PCs can never die permamently

Dying causes them to respawn in a specific location? Even if death doesn't cost them anything mechanically it's cost them time and distance. You can still lose the campaign if your goal was to stop the evil wizard from destroying the world and you just got bumped from the top of his tower down to the city a dozen miles away.

I run a MonsterHearts campaign and in that system player characters are extremely difficult to kill, you can essentially 'die' three times per session before your character is actually killed off and the games social focus means that there usually isn't enough violence happening that they will die three times in one session. That said being killed in MonsterHearts still causes problems, other than dying when a character reaches zero hp they have two other options; lose all their strings or enter their darkest self.

Losing all your strings sucks because you are more or less at the bottom of the social dogpile, most other characters can outclass you so you either have to play smart and gain your advantages elsewhere or you go low-key for a bit while you build back up (harder than it sounds).

Going darkest self also kind of sucks because you essentially lose some of your character autonomy for a while, you have to single-mindedly pursue a certain goal and it will usually be a while before you get control back.

So I suppose the answer is to make losing a fight seriously suck in a way that doesn't involve losing your character entirely.

This.
There are worse things than death

>Do you really think time would stand still in the event of your death?

Your phylactery is also your charmingly annoying companion and tool.

If it's destroyed your pseudo immortality is taken from you as well as losing your constant companion.

You kill their money and exp. Don't take away levels they've already gained, but instead strip away the exp they have from one level to the next. Money is simple, they lose all of it upon death, and regain it when they encounter the spot they had died at. Alternatively, they could overcome whatever had killed them, or resolve the encounter without fighting, with the npc acting as though they had never met. The latter acts as a groundhog day scenario.

>can never die permanently = no stakes or danger

You need some permanent injuries in your gaming experience. Every time someone reach zero hitpoints from damage, roll on a good injury table (pic related is my favorite). It's a fine way to make players dread hitting zero, even if their characters don't necessarily die.

In Dark Souls, repeated deaths lead to a given undead gradually forgetting themselves and their past, and going Hollow.

In RPG terms, dying causes SAN loss.

I liked the way it was done in Phoenix: Dawn Command. (not the same thing as Phoenix Command) When you die, you come back at one of the sacred fires -- the first one is in the mountain over the city, but others exist in the world and just need someone to relight them, and then the Phoenixes can step into one and out any other.
You also gain some improvement based on how you were killed, so dying makes you stronger, until you've reached the ancient treaty's limit, when you're not supposed to return any more. So you have limited lives, but spending them can help you achieve goals and grow stronger, so it's always tempting to sacrifice yourself to help the party.

just give them goals that don't hinge on whether or not they die.
or raise the stakes

I unironically found this concept to be the best part of that game.

Death is one of the least interesting penalties you can apply to a character, most of the time.

So yeah, you can totally make an interesting campaign out of this.

Eventually you'd stop thinking.

They dont make enough of the fact your playing a constantly ressurecting warrior in service of a possibly dying alien god to protect a nearly eradicated humanity.

They dont make enough of the lore in general.

Very true.

remember when they had a slice of lore dedicated to the idea that some guardians flat-out didn't want to come back and fight for humanity? remember when they wanted to go back?

Too bad all of the potential is wasted.

Making EXP linked to money and making the money something besides coins that get lost if you die...you know...like in the game you are using a picture of?
That and like a hidden sanity score probably cause dying over and over will fuck your shit up.

I suppose there's only so much you can do with groups of Guardians who didn't ask for this but it would be interesting if their nihilism could be leveraged by the Darkness.

Some entity corrupts and kills your ghost but in the process you have to do some kind of favor for the entity for the chance to permenatly die or something like that.

I've wanted to do a one on one game using Runequest for some time now but no one I know is up for a post-when-you-can online side game.

