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After reading SKR's thread on Raise Dead I created this thread to discuss why the push to essentially trivialise death.
In my opinion, death should not be treated like a condition that is easily taken care of. Death should be something that is costly and is hard to come back from. I don't really understand this push for death to become so trivial. Well to be honest, I believe it has something to do with lessening the impact of death because some people find death "not fun" and because theplayer has spent a lot of time creating their character so they feel like they need more protection for their investment. I don't think anyone finds death "fun" but that's the whole point, death is supposed to be unfun and a bad thing.
If the game gets to the point where you have to go through mountains of red tape just do die while a quick snap of the fingers brings you back then I will just stick with what is printed before that and not buy anything else in the future.
What thread is it that SKR posted in?
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I never understand why in a game of great heroics there should be severe penalties for death. Missing a some moeny and a good portion of a fight even at high levels (which can mean a good portion of the game-evening) and likely even more game time in lower levels is penalty enough for me.
If you want a gritty, "one wrong step and your done for good" approach, then make a houserule.
I never understand why in a game of great heroics there should be severe penalties for death. Missing a some moeny and a good portion of a fight even at high levels (which can mean a good portion of the game-evening) and likely even more game time in lower levels is penalty enough for me.
If you want a gritty, "one wrong step and your done for good" approach, then make a houserule.
...or play a game that has such rules actually incorporated into it, like Call of Cthulhu.
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Yes. It seems pretty obvious that the majority of players are more than happy with the trend towards less player punishment for character death. That's why it's happening, that's why the default is less punishing, and that's why those that want a different feel/game need to houserule it.
To the OP, short answer: Because that's what most people that play the game want.
In my campaigns death is a pretty severe thing. I like to challenge my players. Spells that can bring dead people back to life are two levels higher for all classes and true resurrection doesn't exist.
I dont like it when players think "eh, so I'll die, just get me back to town, and I'll pay you the raise cost.", if they are going to get themselves killed they will likely stay that way.
Although in our last session we found that the dead condition does not prevent a character from performing actions, or influence their perception in any way. So all it does is remove your soul and you start decaying. One casting of Gentle Repose and you're good to go, just a little less passionate than before.
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I think a large factor in making death more trivial is the search for challenging content. Generally the more challenging content is the more satisfying and enjoyable the gameplay. The caveat to that is that challenging content leads to death!
I've played in games where the players never seem to die. Whether it's because the GM doesn't have great tactics, the monsters are underpowered, or the GM just fudges things a lot to walk the player through. Most of the time these games don't last very long because players lose interest.
But of course it's different for every play group. If you prefer for death to be a serious issue then here are a few questions to ponder over:
1. Are your players being challenged every time they come to the table?
2. Are they only being punished with death if they do something stupid?
3. Do you in turn remove death effects from the game? Instant death is harsh enough for players that have access to resurrection.
So far the best compromise I've found is making resurrection an expensive enough endeavor that my players are more likely to make a tactical retreat if someone falls than throw bodies at the masses. If money isn't a concern for your campaign you can do things with stat penalties like a -2 to all stats until the character gains 10-20% of their current experience.
Since it was brought up, curious to see perspectives from other groups.
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The problem with treating death as if it were nothing is that it affects the world. If you have an entire world where people can be ressurrected for a promise to a god, then there are no atheiests, there is no one unaligned with a god. The rules about clerics who worship no god goes away.
Additionally, you have MASSIVE overpopulation, since every time someone dies, they promise to do something for a god and pop back up. Oh, look, bandits, fight to the last man, if we die, the gods will bring us back.
Think about how much of the game is actually, at it's core, dependent on the idea of death being something other than a wave of the hand to undo. Lich's are obsolete in a world where people get raise dead at will. Ancient Dragons are nothing, who cares, we attack in waves until it's gone, and then we all get a raise! yay!
I think the Cheerleader from Heroes is a good example of this. She got so bored with being immortal, she started trying to kill herself just out of boredom, cutting her own toes off to watch them grow back, throwing herself in front of trains, etc.
