually recover a lost character but with these rules it just means a higher chance for permanent death.

Personally my preference would be to switch your minutes to rounds to add a sense of urgency in combat to hurry and heal a fallen comrade and then make the resurrection type spells more costly, possibly even requiring a successful save to be brought back to life with a DC the increases the longer you have been dead. That way high-level characters aren’t killed permanently due to a bad die roll in an unfortunate situation.

This is the way I handle death:
1) Casting Raise Dead, Resurrection, and the like are dangerous. The caster must make a knowledge (religion) check of 20 + spell level + level of dead character or bring back the wrong soul into the body, usually a demon or evil ghost.

2) Meanwhile, the departed soul must convince whatever deity claimed his soul to allow him to return. This can be done through Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate (for the brave). Deities will usually require the character to perform a service in exchange.

Resurrection spells are already expensive so I don't really see the problem here. You can just flavor the spells so only a secret organization knows how to cast them if you want. Most of the time when low level characters die, no one raises them because it's not cost effective to do so. There are also ways to permanently trap souls if you don't want someone to be revived. This is just unnecessary rule.

I actually think that a lot of your rules are unnecessary as well but that's for a different discussion.

I actually think that a lot of your rules are unnecessary as well but that's for a different discussion.

How 'bout if she promises to use them only at her table?

As a player, I would not agree with it.
A buffyesce rule that brings an undead into the world every time someone is raised, would be fun. Also, a period of a month where the ressed person attracts undead, would be interesting. "I see dead people"

One of my serious hopes for Pathfinder 2E would be that Paizo takes a long look at the spell lists, and hacks away pretty viciously at some of the spells that take the adventure out of adventuring, or at least raises their spell levels substantially. Frankly, in a Pathfinder campaign setting, trying to assassinate someone who's actually of a high enough position where anyone would actually feel the need to assassinate him is ridiculous, since Raise Dead and similar solutions are so easily obtained. Likewise with flight and teleportation.

I'm actually working on a campaign setting that is based in a city on the borders to all the afterlives. Kind of film noirish, with a bit of courtroom drama and grand mythology mixed in. Raising or reincarnating a body would require the rest of the PCs to travel to the land of the dead, gain the services of an advocate for the departed soul, and make a case before an adjudicator, opposed by an (often infernal) adversary. The player of the dead PC could temporarily play a guide or even the advocate trying to release the soul of his departed PC.

Or maybe have something like Morganti weapons that prevent resurrection magics from working. They're from Steven Brust's Dragaeran series (Vlad Tatlos of the Jhereg series and Phoenix Guards, Viscount of Adrilanka, etc.).

To quote Wikipedia:

According to Dragaeran legend, the Serioli created Morganti weapons to make war so terrible that no one would ever start one. They are magical blades that destroy the soul of any person they cut, killing victims utterly with the smallest scratch and making resurrection or reincarnation impossible. Morganti weapons are semi-intelligent and yearn to "eat" the souls of victims. People near a Morganti weapon can feel its malevolent presence. Morganti daggers are often used by the Jhereg for particularly vindictive assassinations.

The power of Morganti weapons varies. The most powerful are called Great Weapons, which possess a number of advantages over lesser Morganti blades. Great Weapons are more intelligent and can exercise their will by choosing not to devour a soul, protecting their wielder from harm, and granting their wielder a number of magical abilities unique to the weapon. Several Great Weapons have been portrayed, including Blackwand, Godslayer (Called 'Lady Teldra' by Vlad), Iceflame, Pathfinder and Nightslayer. There are thought to be a total of 17 Great Weapons in existence, each with its own name and personality. They are the only weapons powerful enough to slay the Jenoine with one hundred percent certainty.

Bump the levels of the various raise dead type spells a couple of levels and increase the expence / difficulty or... add an element of danger for the caster. Say the caster has to battle an appropriate level outsider (whose job is to take the soul to it's judgment), sans gear, for the soul to bring it back. And if they lose, they die too. That could be interesting :)

One of my serious hopes for Pathfinder 2E would be that Paizo takes a long look at the spell lists, and hacks away pretty viciously at some of the spells that take the adventure out of adventuring, or at least raises their spell levels substantially. Frankly, in a Pathfinder campaign setting, trying to assassinate someone who's actually of a high enough position where anyone would actually feel the need to assassinate him is ridiculous, since Raise Dead and similar solutions are so easily obtained. Likewise with flight and teleportation.

If you dislike those spells so much, just take them out of your campaign or petition your DM to do so. Or play one of the bajillion rpg games out there without a ressurection mechanic.

I like the "Your Time" rule, it's almost RAW in Golarion if you consider Pharasma.

I wonder if the Red Mantises have advertisements that say something like:

The Red Mantis...we keep on killing them until their friends just say "screw it".

