Mm, forgot to mention. I tend to have my PCs keep a 'ghostly' version of themselves on a character sheet. It's basically a stripped down version of the ghost template that pops up after the battle. Keeps them in the game and relevant.
I'm so totally swiping the Yin Yang idea thing, along with the Evil Twin. Resurrects in my game will now have a nasty habit of bringing more evil (or good if you're evil) into the world (as well as being stressful on the PC's system). Expect balance-oriented outsiders to start getting pissed off.
Some observations and some questions:
Most of the concerns about making death meaningful appear to come from the GMs who, let's face it, do not have the same investment in a single character that a player does.
When I GM, I make no qualms or secrets about fudging the dice when something like a lucky crit happens. If you happen to go splat from a max damage crit from some mook, I'll reroll it (and if you die again, the dice gods have decreed that thou shalt die).
I don't protect the PCs from the consequences of their own actions though. Something they couldn't have prevented, like an orc that gets lucky with a greataxe? Sure. Trip and fall because you bungled a dex check to climb a short cliff and rolled max fall damage to go splat? Sure, reroll. Mouth off to a dragon because you think you're invincible? May the dice gods have mercy on your soul.
Would you impose a mourning penalty if the player decided not to get his dead PC raised and just brought in a new character?
If not, it's less a mourning penalty and more a raising penalty.
If so, does it apply only to the surviving party members or also to the new PC who might well never have met the dead party member? (Granted, you could impose the same -2 penalty or whatever to the new guy and call it a "getting acclimated to new companions" penalty, just to "punish" the players evenly for letting someone get killed.)
I would apply the penalty to the party until the character is raised or some other important event happens like leveling up, finishing a book of the adventure path, defeating major BBEG, or the "appropriate" amount of time has passed as determined by me. My goal would not be to keep this penalty for an extended time, at most 1 or 2 gaming sessions.
If the player of the dead character decides to bring in a new character thematically it wouldn't make sense to impose the same penalty, but I most likely would to keep everyone equal.
As an idea...what if resurrection of all sorts is gone, but I use hero points (which allow you to cheat death at the cost of a limited resource). If you would die occasionally, you're probably fine. You'll recoup enough points to that you'll never permanently die. Though there is a chance of it happening. It should make permanent death difficult, but leave the risk while providing a means for the character to not have "really died" at all which helps explain why others are just raised from the dead willy nilly.
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I'm afraid that if hero points are the go-to resource for beating death, that'll be the only thing they do; people will be hoarding them for that alone because they're far too precious to spend on anything else.
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As an aside, I previously identified a tension between making death scary and making death not too un-fun. Others have then said that's a total contradiction; I disagree. The thing is to find a compromise that gets something from both.
I also believe that real setbacks are important to the game. Triumph after (partial) defeat is much sweeter. Revenge on a villain who previously got to rub it in the PCs faces is much more satisfying than beating a villain who never really did anything against the PCs before appearing on their quest log.
However, it takes a certain deftness to engineer setbacks, which should sting, without going too far and making the game un-fun. Even if you're doing things right and players like it in the long run, in the short run they might moan and complain. So knowing which complaints signal that you've gone too far, and which ones are just players feeling the sting that sets up a satisfying reversal later on, is tricky.
I'm afraid that if hero points are the go-to resource for beating death, that'll be the only thing they do; people will be hoarding them for that alone because they're far too precious to spend on anything else.
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As an aside, I previously identified a tension between making death scary and making death not too un-fun. Others have then said that's a total contradiction; I disagree. The thing is to find a compromise that gets something from both.
I also believe that real setbacks are important to the game. Triumph after (partial) defeat is much sweeter. Revenge on a villain who previously got to rub it in the PCs faces is much more satisfying than beating a villain who never really did anything against the PCs before appearing on their quest log.
However, it takes a certain deftness to engineer setbacks, which should sting, without going too far and making the game un-fun. Even if you're doing things right and players like it in the long run, in the short run they might moan and complain. So knowing which complaints signal that you've gone too far, and which ones are just players feeling the sting that sets up a satisfying reversal later on, is tricky.
That's exactly the sort of thing I'm after.