What it really does over time is concentrate all the wealth in a few hands, because the people that are poor and starve to death don't want to come back to life to starve over again. So the only people who get immortality are the ones who can enjoy it and have fun with it, ala the rich people.
Within my own world, I handle things differently. The goddess of death harvests souls when they die. How long that harvest takes depends on how powerful the soul is. When someone dies, I roll a d20 each week, if it rolls above their current Hit Dice, then they are not harvested yet. As long as they aren't harvested, they can be brought back with any of the appropriate spells (reincarnate, raise dead, true ressurection, etc). However, if the roll is equal or under their hit dice, then they are dead dead, harvested, and the only way to get them back is to go on a quest to the realm of the dead and request their soul back from the Goddess of Death herself. And even that has to be before the soul is processed and sent off to whatever god has claim on it. Once it's sent to it's god, that's it, unless you go quest to that god to get them back. But gods tend to hold onto their followers, once they get them in their realms, they have jobs for them. Usually it takes about a month per Hit Die to process them through the realm of the dead.
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I always notice that it's GMs that are bothered by this. Rarely players... ;)
When you get to the point where you can regularly afford raise dead and beyond, you're in that point of high fantasy gaming that players love and GMs hate ;) 5,000 GP is pretty expensive.
In my campaigns death is a pretty severe thing. I like to challenge my players. Spells that can bring dead people back to life are two levels higher for all classes and true resurrection doesn't exist.
I dont like it when players think "eh, so I'll die, just get me back to town, and I'll pay you the raise cost.", if they are going to get themselves killed they will likely stay that way.
Although in our last session we found that the dead condition does not prevent a character from performing actions, or influence their perception in any way. So all it does is remove your soul and you start decaying. One casting of Gentle Repose and you're good to go, just a little less passionate than before.
Y'know, I had a player that tried to pull that whole "death doesn't equal no actions" schtick on me once. I then declared that his character (a male rogue) was illegal since by RAW, the rogue class was only referred to as a woman in the text. He then shut up and took his death like a man. :)
Challenging doesn't equal dying all the time. If you go to that extreme, players stop caring about their characters since now, the cast is a revolving door of freshly-made, max WBL soldiers ready to enter the meat grinder again. Not to mention, there are FAR better ways to punish poor tactics than death... hehehe...
EDITED: Quoted wrong person.
Because its a game. Seriously why get bent out of shape over every little thing in a GAME.
Don't like it make it different at your table. Or better yet if you dislike so much about this game don't play it.
Surel challenging is not the same as dying all the time, but with death as something permanent, people will look out for their characters,and try to make strategies that will keep them from dying.
I don't go around killing off PCs unless they do something that really deserves it.
Y'know, I had a player that tried to pull that whole "death doesn't equal no actions" schtick on me once. I then declared that his character (a male rogue) was illegal since by RAW, the rogue class was only referred to as a woman in the text. He then shut up and took his death like a man. :)
A flipside story I have is that two players asked me already, about Oracle and Witch respectively wether their character had to be female because the class description kept saying "she", "her" etc.
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For the record, I'm happy the way raise dead is now. Negative level and money drain. I prefer dying to have negative consequences and I'm not afraid to just man up and take a death like a true adventurer. Builds character and you grow hair on your chest.
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Because its a game. Seriously why get bent out of shape over every little thing in a GAME.
Don't like it make it different at your table. Or better yet if you dislike so much about this game don't play it.
Careful with that kind of forward thinking. Won't earn you any friends here :p
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The problem with treating death as if it were nothing is that it affects the world. If you have an entire world where people can be ressurrected for a promise to a god, then there are no atheiests, there is no one unaligned with a god. The rules about clerics who worship no god goes away.
Two replies to this one, just because!
1. Comparing the players to the rest of the world usually doesn't apply in pathfinder simply because the characters are "Heroes". NPC bosses don't always want to raise their goons... after all if they died once they weren't worthy!