>Runequest characters have passions which determine what's important to them
>dying would decrease passions and having a passion reduced to zero
>your character hollows out when all of their passions hit zero
>defeating bosses, finding items relevant to you, or achieving certain milestones would add to passions
>utilizes Runequest's more tactical combat for more in-depth duels and fights along with a slightly higher lethality
>various magics so replicating Souls magic would be somewhat easy mechanically
>world similar to Demon's Souls or Dark Souls 1 but mostly original, borrowing elements from all Souls games

Oh well. Have a spooky gif

There are amour sets that make the player look like a Taken Guardian, but nothing in game.

I suppose coding an enemy that believably acts like a player is really difficult, so no enemy guardians.

Though there are Guardians who operate outside the City's and by extension the Traveller's jurisdiction in Osiris and his followers.

Our characters can't be kept dead or even dismembered in the usual ways, but it's suspected that if we lost our heads or our bodies were completely destroyed, we'd be done. So a TPK can be a TPK if our enemies know they have to burn our bodies. Our non-individually-bound loot is also up for grabs.

But, most importantly, because we aren't still immortal, we need greater offensive strength to challenge the real enemies in the world. So we need allies, allies we often have to work with to satisfy them and gain their trust, so we can't squander their lives. There is no resurrection magic for them. Even a single lost alliance might make our coalition too weak to oppose the Empire that will be invading soon.

But, now we went into a battle where the enemy, a sort of famine god's herald, can rather rapidly devour a victim whole, and there is no coming back. Furthermore, death near it means a demon might burst it of you. So we have to be even more careful than adventurers in a typical game.

Asura's Wrath is a lovely example of this.

If you the world of your campaign is engrossing enough to get the players invested in it emotionally, losing it should be big enough threat.

Yeah, even though the Warlord era was over I wouldn't be surprised if there are more then a few rogue guardians in desperate parts of Earth and the rest of the Solar system.

The gun Bloody Murder (I think that's what it's called) details a nameless guardian who went around murdering guardians and the gun became infamous to the point that it was declared to be destroyed on sight.

That's pretty much the point of Eclipse Phase.

Even if for some reason the players are never in personal danger (which as other people pointed out, is far from inherently included with "immortality"), that doesn't mean nothing is on the line.

Just because superman might not be in danger doesn't mean innocent people might get hurt if doesn't stop the bad guys quickly enough. Not that I'm a fan of the superman franchise.

That was the original flavor text for Red Death.

Man, why wasn't the game set during the warlord era?

That would be something I'd like to see, especially after seeing shit about the Iron Lords getting into personal duels to the death with various warlords.

That would be something worth making a TT game of. Being a guardian post Collapse and deciding to either become a warlord or striking it up with the fledgling city/Iron Lords

There were also likley Guardians involved in the uprising at Bannerfall where one of tthe factions tried to ovethrow the government.

The political system of the City is another thing that should be expanded on more.

Yeah, we have the 5 major groups (Vanguard, Crucible, FWC,NM,DO) but surely there has to be more then that and the only group to get any real story time is Future War Cult because they have a machine that drives you insane showing you visions of the future.

What's New Monarcy's deal? Why the hell have Dead Orbit stuck around as long as they have?

You don't die...but you don't exactly come back, either.

When you die, your soul is sent to a massive, incredibly strong fortress in the middle of an inhospitable (though still accessible, to those who really want to travel there) wasteland full of dangerous beasts.

In a crystal coffin, your whole being is trapped and confined for all eternity. You can move - slightly - and you can see out of the coffin, but it is completely unbreakable to any known form of might or magic. The keeper of this fortress - some claim he is the god of Death, others a powerful lich, while some even claim he's simply a businessman who stumbled onto some powerful medicine - is willing to release your soul - for a price. More often than not, the price is something dear and permanent to your being - the ability to laugh, your right toe, memories of a specific person - but still more it is a price that you cannot pay. Instead, someone else must come and pay your bail, through an action, deed, or sacrifice of their own. Until that day comes, however, all you can do is watch as other dead are bartered and freed by their loved ones, all the while hoping that somebody will come to pay the price needed to free you.