I don't think any of the suggestions are necessarily bad but before I implement any of them, I would ask myself a question as GM: "why am I having a problem with the revolving door? Are my adventures matching my players' abilities and expectations?"

Black_Lantern wrote:

I actually think that a lot of your rules are unnecessary as well but that's for a different discussion.

How 'bout if she promises to use them only at her table?

I'm perfectly aware that it is her choice. However that doesn't mean I shouldn't never say what I feel is right. No need to be a jerk, eh? ;P

One thing that I remember is that, typically, when a person dies in this game it goes to a place that is perfect for its soul. When one uses any of the raise spells it assumes the soul wants to return to a world of pain, misery, of discontent. I think most people would be done with doing that and only a few rare individuals, PCs, would have the drive to move beyond that contentment.

It worked for dealing with the NPC raise issue. If you are on Golarion, someone can only be rezzed while in the Boneyard. If Pharasma judges you, well, you are on to the big sleep.

This was one of the key themes dealt with in the 6th season of Buffy, her friends brought her back under the false assumption she was being tormented in hell, only to later find she had been in heaven and found her newly resurrected state to be the hell.

I find as a player, I have a two death max, the first time it might have been fluky so the character comes back, a little scared and a little wiser. The second time I find the character in character would likely reject the resurrection unless they felt some obligation to the something higher. IE would come back if a close family member was in peril, or the world itself had been caught in some sort of apocalypse situation. In less dire times, the second death the character accepts the afterlife reward and moves on.

Out of character, if the the character is repeatedly dying, it is usually indicative that the niche/build is a failure. So it is time to roll up something a little more conservative or a different niche.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, in our last campaign I was the front line meat shield, with a hojillion HP. I probably died every BBEG encounter, as we were fighting the apocalypse, and I usually got a miracle to put me back on my feet mid fight. It became a bit of a running gag that when I got to Jergle's domain I would just take a seat in the waiting room and wait for Lathander's Herald to show up and escort me back. Jergle would often give me a clue, or at least a reassuring smile.

Can'tFindthePath wrote:

Black_Lantern wrote:

I actually think that a lot of your rules are unnecessary as well but that's for a different discussion.

How 'bout if she promises to use them only at her table?

I'm perfectly aware that it is her choice. However that doesn't mean I shouldn't never say what I feel is right. No need to be a jerk, eh? ;P

I believe that Can'tFindThePath's point was that you went beyond providing constructive criticism in this thread and just made a blanket attack against the OP's playing style. They have come to this home rule forum to discuss critically what they perceive is a problem in their home campaign, and to ask for suggestions on a proposed solution to their problem.

Your post started off with a very reasonable suggestion, and then you post scripted it with a fairly negative statement. It wasn't constructive, and a flippant emoticon doesn't grant it the social nicety to make it appropriate, nor make you the victim.

For my games I say that some souls have a stronger bond to the material world than others.

When a PC is first roll up I secretly roll a d4 for that character.

1= 1 time able to be brought back to life
2= 2 times
3= 3 times
4= 0 times

PCs dont know how many times, if any, that their character can come back and it tends to create a suspence of 'Is this the time my character will finally die?'

I think your system makes death seem even cheaper than normal. That deserves to be said a second time: Your system makes death seem even cheaper than normal.

Your mission statement with this idea was to make death less cheap. You have done the opposite. With your changes, you can now have characters dying left and right to be resuscitated minutes later using class abilities, potions, or spells of a much lower level/power than before. With none of the penalties dying normally occurs. Besides not having to suffer a negative level, there is also the financial cost which has been avoided. Or having to have spell slots or items prepared for the eventuality. You are making adventuring easier = less fun in my opinion.

Social rammifications:
You have increased the ways to bring back someone from death at a much lower level. Raise dead, reincarnate, or resurrection are higher level spells less likely to be found available to an NPC popultation.

Poor Timmy gets mauled by a bear. No worries! Just take him to the towns 1st level adept to get it taken care of. Society in general would be less careful and more prone to take risks.

Additionally, by having the soul stay in the body until after the 1d3+x amount of time has passed you end up screwing with quite a few abilites and spells throughout the game. Especially ones that involve the soul at the moment of death. For example, any creature with the ravener template becomes less of a threat.

And you are also bypassing the revivication against ones will. Death by torture will become more prevalent because you can just keep bringing back the prisoner with that handy first aid potion kept nearby.

Instead of avoiding a revolving door afterlife, you have made life less precious.

I think your system makes death seem even cheaper than normal. That deserves to be said a second time: Your system makes death seem even cheaper than normal.

Your mission statement with this idea was to make death less cheap. You have done the opposite. With your changes, you can now have characters dying left and right to be resuscitated minutes later using class abilities, potions, or spells of a much lower level/power than before. With none of the penalties dying normally occurs. Besides not having to suffer a negative level, there is also the financial cost which has been avoided. Or having to have spell slots or items prepared for the eventuality.

