On a scale from "death is permanent" to "slain PCs automatically come back to life at the nearest town"...

On a scale from "death is permanent" to "slain PCs automatically come back to life at the nearest town", how do you like resurrection to work in your games?

I actually really liked Dungeon Meshi's resurrection rules. It isn't just a sure fire thing all the time.

>how do you like resurrection to work in your games?
Incredibly rare. The sort of thing that would requires its own quest.

SWN has a rule where you have 10 turns after the PC reaches 0 hit-points to stabilize him before the death is permanent.

That seems like a nice in between

Essentially impossible.

Dungeon Meshi is particlairly good because resurrection only works in that dungeon because souls are bound to the area so the body can be repaired and the soul brought back.

And the souls were bound to the area so that the Mage could create a powerful dungeon ecosystem that required murderhobos to function.

You may be revived for a great cost. The kind that has players gritting their teeth and talking together out of play to decide if it's okay, if it's in character for them to make such a choice, etc.

Resurrection is a lost Magic.
Though fundamentally, the principle is 2 steps, with a possible (and highly immoral) third.

1. Repair the body to the point of it being a functional organ
2. Restore the mind to the brain, reclaimed from the afterlife
3. Grant the subject a soul, soul's los upon death, so you'll need to steal someone else's, forge one out of bloody chunks stolen from others, or steal one from the Gods themselves

Why not just knocked out?

Resurrection is possible but requires the use of wish magic, which only supernatural beings can grant such as devils, gods, Djinn, and such beings don't give such things for free and so a wish comes at often a great price depending on the being, and if it is a malevolent one there's no guarantee the wish won't have some cruel twist to it.

Players are to be put up against harsh and unforgiving challenges which will force them to use every advantage they have available in order to get by. The foolish, the weak and the unlucky are culled, the cunning, the strong, and the blessed struggle forth upon a path of corpses.

Suffer and despair, for the world is large and cares not for your struggles. The universe gazes down upon your broken form and neither laughs nor cries. It simply continues, unfazed.

Most games I play run, death is permanent with expendable resources to avoid death, a few times. I quite like the fate point system. Use it for a small boost, a little healing, or burn it to avoid certain death, or get the best possible roll for an action.

They make good rewards for difficult quests, and lets players grow attached to the character, but forces them to play carefully, otherwise they will run out of second chances or heroic moments.

Death should be permanent. No matter what function death is supposed to serve in the game, whether the PCs are struggling in a brutal and harsh environment or they're noble heroes making sacrifices to save the day, its effect is lost if resurrection is a reasonable possibility.

Depends on the type of game I'm playing. I don't see the need for hard or restrictive death rules in a lighthearted game.

Resurrection should only be possible at the end tier of gameplay. I run 5e, and allow Revivify, because that's the Last Minute, Nick of time Resuscitation. After that, I ban the use of Spells that resurrect, but hint that if they really wanted to/needed to Revive someone, their might be Legendary Artifacts capable of doing so once every century or so, but that finding such an object will require a major quest. I also allow the use of Wish to resurrect people, but caution users that there will be repercussions for doing so, as Magic always has a price. Basically, if they want a major resurrection, it's going to be a big deal.

You'd be better off dead more often than not.

Requires a lengthy quest to resurrect said character and is usually tailored for that specific character.

You forgot your fedora fampai

The problem with resurrection is why wouldn't rulers and the rich be using it all the time? Unless it is incredibly rare, like a handful of times in the history of creation rare, it just creates plot problems and fucks with the setting's internal consistency.

With PCs you're functionally limited to either easy resurrection or death. It's not usually practical to go on some long quest to revive a player, unless they are content with playing the NPCs for a while or something. Also, you don't want the game to be a constant series of "so and so's character died. Time to go collect the holy grail again from Mount Doom / return to the capital and meet with the pope."

So far as plot in general, I think death is a good thing to have because it's the only absolute consequence. If you're going to break it, you ought to be giving up more than you regain. It may not necessarily be you who suffers for it, but someone will sufficiently that if you use it as a revolving door you will cause serious damage. Demons flee Hades when the door to the afterlife is opened, causing devastation, or other consequences. There should be a reason it's not a routine solution to problems in the setting.