New Monarchy preach a message of hope, unity and a return to the Golden Age. However they think the city needs decisive and quick government for this, but the current system is going to end badly in a mire of indecision. So they want to put a king of 'impecable character' in place, the current pick is Zavala of the Vanguard, but he isnt interested.

As for DO, I can only imagine its because they're actively improving the Citys space capability and are easily ignored.

this is pretty much the death mechanic in Dungeon World

That could be something to work off of. New Monarcy kicks off the second faction war loudly proclaiming "Fuck the Speaker, Long live the King!"

>MakeTheLastCityGreatAgain

there's a GURPS splatbook for that

the answer is that death still has consequences - they're just different from being unable to affect the world anymore.
you might lose power or resources, your enemies might gain power or resources

also look up eclipse phase, where death costs you memories because ressurection involves backing up your mind every x amount of time, and then the backed up mind being put into a new body if you aren't heard of for a while or are confirmed dead.

I doubt it. But, even if you did, congrats: the "you" have now stopped existing and the shell of what you once was is trapped forever.

Never die permanently is different from never dying. They could come back years after they remember dying, or every time they resurrect it could take memories or even the lives of others

Fates worse than death are a real danger.

The worse bad ends are the ones where you can't ever die.

Death doesn't matter if the fight you died in had different stakes than "I survive or not".
It can be simple stuff as getting to your transportation to your next destination. If you die here, it's gone and you have to finde another way to continue. Then you escalate upwards, always with the imminent danger that the players will face more difficulties or might even fail their quest, lose important NPCs and generally have more problems.
Of course, this doesn't work when you're simply going dungeon crawling. You'd need to have quite a few important social encounters and you have to build up stuff the players can actually lose.
So to answer OP: Yes, it can be done. What's at stake is the success of the campaign and what the players care for.

Remove death, add a Sanity (Or in case of OP image, Hollow) stat.

Given certain intervals, roll checks against said stat. If the check is failed, GM determines your next action.
At a certain threshold, failure means GM takes permanent control over your PC.

I mean it's basically death but I've considered it.
Plus the rest of the world is a shithole due to lack of death.

If you want dark souls specifically, they can still go hollow after dying enough times.

>What's at stakes, if player characters are never in real danger?
Create characters and places that the players care about, and put them in danger.

Things can happen to other characters or things, you know.

It's not like resurrection isn't a mechanic in a lot of games.

You can do it the PS:T way - you come back as a clean slate, but your deaths leave traces, both literally (haunting shades of your former lives) and in the sense of repercussions for your previous actions. Imagine finding yourself having to deal with the consequences of a crime you don't remember committing.

While ressurective immortality removes some danger, it doesn't free the characters from consequences. Even if you will come back, NPCs might not. That dungeon you died in the middle of clearing might be long looted by rival parties, or entirely replenished and reinforced by the forces of darkness. If you die in the climactic battle against the Dark Lord, you come back later - but you failed to stop the Dark Lord, and the land has suffered the consequences of your actions. If you die while storming the megacorp, they might take revenge on your clients - not to mention taking your blinged-out gun from your corpse. If you die while containing the infection on Space Station 14, well, I guess there's one less space station.

Being unable to die doesn't remove the consequences of your actions - rather, it reinforces them by denying you freedom in death.

Only the dead can know peace from this evil, and you will never be at peace.

Well fuck, I thought I was being original.

It's just like the time I wrote half a book in high school, completely unaware it was basically Lord of the Flies 2.0

You were, in part. In DW it's just "if you die and roll averageish, Death will offer a deal to live again, and you can take it." He'll want stuff like what you said, probably. Or maybe he'll be a dick about it and say "since you were so sneaky during life, you can live again but you must literally always stay in the shadows or you're comin back here"

But he offers it to you directly, right away, and you can accept it (or not, and actually stay dead), so that is different.

Stats degrade until they literally can't accomplish anything.

If the characters are well written in any way, then there's far more they fear about losing than just their lives. There's ways to make it work
.
Even gods can lose. Pic related.