2. Resurrection isn't specific to gods.
I like your harvesting souls idea. I might try a variation of that, but give the player a hireling or something to play until their character can be resurrected.
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I'm following this thread with interest because I'm running the final book of Jade Regent and there seems to be a character or significant NPC death every other session at this point. Sometimes it is through poor tactics, sometimes just through bad luck or overwhelming damage from a full attack etc. I'm pretty generous as a GM with my roll fudging because I want the players to shine and enjoy being heroes. For me part of that though is overcoming overwhelming odds or succeeding in the face of adversity.
The idea of someone coming back to life in mythology is a MASSIVE deal, it just doesnt happen that often. So from that point of view I agree that there should be some harsh penalties for being raised.
On the other hand, my biggest problem with player death is the huge derailment of the story. When on this world-changing quest, one or two deaths can actually help invest players in the story but when you have to constantly introduce new characters, shoe-horn them into whats happening - that doesnt help the continuity.
At the end of all that I don't think I've actually made a point lol. I think the rules are just about right. At low levels returning from the dead is expensive and either inaccessible or comes with a penalty because they cant afford to remove the negative levels. At higher levels PCs have a lot of disposable income and are basically heroes of fantasy where even death cannot stop them achieving their quest. I think the biggest problem is the mid ground where its just about affordable but the character will have to sell some of his hard-earned gear to come back. A couple of my players will do that because they are invested in their characters, other will just go 'you know what I'll make a new guy and come back with full WBL.' Those that choose the easy option rerolling can be very difficult to weave back into the story and keep it exciting for everyone.
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i think PC deaths can be meaningful, they can be remembered and recalled,
their lives and stories can continue to be known by NPCs in the world,
and the presence can still be felt by new (replacement) PCs.
heroic deaths are part of heroism. D&D roleplaying is a co-created story/movie.
restricting a story/film plot so that characters can never die is silly.
if a player is so attached to one specific PC that they cannot roleplay another if the first PC dies,
or that their 'belief' in the gameworld solely hinges on that one PC not ever dying, something is off.
and deaths that seem not so meaningful to that character specifically can still have content as non-meaningful deaths.
it's just another type of plot peak in the ongoing story.
the whole game is set up so creating characters is a plural sort of event. GMs do it all the time.
if the ongoing story is interesting enough, players also don't need to be attached to a specific PC,
they are interested in how the story resolves for it's own sake, and can find a new PC to engage with that.
sure, if a player feels like any PC they make is dropping dead left and right, they don't feel a chance to develop the character.
but likewise if your PC is dropping dead left and right, and happens to be rezz'ed every time,
that is rather reducing plot peaks to perma-blur events, becoming rather monty python-esque at that point.
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Plot derailment is a big thing yeah. I tend to play in campaigns in the sub-9 levels, so Raising isn't really on the table most of the time. This has the effect that after a while only a few PCs survived the entire campaign (usually defensively built, cautiously played PCs), and that they become sort of the anchor of the plot, with the rest looking a bit like the hired help who doesn't understand what all the fuss is about.
just give PCs the tarrasque template and be done with it.
When I first started to GM in one of the earlier games I ran I allowed the players to get free resurrection no penalty or just roll up another character with appropriate WBL. My players were incredibly reckless with their characters much more so than in any other game I have run and it got worse as the game progressed, the players eventually saw death as a boon since the dead characters items were up for grabs and a new incoming hero would have a full set of gear as well.
That game had a lot of issues mostly due to my inexperience and looking at things from a character perspective rather than a player perspective. I still consider it a success because the players had fun. And it really cemented my belief you should always try to say yes to your players.
I find my players to be less adversarial with NPC's and have better immersion when death has a consequence, even if it's mostly just a gold and time cost.
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Well I think that the more you trivialize death the more you encourage combat and "roll playing", because you are not threatened with any loss, just a minor inconvenience.
