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Feb 1, 2013 -- 8:40AM, merb101 wrote:

I'd ask the players to create some downsides to being ressurected. They don't have to be a mechanical penalties, but chances are they could create some really good issues for their characters, maybe some stuff you as the DM wouldn't have thought of. Plus it gives them more control and buy in, so they are less likely to see it as a punishment and instead view it as this cool new complication.

really love the idea of asking the players... something I rarely think of.  I guess I'm an egotist a bit!  Thanks.

Feb 2, 2013 -- 9:54AM, TheMicaMonster wrote:

I would say because  that feels like a video game to me.  I guess it's just an old school mentality of, if you die you die and interesting twists can come from it.  It's the unpredictability of a character's death that I like, that can really change the story.

That being said I would rarely tell a player they can't bring their character back from the dead.  Sure if Tiamat came down and ate their head off, I'd probably say "no more of that character" but generally I think if they want the character back, they can have them back, but I'd like a story element to happen with it.

Additionally it just fits into the world and the fact that the God's and religion is scarce and distrusted in my campaign.  It'd be fun to have a consequence that gets worst and worst each time.

These are all valid reasons to want to raise an eyebrow at raise dead. I'm also a fan of at the very least, making any resurrection (or otherwise any "undoing" of death) a conversation that adds to the game in addition to being a simple game mechanic. Some food for thought:

Why is raise dead relatively cheap and accessible in the base game? While raise dead has its place in the genre, I think this is because in a non-competitive, participatory game where it's not terribly easy to whip up a new PC quickly, raise dead and its ilk are a patch to solve the problem of players being forced out of the game experience. To that end, raise dead is not the problem. It's an attempt at a solution to an underlying problem, specifically, "We're 30 minutes into the session and Bob's character died. What's he going to do for the next few hours while we play?" Many DMs have come up with their own ways of dealing with this issue. Like raise dead, those are just patches with usefulness that will vary from table to table. (I make no judgment as to what are good or bad approaches as long it works for them.)

As hit points are an abstraction, they do not represent physical damage unless you want them to. A "hit" result on dice doesn't necessarily mean a physical hit to the target. It simply means a success on the action taken such that you can apply an effect fictionally and mechnically to the target. Hit points, which can then represent anything from physical damage, emotional stress, luck, endurance, or what have you, are deducted accordingly. Taken to the next logical step, this means that 0 hit points or less can mean you're knocked out or otherwise "taken out" of the current scene until you recover. It doesn't necessarily mean you're dead, even if you've rolled 3 "death" saves.

What does it mean to be "taken out" and what does it take to recover? Whatever you want it to mean, given the context of the situation, and the desires of the player or players involved. It could mean death, certainly, and many players will prefer that option if the death was particularly cool, heroic, or - my favorite when I'm a player - ironic. Or if they like whatever tension comes from knowing they could die by taking the wrong step or because of bad luck. Other players may decide they really don't want to spend the rest of the night making a new character or playing an NPC. Or that the death they got wasn't the death they envisioned for their ultra-heroic paladin archetype and is unsatisfying. Thus, they might choose to recover in some other way ranging from needing raise dead to simply dusting themselves off and getting back into the action because the hit points they lost didn't represent blood loss, dismemberment, or immolation by Tiamat's breath weapon. Instead, it just means the hero was taken out in some other way like in the pulp action serials of old and comes back in the next scene with a harrowing story to tell about how he laughed at death yet again.

That all said, I think the best way to handle this is to be flexible and collaborate with your players when death comes around. Death is an opportunity, but rarely does it have the impact we desperately hope it will when the dice go in that direction. If you collaborate on it with your players, it will have that impact every single time because you'll be making it interesting at that moment in time to that particular player in a way that leaving it to the dice alone almost never will. And that's all that really matters - the conversation that the opportunity stimulates and what it means going forward.