I played a character with Unkillable 2 in GURPS. I was playing a paladin and I feared being incapacitated because it meant that my companions would die. There was also the real risk of being permanently disabled, which DID happen when I was stabbed with a magic spear that suppressed my regeneration. I was still playing a character with motivations, morals and desires, so the fact that I couldn't die didn't detract from the overall campaign.

>What's at stakes, if player characters are never in real danger?
I can already tell that you are a bad gm.

If your PCs arent shallow murderhobos, death quickly becomes one of the LEAST troubling outcome.

I've been toying with the idea of doing it kinda, Bioshock infinite style. You die, but you wake up in an alternate time stream earlier than when you left, long enough you could correct it in your next attempt.

I'm thinking to make it more punitive than time and distance, and being separated from the party - possibly knocked out of the campaign depending on how far back they get set.

That the alternate timelines they wake up in, and the way people's memories are overwritten as the time streams meet up (to cover the meta angle), are different than the one they died in, where events in their past (They got the cool shiny guns and bullets) didn't happen, so they'd be down some gear.

Not exactly sure how to best implement that though.

What's the idea behind that?

death is the goal of pcs

>Can you still make an interesting campaign out of this?

I'd kill to play a Souls campaign.

I've been running a campaign with that as half the premise, actually (though it's currently on hiatus) - the PCs are the Dark Lords who've just been unsealed a thousand years after almost conquering the world, and so now they're trying again. They're impossible to kill, in that they can be cut into itty bitty pieces, but continue to be conscious (and still talk even when decapitated), with a limited healing factor.

It's worked pretty darn well, all things considered. Combat is still a threat, since they can still be incapacitated by dismemberement and captured, and none of them are looking forward to the idea of being sealed away again. And their allies are still very much mortal, which means failure still has very permanent consequences (since ressurection magic is so-far impossible in the setting). As a bonus, it also prevents the usual issue with evil player characters in that betraying each other is mostly pointless.

It does mean I've had to keep in mind the change in stakes when designing encounters - as a general rule, if a combat has absolutely no stake in it, then I won't bother putting it in. Most their fights so far have been under the threat of early discovering getting them re-sealed, or vital allies being killed, and as the hiatus started just as they were getting into the world-conquest part of the campaign, failures will result in significant setbacks for their empire.

making them regret their worst decisions forever

Well, in Asura's Wrath, you're betrayed by your allies, who kill your wife, frame you for killing the Emperor, and steal your daughter to use as a power source. Then they kill you.

The few levels are you climbing out of Hell to find several thousand years have passed, and they've become worshipped as gods by the populace.

Er, next few levels.

Also, a little while later, they do it again. And you have to climb out of hell all over again, to find out another 500 years have passed.

The values/goals of the characters would be adjusted. Ex: if they are lawful good, they'd be pushed to enforce total justice on the entire world (whatever they consider that to be). Anything less would be failure. Alternately, increase the scope so their agency is reduced and they have less control.

Every death causes a loss of self. Treat this as a loss of stats that can only be offset by humanity/embers and they are exceedingly rare.

That means you can basically wither your character into a nobody. Make the stat loss permanent and random as well.

Seconding points about the other people and places of the world that aren't immortal providing motivation, but there's another big one- accomplishment. In most videogames, non-permanent or reloadable character death represents a setback. Even when canonically you rise again, having fallen takes you from what you were doing and impedes your progress. So even someone only concerned with adventure would want to not see their efforts coming up short at the expense of a stupid, albeit temporary death. The dead don't have to dwell on what is most likely their ultimate fuck-up.

I don't follow the question. Death usually isn't a big deal in any campaign unless you prevent people from making a new character. Not being able to make progress or losing their stuff is probably punishment enough--your image related.

This is especially true in higher-level games that have stuff like Raise Dead.

In D&D, death eventually stops being the unstoppable force and become merely another setback. That doesn't mean that you can't still fail, of course, but it does mean that death matters less.