My problem with death being cheap is that, if you've got the money, you can try to bring back pretty much anyone at any time. Under my system, after a few minutes nobody comes back. My problem is solved.

You are making adventuring easier = less fun in my opinion.

I'm not a big fan of harder adventuring styles.

Social rammifications:

You have increased the ways to bring back someone from death at a much lower level. [i.]Raise dead[/i], reincarnate, or resurrection are higher level spells less likely to be found available to an NPC popultation.

Poor Timmy gets mauled by a bear. No worries! Just take him to the towns 1st level adept to get it taken care of. Society in general would be less careful and more prone to take risks.

Except by the time a spellcaster actually gets there Timmy has most likely been dead too long and can't be revived.

Additionally, by having the soul stay in the body until after the 1d3+x amount of time has passed you end up screwing with quite a few abilites and spells throughout the game. Especially ones that involve the soul at the moment of death. For example, any creature with the ravener template becomes less of a threat.

As a GM I don't really use that sort of ability much.

And you are also bypassing the revivication against ones will. Death by torture will become more prevalent because you can just keep bringing back the prisoner with that handy first aid potion kept nearby.

I don't consider this possibility a flaw in the system.

Instead of avoiding a revolving door afterlife, you have made life less precious.

Not really. This system relies on medical attention being available within a few minutes. If such attention isn't available that quickly, and it quite often isn't in the case of violent injury, there isn't much to be done.

I actually think that a lot of your rules are unnecessary as well but that's for a different discussion.

It's not a matter of necessity, it's a matter of what fits a specific playstyle.

I don't have your problem, as there are only two solutions in my game.

1. When you die, you are dead - roll up another character.

2. When you die in the Kaidan setting, you are forcibly reincarnated into another living person, killing them and becoming them with some memories of your past life. For all intents and purposes you are now a different person - your previous character is still dead. In Kaidan, reincarnation by spell, resurrection and other means of bringing the dead back to life, do not work at all.

Either way, there is no revolving door issue.

I've said more than once that I hate resurrection magic. I just don't want death to be cheap, and I don't want to deal with the implications of resurrection common enough for PCs to utilize. On the other hand, I also don't want to put the players in a situation where a few bad die rolls will take their favorite character away forever. I think I have come up with a workable compromise between these two desires:

If a healing spell is cast on a corpse that has died within 1d3 + 2 minutes, and this spell raises the corpse's hit point total above its constitution modifier in negative hit points, the corpse returns to life. The corpse may not have more hit points that half it's constitution score in negative hit points when it returns to life, and resumes the dying condition normally, though it does not get an attempt at stabilization until losing a hit point. After 1d3 + 2 minutes, this can still be attempted, but it will likely fail to revive the corpse, and if it succeeds there will probably be brain damage. Whether or not such a late revival attempt fails, whether it does brain damage, and what this brain damage does is up to DM fiat. Once a person has been dead for 1d3 + 7 minutes, the individual can no longer be brought back to life, as resurrection magic does not exist.

This system is inspired by IRL emergency resuscitation, the idea being that, if we can pull it off at times in the real world, why couldn't magic pull it off more consistently? This system makes it so that a fallen PC has a very good chance of getting back up (especially since every spellcaster can heal), yet at the same time there is a sense of urgency involved, as the intended healer only has a few minutes before it's too late. After that, you have either crippling brain damage or, more likely, permanent, irrevocable death. The risk of death is still there, and the revolving door afterlife I...

This reminds me of the field medic's abilities in d20Modern. A field medic with the right equipment could bring back from death with a successful, very high Treat Injury check in something like 1d6 rounds, and later 1d6 minutes. This was the system's way of dealing with modern methods of resuscitation.

I agree with Lathiira's concern, that since combat rounds are 6 seconds, letting ANY healing spell raise someone within MINUTES may actually be too generous and may in fact make it easier and significantly cheaper to raise dead... at least in a campaign where people die a lot. I don't see a lot of fatalities in my games so I don't actually have a problem with the current mechanics as is.

Another way to make sure your system is not abused is to add the material component factor--in my games, what makes it hard to raise dead or resurrect isn't the spells being available, it's that it's hard to find a diamond worth that much to use for the spell. Just because you have 10s of thousands of gold pieces lying around doesn't mean you can walk into a store and buy a diamond of the size and value needed for the spell--diamonds are rare by their nature, and ones that large all the more so. I try to make sure there's some for emergencies for players but they aren't going to be a staple in every jewelry store in every town across the world.

Anyway, I might add a costly component for ressing someone with a cure spell. Even if the PCs have a lot of money, if they're dying a lot it's going to become a drain on their resources.