Since when is cosmicism fedora tier? Are you implying that all CoC games are euphoric masturbation? Because the idea of an apathetic universe is central to the mythos of that universe.

If the PCs get access to resurrection, then so do other groups in the setting. That causes a whole lot of consequences that I don't want to deal with. So death is final.

Unless I'm playing a setting where uploading ones consciousness is commonplace. Those settings have usually thought through the consequences of easy resurrection. I could probably build an entire campaign around the PCs working to assassinate a single NPC.

A 5th level spell. Sometimes 7 or 9 may be required.

Permanent.

Haven't really played any games with the possibility of resurrection but it seems to diminish the threat to the characters...

Why should there be a chance to raise people from dead simply because the characters reached level X or got enough money to pay someone to do so? Inexperienced/poor characters are in greater danger and need to act smart but stronger ones can go kamikaze and can even cheat death... Well, if you like it go ahead but I just don't see the appeal.

>Death
In game, rare, but permanent if and when it happens.

>Resurrection
One of the principle rules of magic is "Never, ever raise the dead," since they tend to come back "as-is." Coming back a la World of Warcraft would be a full story arc of questing.

Rare but permanent. Player characters are much more likely to fall unconscious or get wounded rather than die from damage suffered. Monsters and NPCs aren't so lucky. Instant-death effects don't generally exist, at least not in the hands of players characters and monsters. PCs only die if they do something incredibly stupid and suicidal (like jump off a cliff or try to swim through lava), face an enemy that's clearly too difficult for them to handle, or during a dramatically appropriate moment.

Resurrection magic exists but nobody knows how to cast it, and the Gods aren't telling anyone. It's less of a game mechanic and more of a quest reward for high-level characters.

Not necessarily though. If you need a god's direct intervention to bring a man back from the dead (for example) it still retains that impact with the possibility of being reversed. Essentially see for how resurrection should work without scrapping it.
Maybe they do. At the risk of being jabbed by Veeky Forums, I'll use dnd as an example. Level 10 casters are the highest most people will have any reasonable access to, which means the corpse has to be mostly intact, accessible and dead for 10 or less days. That second part alone leaves plenty of opportunity for perma-death to come up in the plot. Resurrection magic also doesn't work against old age.

Reincarnate or gtfo

I personally prefer permanent, or possibly very definitely end game level quests.
Because the soldier who lost a best friend in a war, the wizard who killed an apprentice in a magical experiment gone wrong, the adventurer who lost a lover to sickness, should, by all rights, be given a owlish stare and asked "So, why haven't you resurrected them then?"

Plus, I do love Noble Sacrifices and Last Stands, and they lose impact when the hero is going to be up and about, basking in praise within the day.

Resurrection is only possible on the most recently dead, and has a very low chance to succeed even then. Which drops even lower the more time passes since the time of death, to the point that after two-three days it would require almost a miracle.

The upside to this is that it's not a TOO complicated process, so even if the success rate is low most accomplished healers are at least capable of trying.

Standard D&D fair is my preference; the strongest people in the world treat death as a mild annoyance, but 99.999% of people treat death as a one-way trip. (In D&D terms itself, people below level 9, when the divine casters learn Raise Dead. An incredibly small fraction of living beings are at or above level 9 in typical settings.)
Since players are often enabled to become movers and shakers of the world, resurrection is generally a potential option for them, but not necessarily easy until they're so strong and rich that death would be a rarity to begin with.

Friend wasn't retrievable, apprentice was disintegrated and the lover's religion was against resurrection. All are valid responses, and I even used the last one for one of my paladins. First one goes for the noble sacrifices when Raise Dead is all you've got.

Not a whole lot of settings stop at Raise Dead.
Especially since we're almost certainly talking about D&D/PF.

And even if it didn't, that still significantly lowers the stakes. Not every thug with a knife that might kill you has a knife of auto-disintegrate. Not everyone can worship that one weird religion where everyone's meant to be dead.
Your last words, when bleeding out, probably aren't something you desperately need to say, some last bit of vital info, but 'Yeah, nah, I got about 10k in diamond dust in a pouch in me left boot, mate. See you in a few."