Just make death lose XP as your memory gets scrambled a bit. You will get back up from being dead but you lose more and more of yourself until you go under "0" XP and then you Hollow as a mindless undead.

The greentext was actually paraphrased from Soul Reaver, which uses a similar plot device. Raziel spends a long, long time before he reawakens by which point the vampires have regressed to barbarism.

Sanity loss

...

>it's number which can take damage due to things which happen to the character and when it reaches zero your character gets taken out of the game
>but it's totally different to HP guys

Time. Sure they'll live forever, but they can be too late to stop the BBEG

>You're technically immortal, but the world is not.
i recently read a story about an immortal living through the constant death and rebirth of the universe.

The bad guy is gonna win in 3 months.
Yeah, you reform the day after you die, but that's a day you've lost.

>Taken out of the game

I feel like you don't understand how sanity should work.

actually I prefer when sanity works as an alteration to the way the character interacts with the world instead of an alternate death mechanic, I just see it used as one too often

You'd think the picture would've tipped you off

>some anime I've never heard of
does it handle sanity in a particularly interesting way then?

RuneScape style
If you die, you drop everything you were holding and respawn in a predetermined place, naked.

Yes it does

>respawn in a predetermined place, naked
It better be the town/city square or a church. Bonus points if it's the latter and PC gets mistaken for some deity

give them a permanent stat-reduction every time they die. explain in-universe that every time they die, they move closer to being a fully, "true" dead one - which makes the character into a mindless Ghoul once their "main" stat or one that can relate to this (intelligence, perhaps?) reaches 0.

The players can find rare magical artifacts that will allow a stat-reduced player to fully regain One stat, which will still decrease at the next death per usual. Once a Character becomes a "Ghoul", the player can either quit or roll up a new character. Add the fallen character into a "chance to meet" table - set for random encounters - and the longer it takes for them to meet said Character/ghoul, the more monstrously feral it will have become, perhaps even gaining some stats so it can be an interesting fight.

that's how I would do it, anyhow.

Trail of cthulhu has the best sanity mechanic in an RPG. If you fail, GM and party get to fuck with you (ex. change details of the backstory or the world behind your back).

It depends, if they respawn naked with a flash of holy light it could happen

Or they wake up naked and unconscious on the side of a muddy street with a passerby throwing a torn burlap sack on top of you and calling you a lewd drunk

ITT: you can play "Spot the threaboo".

Srioulsy, "stat reduction" is a stupid answer.

>threaboo
what kind of word is that?

>Srioulsy
go get your meds, then re-type that sentence.

Yeah, everyone who comes up with mechanical penalties on death is doing it wrong.

Death is but a door.

You can go through that door, and come back out of it. But the living were never meant to see the land of the dead and come back. There are hungry things there, that eat soulstuff, and latch on to sentience like parasites.

Every time a PC dies, they come back. But a little pieces of their soul is lost every time, and a little bit of the darkness from the land of the dead comes back with them. This first takes the form of mild insanity, then it begins to manifest as bodily corruption. If it happens enough times, and the PC is unlucky, they come back wrong. Bad wrong. They have been subsumed by the things from the land of the dead. And those things are very jealous of the living.

Death is overused as a dramatic device anyway. Think about the typical timescale of a campaign and then compare that with a typical lifespan, it quickly becomes clear that death usually gets far more screentime than is reasonable. Granted in combat-focused stories (which is admittedly the vast majority in the given genre you're talking about) the skewing of the numbers makes a lot more sense but that isn't the only way to run an RPG. Political intrigue, the pursuit of a dream career, exploring and mapping a new region, even mundane relationship management between family members, friends or significant others. It's not difficult to frame a campaign in such a way that the focus isn't on rampant bloodshed.

>what kind of word is that?
Hello, newfriend.

Anyone remember Bagworld?

You couldn't die there. Shit was horrific.

I've been here since 2009, but I am sorry that I don't know every word ever written on Veeky Forums. I'll be sure to improve