I also feel the 'revolving door of death' is problem, actually less so for the players coming back but with regards to NPCs it's very difficult for the players to care about the fate of NPC's when they can just be raised if anything happens to them plus easy access the resurrection can end some story-lines very quickly (murder mysteries for example).

I've just finished running the last Council of Thieves adventure and this came up then, the bad guys had destabilised the city by murdering various prominent people (nobles, the guards captain etc.) so the PC's just rezzed them...problem solved. It wasn't too much of an issue as I came up with a few ways to complicate the process of getting certain NPC's raised (Quieting needles FTW :-p) to provide a bit more of a challenge rather than just solving the problems by throwing money at them.

Remember that a soul must be WILLING to come back to the world when those spells are cast. If an NPC is on his way to strumming a harp in Celestia or enjoying devouring fellow lemures and is about to be promoted to a devil where he can joyfully begin to corrupt souls, he may well not WANT to be resurrected. Especially if being ressed means going back into a frightening or dangerous situation, or even risking being killed again.

Since you are GM, you have every right to say the NPC does not wish to return.

And as above, I'm wondering where the PCs found all those 5,000 or 10,000 gp diamonds lying around, that they can just resurrect any fallen NPC they come across (but I'm not familiar with that AP).

As an aside, I further have a system in my world that the goddess of birth and death is as likely to reincarnate you as she is to release your soul into the afterlife. So in some cases, an NPC can't be raised or resurrected because he or she is already living her fulfilling new existence as a baby fruit bat.

Regarding the further cheapening of death, and the "generosity" of giving you a few dozen rounds to "rez" someone: What this rule change does is re-establish the line at which you are D-E-A-D. Dedd.

Yes, people who fall in combat will get up a lot more, and sooner. But this is necessary to continue a high adventure RPG. As stated, people get attached to their characters, they often want to keep playing them. That is expected. The problem is that even when you are attached to a PC, it starts to feel less exciting when you've been raised for the 5th time.

With this rule, you may have "lost the fight" 10 times, and been healed back from "death's door" each time. But then that one time you got pasted, and your buddies couldn't get to you, or didn't have enough mojo because the fight was too epic.....you died, and joined the ranks of heroes (like the ones in real life-our heroes are mostly dead).

Some people don't want to play heroes, they want to play super heroes. That's cool, I've done it for decades. It is the foundation of our shared pastime. I'm not going to tell them to "go play champions". But some of us prefer to feel mortal, so that the heroics matter.

I've played some characters off and on for over 20 years. They've "grown old" (about as old as I am, lol), and raised families, and built kingdoms large and small. But I would trade it all for this rule. I've had a few beloved D&D characters die irretrievably, and it was often the coolest moment in the game.

On the other hand, my (deep RP) group started up a new campaign a few years ago, and they made it to something like 6th level before the first PC death. We all played it as traumatic, and sad, and "oh my gods...she's dead".....but then we got her raised. And although, the PC's still try to respect death, they are now 11th level and we've had about 5 or 6 more deaths. You know the PCs are looking back on that first time and saying to themselves "lol, I was so young and naive, death isn't scary!...n00b!"

Regarding the further cheapening of death, and the "generosity" of giving you a few dozen rounds to "rez" someone: What this rule change does is re-establish the line at which you are D-E-A-D. Dedd.

Yes, people who fall in combat will get up a lot more, and sooner. But this is necessary to continue a high adventure RPG. As stated, people get attached to their characters, they often want to keep playing them. That is expected. The problem is that even when you are attached to a PC, it starts to feel less exciting when you've been raised for the 5th time.

That's my point exactly. My system establishes a line, and that line is brain death. When you drop below Con in negative HP, your heart stops. This is death. However, it takes time for the brain to die after the heart stops, and intervention during this period can restart the heart. This sort of "resurrection" I can handle, because it has clear limits, and technically the person being brought back isn't completely dead. Way different than, with the right components, being able to bring anyone back. Instead, there is a clear line where dead is DEAD. The PCs probably won't reach this line, but that's okay. In fact, I kind of prefer it that way.

Perhaps if there was some slight alteration to the math here and the appropriate amount of healing had to be done in a single casting? "Heal" (the spell) obviously causes problems here, but any healing that must be rolled won't always result in success.

I'm picturing a cleric casting cure serious wounds while pounding on his fighter's chest CPR style, each press being another cast, hoping he healed enough.

I actually like this idea, but I think I would combine it with some of the other ideas. Particularly, I would combine it with the idea that your body can only handle being laid low so many times before you actually die and can't be fixed.

And then I would allow True Res to function.

To fog hammers point, maybe it a specific number, but a number of tries, like you can cast exactly one spell to push them back above negative con. Basically turning every type of healing into a breath of life.