Anything beyond raise dead should take a massive quest to get. Hell, even level 9 clerics should have better things to do than sit around acting as medics for hire.
>Not every thug with a knife that might kill you has a knife of auto-disintegrate.
No, but when 10000 gp of diamond dust is affordable, you're not fighting common street thugs. You're fighting devils that fireball you leaving your corpse as ashes, you're fighting necromancers that add you to their undead horde.

And yes, even ignoring that it can sure lower the stakes for adventurers, I never said anything against that. All I'm arguing is that it doesn't break plots. If you want someone to die permanently as a DM, it's still perfectly possible, even without bringing necromancy and such into it.

To surmise my view, it's not a problem with the magic itself, it's a problem with the DM making it too easily accessible or not looking enough at the spell descriptions. Raise Dead is highly limited, and anything better than that should be difficult to get ahold of short of having your own party cleric.

>Because the soldier who lost a best friend in a war, the wizard who killed an apprentice in a magical experiment gone wrong, the adventurer who lost a lover to sickness, should, by all rights, be given a owlish stare and asked "So, why haven't you resurrected them then?"
"Their soul was bound by black magic. It fills me with rage to this day."
"We tried, but their spirit refused. I am relieved that they are at peace."
"There was no piece of them remaining, and only a handful of people on the continent could revive them in spite of that. We'd never have a chance to grab the attention of such esteemed heroes."
"We simply could not manage the funding. Revival is for the nobility."


Magic in magic out.

>You're fighting devils that fireball you leaving your corpse as ashes, you're fighting necromancers that add you to their undead horde.

Not always. Giants, Golems, Well trained men with big pointy sticks, Things that are just bigger versions of other things. Poison. Traps.

None of these need to disintegrate or necromancy you up..

And the money for a raise dead, for adventurers, isn't too great a loss. Really. Even at pretty low levels, that's 'We'll all hang back one more quest before we upgrade from non-magical to magical gear."

Not much of a stretch to believe a group of friends might do.

But y'know, whatever, to each their own. I feel that restricting raise dead should be done in extreme, so no-one can cast spells that do that.

If you feel otherwise, go ahead.

>And the money for a raise dead, for adventurers, isn't too great a loss. Really. Even at pretty low levels, that's 'We'll all hang back one more quest before we upgrade from non-magical to magical gear."
10000 gp is a fifth of all the gold an adventurer is expected to have gained in going from level 1 to level 10. A fifth of all your gold. And being pulverised into being unrecognisable seems staple of being killed by giants/golems. Men with pointy sticks shouldn't be enemies at mid-high levels, and poison/traps aren't gonna kill you in dnd/PF.

On the cost thing, yes it's fully possible to cover, but no, it's not insignificant by any stretch of the imagination. There's also the level cost (Fuck Pathfinder for getting rid of it) which means that the bloke in question will be hamstrung for a good while onwards.

How bad would it be to have your conscious mind mixed up with your subconscious mind?

The one responsible for instinctual preservation of bodily function and survival switches place with the one for abstract thought and higher thinking

I run LotFP so death is permanent.

It's actually 5k, I was being hyperbolic.
Also, why can't men with sticks be a mid-high threat?
I could be a man with a pointy stick, and I have to BEAT mid-high level threats. That's means I should stronger than them. So what's to stop the evil blokes from having some similarly levelled elites?

Because you're not just playing a man with a pointy stick, you're playing a high-end warrior. Very important difference. 5k then, a 10th of all the gold you've every made in your adventuring career at level 10. Still not negligible.

This is my favorite too. Give the players the ability to stave off death, and something so that a couple shitty rolls in a row alone won't kill them.

Alternatively, in settings with afterlives it requires either divine intervention, or going in and kicking down the doors yourself to get your buddies soul.

Since I tend to have gods in my games be LoP levels of "Can't fuck with this" you usually need the backing of another God, or a really, REALLY good plan.

I haven't really upgraded myslef in any way that stops me being a man with point stick. I might tank a hit or two more, and my stick may be especially pointy, but in the end, I'm just a Man with point Stick+.

