Healing and Dying are tricky concepts in a role-playing game which often centres around slaughtering large quantities of foes. On one hand, you want it to mean something, so if a character dies, it's not just "five minutes in time out until you get a Resurrection card", but on the other hand, you want to be a fan of your characters, and not derail your entire game because someone gets accidentally killed off by a lucky roll or random encounter.
I've touched on a similar theme before with scars and wounds but this is a slightly different approach. You can offer Player Characters of some specific status (some demigod blood, chosen by fate, load-bearing to the plot, whatever) a chance to 'make a deal with death' to get out of it, stay alive, and maybe take some sort of mortal wound instead, but you then have to wonder which enemies should possess that status as well, and how this would affect them if they come back. You can start to think about what constant exposure to this would do to someone's psyche- "that mercenary with the thousand-yard stare, apparently he died six times already. It's like looking into coals when you look into his eyes..." or even causing some kind of death-resistant mania, like daredevils who don't believe they'll ever truly die. I've included a 'cheated death' condition below for consideration. Another thing to think about is that people get attached to what their characters can DO. If they know that mechanically, their character can heal someone 4d8 hit points, and you don't let them heal someone who's been fatally stabbed with a dagger, people often get frustrated. So how can you communicate that someone can't be healed, without just slapping a "cut scene" label over the top and telling your players that what they do can't affect the outcome? An option is to introduce a rule for critical wounds- wounds which can't be healed as easily, and will definitely lead to death if not healed quickly. Failing that, investigate what to do when it all goes off the rails... Cheated Death (condition) You gain this condition when you've been restored to life by magical means. You may gain this condition more than once, but it stacks each time. When you return from death, you lose some of yourself forever, it being lost in the trauma of remembering your own dying agonies and the secrets which no mortal was meant to know. Effects: Your Charisma score is lowered forever by 1d3 points. You gain a +2 bonus on any saving throws against fear based effects. In addition, you have resistance to healing magic, whether you like it or not. Something about it just doesn't work on you any more. Also posted on Game Masters Stash on 21 November 2019. Comments are closed.
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AuthorI'm Luke. He/him pronouns. Archives
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