But, on the other hand, If death is a big deal, and people have the real possibility of loosing their characters in combat, I have found that in my experience people tend to "Role Play" much more before swords are drawn to sometimes try and diffuse a situation before someone looses a head err character looses a head.
So, I for one am going to keep the 5540gp cost to the raise dead spell.....along with the two Restoration spells..
Just my two cents
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If it was the other way around and death meant re-rolling 90% of the time we would have people (likely this same person.) here with threads saying "Why does pathfinder make characters so throw away"
1. Can someone link the SKR comment that gave the idea for this thread.
2. My homebrew solution is to make 'death' from adventuring much less likely. As long as you have the body and can cast enough cures to get it up to a certain negative point within about a minute you do not have the 'dead' condition; you have the 'at deaths door' condition, this condition means you cannot be healed above 0 hp until you have a weeks rest and when you can you have a negative level for a period of time ( or until you gain a level) The raise dead spell removes this weeks requirement and reduces the time , or if cast within 1 hour you don't get the negative level.
The effect is that people really only die if their bodies are abandoned or lost or the bad guys rip them to shreds, behead them etc. at that point you need serious magic to come back.
The logic is that if you are going to make death easy to ignore it isn't really death in the classic fantasy sense is it? Don't call it death, call it something else then when you kill the bad guy it is a win and when you risk your life it actually matters.
3. My other game I play savage worlds, death means the end. The (same) players love the actual character risk, they don't find it unfun.
I also like to make resurrecting/raising people a lot harder, because otherwise it makes killing wealthy NPCs impossible. What good is it to be the most skilled assassin in the world, if your targets are just going to be resurrected the next morning? (because a high level character would probably go after high level targets)
The heroes finally killed the BBEG. Two weeks later the BBEG is wreaking havoc again.
Heroes: "But... we killed you!"
BBEG: "Yeah, but then I got better."
If it was the other way around and death meant re-rolling 90% of the time we would have people (likely this same person.) here with threads saying "Why does pathfinder make characters so throw away"
You base this statement on what?
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It's the thread about Raise Dead and it's cost. I'm posting from my phone so I can't forward the link right now.
I agree with a lot of posters here with regards to death actually meaning something and that players become a bit reckless with their characters.
I just hope the problems SKR have with the cost doesn't spill over into the game.
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I never understand why in a game of great heroics there should be severe penalties for death. Missing a some moeny and a good portion of a fight even at high levels (which can mean a good portion of the game-evening) and likely even more game time in lower levels is penalty enough for me.
If you want a gritty, "one wrong step and your done for good" approach, then make a houserule.
The great thing about Pathfinder is that supports different playstyles and one of the playstyles is playing a hero but there are also games whete you're not a hero.
I never understood the whole "hero cannot equal death" but I'm assuming people are calling themselves heroes before they've done anything. Your legendary status as a hero is written after your adventure ends.
Wrapping yourself in "heroic" plot armor shouldn't be used to trivialise death for the default of the game. 4th edition did that and it is horrible.
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I never understand why in a game of great heroics there should be severe penalties for death. Missing a some moeny and a good portion of a fight even at high levels (which can mean a good portion of the game-evening) and likely even more game time in lower levels is penalty enough for me.
If you want a gritty, "one wrong step and your done for good" approach, then make a houserule.
The great thing about Pathfinder is that supports different playstyles and one of the playstyles is playing a hero but there are also games whete you're not a hero.
I never understood the whole "hero cannot equal death" but I'm assuming people are calling themselves heroes before they've done anything. Your legendary status as a hero is written after your adventure ends.
Wrapping yourself in "heroic" plot armor shouldn't be used to trivialise death for the default of the game. 4th edition did that and it is horrible.
1. I don't recall having this plot armor when I played 4e.
2. Please stop talking as if your opinion was somehow a fact.
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My players have no problem accepting death as it is currently in the rules and the payment it requires.
I guess I just have a good group because they can get really attached to their characters and at the same time, know that their character is not guaranteed to live. Sure they may get upset but that's one of the things that brings them to the table.