In any case, splitting a 5k cost between the average party of 4 neatly reduces that 1/10 of your gold down to 1/40th.
1/40th isn't much.

Once we have a fighter. He was such a dick to all party members + his loot hoarding was super annoying.

And we were going to kill the lich. Not regular fucking lich, but The Lich. Someone can die from that. So i gathered the party without that dickfighter and made some preparations with them.

When game start and we finaly encountered the lich fighter get immidiately PWKed, but he succeded saferoll and battle continued. Everyone except fighter died horrible, carefully planned gory death. When character died his player stoped saying anything and just stare at the fighter player. When lich died it was only him and me. He opened doors to the treasure room and find mountains of gold. Hoard of magical items. Chest full of gems. He swimed in gold and cryied with jolly talking to dead friends he didnt even bother to check after the fight.

He asked us why didnt we enjoing our win?
"We all dead John"was our reply.
Suddenly all the gold feels terribly cold.
Gust of wind snuffs out all the torches.
Now he is alone. In a dark labirynth without a map. With tons of gold he never capable to carry alone. Nobody here to help him.


He didnt succed on PWK saveroll. He died and that scene was his purgatory.

I like D&Ds system. It's actually fairly rare, due to cost (specific types of diamonds) and needing casters who are powerful enough to cast the spell.

So heres the rules on Raise Dead

9th level cleric/oracle, 11th level Shaman/Witch
Verbal, Somatic, Material (diamond worth 5,000 gp), Divine Focus

You can raise a creature that has been dead for no longer than 1 day per caster level. In addition, the subject's soul must be free and willing to return. If the subject's soul is not willing to return, the spell does not work; therefore, a subject that wants to return receives no saving throw.

Coming back from the dead is an ordeal. The subject of the spell gains two permanent negative levels when it is raised, just as if it had been hit by an energy-draining creature. If the subject is 1st level, it takes 2 points of Constitution drain instead (if this would reduce its Con to 0 or less, it can't be raised).

A raised creature has a number of hit points equal to its current HD. Any ability scores damaged to 0 are raised to 1. Normal poison and normal disease are cured in the process of raising the subject, but magical diseases and curses are not undone. While the spell closes mortal wounds and repairs lethal damage of most kinds, the body of the creature to be raised must be whole. Otherwise, missing parts are still missing when the creature is brought back to life.

So, permanent negative levels that take a spell to remove, need an intact body, and require a fairly rare resource (a diamond worth a ton of money), and a powerful caster.

The more powerful versions require even greater costs (Resurrection: diamond worth 10,000 gp, True Rez: 25, 000 gp Diamond), and even more powerful, and thus rarer, casters, but do more such as recreating bodies and bringing back souls that have been dead for much longer.

That cost is actually not as simple as it seems. You need a specific gem with a specific worth, but when procuring this diamond, it may cost more than its actual worth (Capitalism, Ho!). And it's not like your party may actually have one on hand if the DM hasn't provided it in any loot. And going shopping for one is going to take a trek to a fairly large city in order to get one if the world is anything like a medieval world.

Basically, just thinking of it as just paying 5k devalues what's actually required to use the spell.

Your comrades have to get you to a TL14 or above medical facility, with your corpse in relatively good condition. Will usually work OK, so long as you've only been filled with enough lead to have several strong men to carry you into the emergency low berth. Not so much if you got hit with a starship scale fusion gun. Things may go wrong with your reanimation, too, like loss of memories/skills, attribute points, etc.

>BIG BAD used ORBITAL BOMBARDMENT, it's super effective!
>HERO fainted.

Yeah, resurrective magic being common would create the problem of "Oh, no! The Archduke of Generica has been assassinated!"
>Fuck it, we'll just pay to get him resurrected. Again. He'll be back up and around like nothing happened in a couple hours, quit your moaning.

'cept it's already been covered why that doesn't have to be the case.
>Oh no, his soul is bound to the dagger that killed him!
>Oh no, he's realised the afterlife is much nicer than he thought and doesn't want to come back!
>Oh no, someone nicked the head off the corpse so it isn't intact enough for raise dead!
>Oh no, the assassin put the corpse in a sack and took it with them!
>Oh no, they killed him via bomb so his corpse is splattered all over the ceiling!
>Oh no, they disintegrated the body before they left!
Admittedly most are dnd examples, but any manner of resurrection that requires a fairly intact corpse applies to the last 4.

