>characters lose part of the equipment on being defeated
>their stats suffer permanently from injuries and have to be re-leveled /trained
making players undead or "restless" allows them to resurrect from physical death (etheric magic may annihilate their essence for good, though)
will this prevent my players from doing stupid stuff without making their characters seem disposable in high-lethality campaigns?
what do you guys use as alternatives to player death?
>>47196786
Sounds stupid.
If an Orc shoves his sword through my skull, or Corpsec riddles my body with enough lead to render me identical to swiss cheese, then I'm dead.
Tell your players to stop being bitches, and if they feel attached to their characters, don't let them run into cannonfire like fucking morons.
>>47196786
A high-lethality campaign pretty much means dealing with characters being disposable. If you don't want that, don't play high lethality.
Also, rather than non-sensically making them zombies or whatever, just have the bad guys capture them for ransom/slavery/interrogation and give them a chance to escape later. Prison breaks and slave revolts make for great plot-arcs.
>>47196786
>alternatives to player death
I'm playing Only War. The GM has expressed surprise that we've survived this long.
>>47196815
it says undead / restless (which seems to be another version of undead) in the OP
leaving ways to actually kill those player characters (burning to ashes /magic) should prevent them from becoming reckless , or only allow death in TPK situations (get beat down , captured , burned at the stake if no one protects you)
>>47196950
If your setting has ways for your players to become undead without compromising the poignance of their death, or the suspension of disbelief.
Go ahead.
But purposefully doing that to merely avoid players dying.
Fuck that.
When I play games I usually give each player 1 Hero points (or some variation on the name) which can be burned to avoid death. If you hit the point of death you can burn a fate and your character will survive by some means. You may not like what happens, but you'll live. You might lose most of your shit, you might get captured, you might end up as a slave in a work camp... etc etc. Point is, you're guaranteed to live.
You get 1 additional Hero Point whenever you complete a major quest line (in a d20 system, that might be once every 5-8 levels, so these points are quite rare), but you can never have more than 1 at a time, so you can't just stack invincibility.
Once your point is burned, you're vulnerable to death. You hit the point of death and you don't have a hero point, "Sorry, PC, shit happens, roll a new character".
>>47196815
op here
with high lethality i mean realistic amounts of hits one can take, or playing enemies as if they were PCs , making plans and tactics to kill opponents
people die as usual , but making it harder for PCs to die doesnt mean they are harder to defeat.
it also changes the whole perspective of the story if the players stop to see their characters as disposable , thus putting effort into character creation.
leaving possibilities to kill them anyway will keep them cautious
>>47197084
As >>47196849 says, if you've got to make your characters more survivable to get your players interested, then don't play high lethality games.
Full stop.
>>47196849
>>47197108
Fucking this.
If holding your hand in an open flame is causing you problems, don't hold your hand in an open flame.
If drinking and smoking are giving you heart problems, don't drink and smoke.
If character death is causing you problems, don't play a fucking high-lethality game.
Goddamn, it's like trying to explain to an obese person that fast food every night is part of their problem and then watching them continue to order fast food every night.
>>47196786
An option my GM uses if you die.
you can lose all your experience to your next level, so your 1 point away from leveling you drop down to the minimum exp required for your level, and are unconscious without being able to wake up or be healed in the encounter.
>>47196786
>characters dying in my group
>ever
Combat feels like a hollow and pointless roadblock. Nothing matters.
I've been going at it for two years multiple sessions a week and haven't seen one PC death.
All of the PCs are such self-important special snowflakes too, you'd think they had rainbow colored hair.
>>47196786
Don't be a fucking wimp. If you die, you're dead. Roll up a new level one character, and do better next time.
Dying sucks, sure. Having to start again from level one sucks, sure. That's why you /try not to die/. It's a game, not a magical hand-holding tour through the GMs imagination, and that means your players should try to play skillfully or else hope they're lucky.
If you try to remove the permanent consequences of failure from the game, it gets really fucking boring really fast. Suddenly, nothing is at stake for your players (particularly if you use stuff like expected wealth by level and encounters balanced to the party's level), meaning that the players don't have any 'wrong' choice to make. This means that, basically, any choice they make will be fine, so their choices don't actually matter. They're just along for the ride, not actually driving anything, and that's really dull.
Tell your players to grow a backbone and git gud if they whine. Pic related.
TLDR: having the risk of death makes your campaign exciting, and this massively outweighs the brief suckyness of actually dying.
>>47200018
A couple of times I've let characters who died of not completely destructive means have the option of makig a deal with death to come back stable but unconcious if they agreed to complete a task.(both involved freeing trapped souls). With the stipulation that their body would desintigrate after 6 months if the task was not completed, and that they would not be given a second chance if they died again
>>47200093
Didn't mean to reply
