I have a low magic home brew setting in the works, but I'm having trouble balancing the reduced power inherent to the setting, with my feeling that resurrections are totally out of place in a world where magic is a very limited and somewhat alien force. I really like the danger conveyed in a "dead is dead" world, but I'm afraid the body count will get ridiculous. Thoughts?
You are in control of how lethal you make your encounters. You can also make resurrection quests, or a powerful ally that could provide some life magic.
You could always come up with some kind of plot device that explains why the PCs keep coming back to life. In a campaign one of my friends is DMing, we're all cursed so that when we die, we just wake up in our beds at a local inn. But we basically can't leave the town, because no matter how far away we get, we wake up the next morning in our beds at the inn.
If you're not into supernatural stuff, you could always go Prince of Persia and have some kind of Time-Altering thing. Or you could go the Divine Route and have a patron god for the group that decrees that it's "not their time,"
It's really up to you, but I here are some fun plot-sy ideas for you:
#1 - Wandering Souls: After death, the spirit is forced to wander the earth. This can transform into one of several things:
---Forced to find and recover corporeal body before other dispatched ghosts / spirits can possess it.
---Soul is forced into a new, non-sentient host magic jar style and the character must get their temporary host to wherever they died in X amount of time before their soul turns animistic and merges with the host animal / plant / thing.
---Characters have to escape from some sort of neutral plane (Fields of Offering / Underworld) type area in order to return to their bodies before their life functions become unrestartable.
#2 If you're playing a campaign without a sense of urgency, you can make having a fully fleshed out family required, and the players could be forced to take over their children / grand children / etc.
#3 The most classic excuse ever, a Wizard did it.
#4 Reincarnation. Your players 'reincarnate' into someone else after death Doctor Who style. Races might have to be randomly determined each time, but the general class, build, and equipment stay the same.
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#2 If you're playing a campaign without a sense of urgency, you can make having a fully fleshed out family required, and the players could be forced to take over their children / grand children / etc.
The family line fits the play style best, but only really works if they all die at the same time.
On the same line, am I the only DM out there mean enough to ban resurrection?
No, you are not. The campaign I currently play in is low magic with no res. Noone has kicked the bucket yet, but there have been some close calls.
Its a common role-playing convention that everyone fights to the death, but its certainly possible that NPC's expect the defeated to surrender and be taken prisoner for ransom. If PC's don't want to be regarded as outlaws and outside the option to surrender, they should also accept surrenders.
Consider making honor a part of interactions, so that honorable PC's who treat prisoners well are recognized and treated well in captivity. PC's who treat prisoners poorly are themselves treated poorly.
This a admittedly works best in a shades-of-gray campaign where rival forces regard one another as worthy of moral consideration and groups want to be protected by the laws of war. In a campaign of stark good vs evil this won't make much sense.
It also works better in a world where the PC's and most people are connected into the fabric of society, belonging to orders, guilds, families, and networks of oaths. Even if a bad guy wouldn't prefer to kill the PC's does he really want to make enemies of several institutions and families? That's how you get people coming after you, and as a wise man once said, there is always a bigger fish.
This also effects how PC's obtain treasure. If you aren't robbing corpses left and right, you need another source of the treasure. Maybe its payment from the orders, guilds, and families for doing good service. Maybe its a reward for freeing captives previously held by the defeated. Arthurian legends are full of damsels who hand out loot to the knight who rescues them.
If death and a world is real, the inhabitants take that into account and respond accordingly. What that means is up to you, but I think a big part of the fix can be in the cultural norms of the place.
Vertico gets it! The prisoner angle is quality, and will be a driving force for one of the early adventures. But then there's the beasties. creatures who don't shackle you up and take you home, they eat you. That's the element giving me headaches.
On the same line, am I the only DM out there mean enough to ban resurrection?
Not at all. Our group plays in a "dead is dead" campaign world that is high magic. It really boosts the fun factor knowing that you're putting your character on the line, and reduces the amount of truly stupid choices we make.
Our group balances the no resurrection mechanic by including hero points. You've got a fair shot at recovering, but sometimes the dice have decided that you need a new character.
If you want to go this route you could also give the PCs a higher point buy value to compensate for low magic, and perhaps an extra feat or two. It's up to you.
My GM runs a game very much like this.
However, he also seemed to realise somewhere that a horrible character death isnt much fun for anyone involved.
We still get brutally slaughtered. Quite regularly in fact. But he always seems to throw a curveball so we can hang on to our characters. In our first year of playing, we had taken over the party ninja's character while she went on a pizza run (combat really wasnt her jive, so she was eager to skip out). She died horribly from a redcap scythe crit. Instead of killing off her character then and there, our mephit companion ressurected her. We were then persued for several months by an Inevitable. It was pretty tense. It ended in a climactic battle in an undead lake with ghost ships, hydras and even a Shakespearean black dragon.
A recent character death (Twigs was torn in half by a redcap crit. This is kind of a recurring theme, those things are horrifying) started up its own side campaign, where we played in hell until we were all double-crossed, eviscerated or pressed in to servitude (in my case, all three). We averaged at about a character death a session down here, but fortunately you dont actually die in hell, you just become maimed enough that your mind goes. A hero (or a spineless simpleton) could withstand it.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the ressurection quest. I'd consider these something close to that. A death shouldnt be swept under the mat, but should become a major plot point. If you want them to fear death, make them suffer for it. Just make sure you have fun with it.
[b]Edit:[b]Vertico, I really like the sound of those monsters. Sounds totally sweet.
You are in control of how lethal you make your encounters. You can also make resurrection quests, or a powerful ally that could provide some life magic.Or you could do what every other roleplaying game outside of D&D or at least the fantasy genre does... Dead is dead. You get one shot around the block and that's it.
In Paranoia you get clones. In Drowning and Falling, you're expected to go through multiple characters and have them ready.
You CAN do "Dead is dead" which the TC is considering, but he feels might be too brutal. So thus, suggestions.
I have a low magic home brew setting in the works, but I'm having trouble balancing the reduced power inherent to the setting, with my feeling that resurrections are totally out of place in a world where magic is a very limited and somewhat alien force. I really like the danger conveyed in a "dead is dead" world, but I'm afraid the body count will get ridiculous. Thoughts?
D&D hit points are an abstraction. Make death an abstraction as well.
Instead of -CON being 'you are dead', have negative hit points represent massive injury.
Negative HP can represent things that have to be recovered from over time.
Concussion. Broken ribs. Punctured lung. Broken arm. Broken femur. Shattered collarbone. Deep belly cut. Coma.
None of these things need be fatal, but they all will take you out of a fight indefinitely. In a world with no healing magic, a broken femur could take months to recover from, for instance.
You can do a few things.
Use wound vitality or something of the like from UC
Make the heal skill allow you to heal HP's
Use hero points
Allow a heal check within a few rounds of death to "bring em back".
Another options is to allow the dead to make deals with something to come back. I did something of the like in my last homebrew. Sometimes it might be better being dead.