Or you can take an approach like the one implied in Girl Genius: rare resurrections exist, but their use by the nobility and royalty in the past apparently led to so much line-of-succession fuckery and confusion and civil war that eventually the lords got together and hammered out an accord of "If you died, you're off the throne, the succession advances, PERIOD. No second chances. All well and good for you if you come back to life, but your kids keep the titles."

(Which opens up another level of skullduggery: if you die and have sufficiently good plans laid well in advance, you might be able to have friends bring you back to life before anyone finds out, and cover the matter up so it only looks like you were absent, not dead. Better hope nobody leaks this to a pretender to the throne!)

I think we're at that point where anybody talking overly-seriously gets the fedora nod.

I actually don't mind this.

Resurrection exists, but NPCs of a high enough level to use it are rare. Those who can generally don't want money; if you want them to bring your friend back, you'll have to promise to do a favor. And you will live up to your end of the bargain, failing to do so is a very bad idea.

Just pay for it if the person actually died. If you actually want to get rid of someone for good you have to trap their soul and hide it somewhere it will never be found.

Death is boring.

Permadeath, but having some sort of expensive and hard-to-restore resource like fate points to avoid it.

I like actual death to be permanent, but with a healthy buffer of passing-out-from-wounds and slooowly-bleeding-to-death in-between any important character and death.

Generally doable, if expensive or time consuming, but I always like to throw in some things that make it fucking hard to do, be it a particular enemy whose method of ''killing'' isn't easily countered or intentionally making something necessary for resurrection difficult to find.

I pretty much go with this
I treat base D&D as pretty much fantasy superheroes and like superheroes if you're a big enough deal high enough level you're probably able to come back baby not this session or the next but you got a decent shot

Systems i play you have to have a professional do a ressurection, and depending on what kind you have it can comepletely change your vharacter.

Being easily revived is one of the things that make humans special.
Cost of resurrection is based on how long until a species dies of old age.
Wizards age slower so their cost is also a lot higher but still a lot cheaper for humans.

This is also why they're the greatest majority of adventurers and soldiers.
An elven warrior may eventually get a lot more skilled in their lifespan but a human one can use suicidal tactics.

Goblins are even cheaper and orcs are on pair with humans so there is always a need for adventurers.

That makes too much sense.

Death is permanent, and I punch players in the jaw when their character dies to ensure the stakes are high enough.

My personal preference is to reroll dead characters at all times.

Resurrection magic removes all the stakes; just like Dragonball Z - "Oh No, Krillin is dead AGAIN, guess we'll have to wish him back or some shit".

I have a house rule where the turn your character dies you roll 1d4+con mod to see how many last words you can choke out.

You die in my game you die for real nigga.

Well, not for real real, but you know what I mean.

Resurrection is both involuntary and immediate.

Wars get really weird really fast.

>Since when is cosmicism fedora tier?
literally started fedora tier and hasn't changed, and I say this as a fan.

In my setting ressurection pretty much doesn't happen. Most non-psychopaths really don't like hurting people and a lot of fights and battles don't end up in death, rather in routs

If I HAVE to run 3.5 or Pathfinder, I always run E6 games, so everyone caps out prior to getting Raise Dead. So, usually any sort of Resurrection magic would be used as plot devices and could only really be used by higher level Diefic servants such as angels that cast as clerics or other things should they actually attract their attention SOMEHOW (Hint: It's super hard to do something that'd actually attract a god's attention).

>You either get a god to really like you, like turning into a nexus (a sort of genius loci)

>Find the powerful cleric capable of reviving people. There's about 40 of them in about 12 million square kilometers, and they probably don't like you already.

>The God of Justice once found a person guilty of so many crimes that the villain was killed and revived three times, to finally be entombed in a way that his soul can't reencarnate.

