Categories
Editorial

Death’s Impact in D&D

Is the fact that characters can come back from the dead a good or bad thing for the game of D&D? From a player perspective nothing sucks more than spending countless hours building up and developing a character only to have him get killed permanently. The creators of the game understand that the fun ends when the PC dies so they introduced mechanics to bring dead characters back to life.

Sometimes these mechanics are as simple as the DM waving his magic wands and the character is suddenly back in the game (which is pretty much how it works in most public-play scenarios like D&D Encounters and LFR). Sometimes the mechanic is a little bit more difficult, but not out of reach. In these cases the PCs spend the appropriate resources to have the dead character returned to life, and depending on the power-level of the campaign the PCs may even have the power to do this without any outside assistance. And then there’s the situation when an entire campaign arc revolves around getting a fallen hero resurrected. It might be a quest to get the necessary material components for a ritual or the search for an item or artifact capable of such powerful magic. The point is that death is rarely final in D&D.

Categories
Editorial

RPG Blog Carnival: Negotiating For Souls

Who truly determines whether a soul can return to the realm of the living – the ritualist who just performed the Raise Dead ritual, the gods themselves or the soul of the recently departed?

Yesterday as part of the RPG Blog Carnival hosted by Campaign Mastery we took a look at what it means to Cast the Raise Dead Ritual. Today I wanted to follow up on that post and examine the inner workings and role playing possibilities that are available when this ritual is cast. Some of these idea’s were inspired by the excellent comments in yesterdays article.