I had a friend tell me that if there was never loss in D&D then he wouldn't play.
It's the thread about Raise Dead and it's cost. I'm posting from my phone so I can't forward the link right now.
I agree with a lot of posters here with regards to death actually meaning something and that players become a bit reckless with their characters.
I just hope the problems SKR have with the cost doesn't spill over into the game.
I don't think you need to worry about that happening. From the comments I've read it seemed like SKR's merely been commenting on his houserule and the justifications for it. I think the design team should be pretty happy with the compromise they've developed in PF - hitting the players' hip pocket.
It's an effective deterrent without permanently crippling characters.
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I never understand why in a game of great heroics there should be severe penalties for death. Missing a some moeny and a good portion of a fight even at high levels (which can mean a good portion of the game-evening) and likely even more game time in lower levels is penalty enough for me.
If you want a gritty, "one wrong step and your done for good" approach, then make a houserule.
The great thing about Pathfinder is that supports different playstyles and one of the playstyles is playing a hero but there are also games whete you're not a hero.
I never understood the whole "hero cannot equal death" but I'm assuming people are calling themselves heroes before they've done anything. Your legendary status as a hero is written after your adventure ends.
Wrapping yourself in "heroic" plot armor shouldn't be used to trivialise death for the default of the game. 4th edition did that and it is horrible.
1. I don't recall having this plot armor when I played 4e.
2. Stop talking as if your opinion was somehow a fact, cuz it isn't.
Then maybe you should brush up on 4th edition. Go and take some time to read through the DMG 1 & 2.
Save or die are gone, you go down to - hp total before you drop, healing starts you always at 0
and works from there so it doesnt matter if you are -200 and someone heals you for 10, you are now at 10 hp. You also have to fail three death saves.
So yeah, 4th edition is designed for playing heroes and having plot armor.
Wait... so you are not complaining about how death is treated in pf -currently-?
Well then I am going to outright apologize. I am sorry, I mistook the meaning of the OP. I agree that it is fine as in right now. Though on the other had do not dislike anyone making it less costly. Let people play as they will.
I always notice that it's GMs that are bothered by this. Rarely players... ;)
When you get to the point where you can regularly afford raise dead and beyond, you're in that point of high fantasy gaming that players love and GMs hate ;) 5,000 GP is pretty expensive.
In my campaigns death is a pretty severe thing. I like to challenge my players. Spells that can bring dead people back to life are two levels higher for all classes and true resurrection doesn't exist.
I dont like it when players think "eh, so I'll die, just get me back to town, and I'll pay you the raise cost.", if they are going to get themselves killed they will likely stay that way.
Although in our last session we found that the dead condition does not prevent a character from performing actions, or influence their perception in any way. So all it does is remove your soul and you start decaying. One casting of Gentle Repose and you're good to go, just a little less passionate than before.
Y'know, I had a player that tried to pull that whole "death doesn't equal no actions" schtick on me once. I then declared that his character (a male rogue) was illegal since by RAW, the rogue class was only referred to as a woman in the text. He then shut up and took his death like a man. :)
Challenging doesn't equal dying all the time. If you go to that extreme, players stop caring about their characters since now, the cast is a revolving door of freshly-made, max WBL soldiers ready to enter the meat grinder again. Not to mention, there are FAR better ways to punish poor tactics than death... hehehe...
EDITED: Quoted wrong person.
If one of my characters dies, nine times out of ten, that is that for the character.
A character has to die in a pretty awful and meaningless way for me to even considering having them come back.
Death in storytelling is pretty sacred, and damaging that can be a pretty bad thing.
And that is before you even get into the whole added sense of risk that it adds. Knowing that your character can be snuffed out, that you could loose something that has peronal value, if you make a dumb move. That feels good, that sets the butterflies off in the belly and makes every dice roll count. In those moments when my character is really, truly at risk of being gone, and gone forever, that is when gaming becomes most forfilling.