>Fractoglyphs are a way to copy your soul and mind into an item so that even dead, your spiritual clone may possess someone and start over. Said items are usually powerful magical equipment as to attract good and equally powerful hosts

Honestly I like it when there is some sort of non-monetary cost associated with a PC being raised in terms of either the person setting the ritual in motion, or the person getting raised. I don't want the game to become a revolving door of character sheets, nor do I want death to be a revolving door.

Easy to do, difficult to do well. Resurrection usually comes with a price; perhaps the revived loses memory, some higher brain activity, or simply doesnt quite behave as he used to. Repeatedly reviving someone runs the risk of zombification, where the soul is so withered from the constant ethereal shoving that it's lost it's potency.
The gods are fickle; the dead are theirs by right, and your 'loaning' of their good souls will anger them to the point of reprisal one day.

So...the scientific mindset is fedora-core?

Oh right, christian image board. Never mind.

The scientific mindset is Christian in origin, and should not be confused with cosmicism.

"Cosmicism is the literary philosophy developed and used by the American writer H. P. Lovecraft in his weird fiction. Lovecraft was a writer of philosophically intense horror stories that involve occult phenomena like astral possession and alien miscegenation, and the themes of his fiction over time contributed to the development of this philosophy."

>the scientific mindset

Did you get triggered, you euphoric fedoracore faggot?

>The scientific mindset is Christian in origin

Man, those gotta be some awkward family dinners.

Possibly funny story there: My paternal grandmother got crippled and had a stroke and then mysteriously claimed "I do all the work around the house" and bitched at my paternal grandfather until he left her because most of her work consisted of climbing from bed to wheelchair in the morning and back in the evening, my maternal grandmother is fucking senile and tells the same three anecdotes over and over again whenever I talk to her, three of my four grandparents are institutionalised, my parents are separated, my mother went to help niggers in Africa, my father picked up a younger hotter Chinese chick, I've moved out and am living in an apartment with a migrant worker, so yeah, the family dinners would definitely be awkward -

IF I HAD ANY!

I think he meant between the scientific mindset and Christianity, you complete fucking idiot.

Depends on the game. As long as it's properly explored, integrated into society and the narrative, and there are still consequences for stupid action somewhere in there, many options are viable and can be made fun.

For my main homebrew setting, I go with something vaguely inspired by the Vlad Taltos series.
It's called revivification to set it apart from legends of true return from final death. it's widely available; it's a little expensive, but not crippling for a middle class family to afford; the state of the body is a factor; so is time. There's an apparatus too, called the Sealer, it's massive, and can't be moved; revivification is possible without it, but requires significantly more magical ability. So if you die more than 3-7 days travel from civilization, without a top tier soul maestro, you may be fucked. (Average time limit is about 3 days, less if you're ill or aged, more if you're especially strong of spirit or magical. Spells can preserve the spirit-body connection, but double is about the limit on that)
So the final upshoot is that "death" in this world is now just a fairly serious medical condition that precedes "true death" (linguistically, the words in the primary languages for these states are cognates to their words for "stopped" and "ended"). Sometimes you can afford to have it fixed in time, sometimes you can't, sometimes you're too far from a place and person that can do it. There are also special attacks or methods to make revivification more difficult, though truly making it impossible requires top tier soul manipulation magic (peeling the spirit away immediately takes almost as much power/skill as being able to put it back without a sealer).

Perma. Don't die.

>Possibly funny story there

Just we're clear, we're laughing AT you.

Nah, they get along fine, it's just the "I love fucking science" fanboys and Westboro Baptist Church heretics who keep squabbling while the adults are talking.

It's pretty easy and cheap.
But the afterlife is so dope almost noone ever consents to going back.

Only liches can ressurect, and becoming a lich is both evil and fucks you up (think Voldemort).

The scientific mindset regarding the universe is that humans are a small part of a massive whole and do not occupy any kind of privileged position.That the universe wasn't made for us and it isn't looking out for us. Thats also the basic mindset of cosmicism.

The reason it was considered so horrible is that it came out in the early 1900's when a world without god was unthinkable.

Though then you have people saying "HE DIED LAST NIGHT. HE LAY DOWN IN HIS BED, DIED, AND EIGHT HOURS LATER WAS RESSURECTED"

The elite men with pointy sticks should know to mutilate the corpse if they want to stop a resurrection.
If they manage to force you to abandon your comrades or get speared yourself, they will mutilate that corpse.

