Death in Pathfinder is going to happen at some point. How does your group handle it? Is there a penalty when someone dies (i.e. coming back with a new character a few levels lower)?
As a piggy-back question - how do you handle when a character is tired of their character and wants to try out another toon? How do allow for flexibility yet not have a revolving door of characters in your game/story?
Thank you in advance for your thoughts...
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Vlorn
Death in Pathfinder is going to happen at some point. How does your group handle it? Is there a penalty when someone dies (i.e. coming back with a new character a few levels lower)?I don't penalize death until it start becoming excessive. The group handles it with a mix of irritation, sadness, and shoulder shrugging. We recently had a character die in our Kingmaker game due to a long series of bad rolls on part of his friends and some good rolls by the bad guys to him.
As a piggy-back question - how do you handle when a character is tired of their character and wants to try out another toon? How do allow for flexibility yet not have a revolving door of characters in your game/story?
Thank you in advance for your thoughts...
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VlornThis is usually only with one person whom I accomodate. I just tend not to do anythign too story related with them.
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I try to keep everyone in the party at the same level. In the case of raising folks from the dead, etc, I'll apply the rules-appropriate negative levels, but the players will have options for getting removing them relatively quickly (in play terms - the PC might need a few months to recover, but we can gloss over that at the table).
When someone wants to change up their character I always bring the new PC in at the same level as the party. The bookkeeping is so much easier.
Whenever you use the word "Toon" instead of "Character" a pen-and-paper game dev somewhere cries. :( Also, Steve Jackson earns a residual payment.
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I try to keep everyone in the party at the same level. In the case of raising folks from the dead, etc, I'll apply the rules-appropriate negative levels, but the players will have options for getting removing them relatively quickly (in play terms - the PC might need a few months to recover, but we can gloss over that at the table).
When someone wants to change up their character I always bring the new PC in at the same level as the party. The bookkeeping is so much easier.
Whenever you use the word "Toon" instead of "Character" a pen-and-paper game dev somewhere cries. :( Also, Steve Jackson earns a residual payment.
For us it's usually the new character is one level lower than the party.
As a player I've too often been stuck playing characters way past their expiration dates due to DM friends' love of them. So, when I run, I make damned sure every player knows they can always retire their char and we'll work in the new one somehow. However, whether death or retirement, replacement chars will start with a fraction of the pc wealth for their level, the amount dependant on how awesome the roleplay leading up to and through the end of the prior char and how much help they give finding a smooth way to work in the new char.
I personally can't stand the negative level penalty with character death. It skews the balance of later encounters completely, especially if the campaign is a TPK wipefest (and it could just be me rolling lucky that night). Now they come back, at a lower level, where they will definitely not be able to meet the challenge. And what if somone's character dies repeatedly? He just comes back as a 2nd level character in a 6th level game? I'd quit playing.
I personally can't stand the negative level penalty with character death. It skews the balance of later encounters completely, especially if the campaign is a TPK wipefest (and it could just be me rolling lucky that night). Now they come back, at a lower level, where they will definitely not be able to meet the challenge. And what if somone's character dies repeatedly? He just comes back as a 2nd level character in a 6th level game? I'd quit playing.
If you can afford the 5,000gp to raise dead, surely you can afford the 1,000gp to have restoration take away a negative level? (And then another 1,000gp the week afterward to do it again?)
Heck, my party just reincarnated two PCs so they could hold back the diamond dust to fix them afterward rather than paying to raise them.
Anyhow, to answer the OP, I will only introduce new characters when it makes sense within the story -- though I will be as flexible as possible. So if you're in a city or something, I'll work something out that makes sense, and generally try to do it in a way that causes the party to have a reason to trust them. (Tiny, in-town sidequest or recovery of an item, or being the guy who crafted the item they're buying, or....)
However, when they're in the wilds, well, things change -- if someone wants in, I'll try to work it out, but it still needs to make more sense than "You run into this solo guy who's going your way and who can survive the dangers you've been facing all by himself and you suddenly trust him." So, for example, one of the most recent entries to our party was Dominated to kill the party by the BBEG -- they thought he was a villain until he crossed into the Protection from Evil and didn't have to follow commands anymore.
I bring in newbies at the lowest XP count of the current party members.
In my Games I always did it at 10% lower than the lowest character.
I had a GM who started an AP at a 20 point buy when most are designed for a 15 point buy. Regardless our players were experienced, tactile, and dominant.
The problem was, many of them lacked discipline and often got bored of their characters, basically allowing themselves to be killed or just writing off their character and bringing in a new one. This was making a cohesive and immersive story difficult to maintain, so my DM came up with a system and I feel like it was a good decision.
When a party member is killed or leaves, it has group and single player consequences.
o The party is not allowed to take any of their dead companion's gear (unless it was a story crucial item).
o The reputation of the party as powerful heroes/saviors decreases a step as their fragility or instability becomes exposed.
o A new character comes in with a 15 point buy in, and -2 for every subsequent new character for that player.
o You also come in 1 level below the wealth by level table, and 1 more for each subsequent character.
I understand that a player might just sincerely find themselves not enjoying a character or feeling lackluster, but I still agree with the strict ruling. There is always options to retrain what you can.
It taught us all to appreciate what we have a little more, work more carefully and diligently as a team, and grasp the consequences of death more realistically. He felt that pathfinder shouldn't work like call of duty where you just re-spawn 20 times a game.
Granted he also wasn't a sadistic DM who just wanted to kill players. After all, collective storytelling is more important to us all than playing video game style.
Generally speaking, I don't think it is as much fun for players to have weaker members on the team then it is to have them all be balanced.
As for the problem of a player being bored and wanting to switch characters vs a GM wanting to keep story continuity, I don't think that is a mechanical issue that should be addressed with any sort of rules.
The GM and the player (as well as the other players) should talk about this a decide together what kind of game they want to have and what makes it 'fun.' If a player is genuinely unhappy with playing a particular character, for whatever reason, I think you should try to find a way to make them happy, because fun is the goal after all. The best way will vary from group to group and situation to situation, but I have had good luck in the bast with basically free retraining/rebuild. The 'character' is the same person, they have been on all the quests and fought all the monsters with the others, but they now have different abilities. This has worked in some cases, obviously the closer in role the character is now to what they were previously the easier this is. Going from a barbarian to a wizard probably doesn't make sense for it to be the same 'person' but a fighter to a barbarian or magus or something works out well enough. One example was a core rogue that (unsurprisingly) wasn't performing as well as the player wanted, we just made him a vivisectionist alchemist instead, and he was still able to fit the same role in the party just fine, but had a lot more options and performed better.
I'm glad you raised this thread, because my players are deciding if they will raise a character this week!
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My GM has an interesting way to encourage players to stick with their original characters in our current campaign. He started us out as 1st level commoners, and after reaching 2nd level our next two advancements retrained those commoner levels into PC class levels. From then on we advanced normally. Along the way, we gained various perks (extra feats, extra traits, etc.) that normal characters of our level wouldn't have.
The penalty for replacing a character is that the new character is made strictly in accordance with the standard Pathfinder rules at the same level as the rest of the party -- but without all those extra perks that the characters who advanced through the commoner levels got.
As for dead characters, you want to keep any penalties that they suffer to a minimum, especially after they have gained a few levels. The last thing you want to do is have the death penalties to accumulate to the point that a player replaces his character, not because he is tired of playing that character, but because only a brand new character has any chance of being viable.