This has always been a problem for me. I don't like character deaths, but also greatly dislike resurrection. On my personal setting, I make resurrection nearly impossible, requiring personal divine intervention to function. But also make some changes to the spell Breath of Life, transforming that spell on the life-saving to prevent character's deaths:
-Positive channeling clerics and Oracles can cast the spell spontaneously like a "Cure" spell.
-The spell works perfectly as a scroll, without the usual problems of lack of time to use it.
My groups usually buy one or two scrolls of Breath of Life as fast as they can. When we play on Golarion, we use the usual rules for resurrection, but that has work fairly well for my personal setting.
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I mean, if your players don't mind, and your group all have fun killing the PCs off, by all means, go for it.
Totally. Its all about playstyle. I have never allowed a TPK because, in my opinion, it is hugely detrimental to the story.
Whilst I agree with SKR that raise dead isn't necessarily any more powerful a spell as teleportation (the whole cost vs no cost arguement) it just doesn't sit quite right with me that there should be no penalty for death and the monetary and negative levels accomplish that for me in most cases.
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Consequences are not supposed to be fun and maybe you forgot that you were playing a game that can't guarantee you will win.Consequences themselves are not fun, nor are they meant to be, but being part of the overall game is what makes the entire game, as a whole, fun.
Serious question time here, and I think the answer I get will help me understand a lot more about where all of your current threads/posts are coming from.
How do you 'win' D&D/PF? How do you 'lose'?
I have never felt that TTRPGs were games with winners and losers, ever.
I think this disconnect may explain many, many things.
I also like to make resurrecting/raising people a lot harder, because otherwise it makes killing wealthy NPCs impossible. What good is it to be the most skilled assassin in the world, if your targets are just going to be resurrected the next morning? (because a high level character would probably go after high level targets)
Because this:
At 10th level, the assassin becomes a master of death. Once per day, when the assassin makes a successful death attack, he can cause the target's body to crumble to dust. This prevents raise dead and resurrection (although true resurrection works as normal). The assassin must declare the use of this ability before the attack is made. If the attack misses or the target successfully saves against the death attack, this ability is wasted with no effect.
Sure they could pay for it, but at the least it would take about a sixth of their grand total wealth (Heroic NPC= 159,000). Assuming they've not bought anything with their money of course.
Consequences are not supposed to be fun and maybe you forgot that you were playing a game that can't guarantee you will win.
Consequences themselves are not fun, nor are they meant to be, but being part of the overall game is what makes the entire game, as a whole, fun.
But there are many ways to make the consequences themselves fun, or at least bearable, and "Welp you dun goofed here spend two hours not playing" is terrible design. Drain their cash and slap a penalty on there, fine. Put something extra if you wish (random ability score changes, insanity, even something as simple as permanent scarring) but making Raising harder to accomplish is a terrible idea.
Basically, you can have consequences that at the very least don't slow the game down for more than 5 minutes without making Raise Dead and the like more difficult to do and more expensive to pay for.
And I don't know why everyone seems to have this idea that "If I can't kill them then they can't lose!". If there's any sort of time limit whatsoever that is simply not the case.
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I thought you already had a thread or 3 for discussing all the problems with Pathfinder. Can't you discuss this there? What's the point of a thread to discuss all the problems of Pathfinder if you don't discuss the problems there?
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When you get to the point where the party, or the world can trivialize death, that's the point where you can just screw with them. Resurection spawn, things that follow them from the afterlife can start appearing and causing more and more death. Res hijacks so the player's body gets possessed. Normal people willing to take swings at the party for trivial things. Grim reapers getting ticked and actively hunting the party constantly (hello shinigami). Black lanterns. Or just dial up the Lady of Pain... they won't be getting back up from that. Ever.
When you get to the point where the party, or the world can trivialize death, that's the point where you can just screw with them...Or just dial up the Lady of Pain... they won't be getting back up from that. Ever.
"Thou Shalt Not F@%* With The Lady Of Pain."