Death can happen any time ranging from instantaneous to soon after the end of the encounter, depending on the situation. Ressurection should never be possible, other than as a soulless reanimation of the corpse retaining none of the original personality of the host.

so i'm not the big fan of his writing style that i used to be, but Steven Brust writes novels about an assassin in a setting where resurrection is relatively cheap and accessible. people will often get killed just to send a message, under the assumption that they can be revived.

there are exceptions. brain has to be intact. special weapons called Morganti will eat your soul so you can't be revived. body has to be non-rotted. etc.

but then again, reincarnation and other weird shit exists in the setting, and undead are potentially intelligent, so even if you can't be properly revived you might still be able to come back. in one case a guy gets sent to the Halls of the Dead to retrieve somebody's lost soul. makes for a lot of interesting plot complications, actually.

And they shall be treated with all the respect of THE PRESIDENT IS A REPTILIAN conspiracy theorists in our time.

i worked on a setting where ghosts are a common playable race.

then if some other race dies, they can choose to just keep playing as a ghost.

unless they're a clockwork automaton. fuck those soulless bastards.

I prefer for resurrection to not be a thing in games. I like the idea that certain actions and choices have consequences, and death isn't something you can just take back.

That said, when I do run games with resurrection, I like it to be something that's very, very easy to the point where dying is fairly meaningless. Who fucking cares if your character dies, you'll wake up in the morning just fine.

Sometimes it's entertaining to play a game where death isn't a consequence and players have the freedom to do things they normally wouldn't because dying isn't a big deal.

Any time a character dies, I kill the player.
While arguments against this policy are frequently spirited, they quickly see the point.

Good compromises tend to be allowing resurrection but with side effects (that aren't easily undone). This keeps resurrection as a possibility, but not one that can be abused too often.

Another useful compromise is to make "death" a little less deterministic once you run out of HP/Wounds/whatever. In real life a blow that causes a "casualty" might not necessarily kill a man outright - he might die of complications from his wounds later but swift medical treatment can go a long way.

Both tables are from ACKS and intended for a D&D-like system, but it wouldn't be hard to implement something similar (or with custom entries) for other systems.

This is hardly a problem in 3+ edition D&D, high level characters are superhuman. You can headbutt a rock at terminal velocity for 20d6, catching a meteor with your face isn't that much worse.

A quick fix is to allow hitpoints to go to negative max hitpoints before you die.

>how do you like resurrection to work in your games?

Common, super fucking common and realistically any priest, shaman or druid can provide the service at any church, temple or monolith a long with any of the other standard public services: blessing crops, cleaning water, kosher butchering, assisting in childbirth and healing the sick & injured among other things.

But that doesn't mean people don't die and that doesn't mean they just do it on everyone.

The vast majority of people who're brought back often suffer from something called "Resurrection Sickness" which is caused by having "context".

A lot of people who are brought back from the dead are like new born babies: hyper sensitive to all the noises, tastes, sounds and minor discomforts they took for granted when alive because they've experienced the sweet existence and freedom of resting and living as your own conscious soul in the after life and living simply doesn't compare anymore.

"Resurrection Sickness" can cause everything from: loss of appetite, synesthesia, vertigo, nausea, veganism, apathy, depression & suicidal tendencies.

Absolutely delightful.

Finite lives, with each death taking some kind of toll.

personal preference: In-game death should be rare (depending on the genre of game and setting, obviously). Resurrection should be impossible.

Something of a strikes system with a small luck element. You can be revived if you die (although since my players never seem to have a character who gets the healing spells to handle it in-party, they usually need to find a priest to do it for them) but the more times you come back from the dead, the higher a probability becomes that something will come to fetch you back when you revive.

There is always a price.
It grows with the paying.
First, the guardian of the dead, who keeps those who have passed safe must be appeased.
Then, the being that controls the afterlife where the deceased is must be convinced.

This. My setting has very few people who can raise the dead, and only a fraction of them would spare the energy to do so, even if they new the deceased.