Dealing with Character Death

The death of a character is rarely a happy event. Sometimes it’s a well-deserved comeuppance for terrible play (he said, glaring knowingly at the mirror-man sorcerer), but usually it’s a series of unplanned circumstances that leave the player and the campaign in a lurch. So what’s a good DM to do?

There’s a style of play based on the contention that the DM is the campaign’s primary antagonist, and that he or she should treat the players with the same antagonism. Characters are challenges to be overcome, and the death of one is the intentional result of some difficult, unbeatable, or outright spiteful encounter. This is the style of Gary Gygax and a number of old-school adventures, including but not limited to the infamous Tomb of Horrors. If that’s the type of game you enjoy running, there’s nothing else to say about a character death. You won! Don’t let reading this post cut into your celebration time! Go frolic!

For the rest of us, the ones who actually play D&D, a character death is more accidental than predictable. It’s often the result of bad luck (rolling a series of failed Reflex saves, even though you succeed on a roll of 6 or higher), unexpected effects (a high-damage explosion that occurs when a creature dies), an unusual battlefield situation (somebody left the wizard alone with three ogres), or a combination of the above. A DM may know ahead of time that a battle will be difficult, but a lot of battles are difficult and don’t get anybody killed. It’s far more likely that nobody predicted that the rogue would fail to climb the wall, or that he would take maximum falling damage on the way down, where he lands next to a wraith that the players didn’t see.

Different DMs react in different ways to the threat of death. Some will subtly (or egregiously) alter events so that the situation is survivable, like by allowing a save where one shouldn’t exist or having a monster use unwise tactics to keep a weak player clinging to life. Other will let the chips fall where they may, holding the players responsible for decisions and luck just like monsters, because this adds the real threat of loss. Both points are valid, and I’ve used both in different situations.

What I really want to talk about is how to deal with the death after it happens, no matter how it came about. Depending on the character, the players, the campaign, and the immediate situation, you and your players have a lot of options.

The biggest question is whether to let the death stand at all. D&D has a lot of resurrection magic, and most parties of a sufficient level have access to it. If the party wants their ally back, has an appropriate spell or ritual available, and meets all of the requirements, a death might only last for an hour or two before the party is nearly back to full strength. Even if the players aren’t ready, they can carry their friend around until they can prepare the spell, or until they can get to a town where somebody can cast it for them (feel free to give them an NPC for the interim, so that the player of the dead character has something to do). This is convenient, but it does make death cheap.

If you like bringing the character back but think raise dead is too easy, you’re fully within your rights as a DM to require some sort of quest or sacrifice. Perhaps the spell only works in a certain place or with a certain strange component based on the creature who killed the character. Perhaps resurrection magic is rare and requires the aid of a mysterious hermit or the permission of a god of death. For sufficiently evil players, maybe a life can only be granted by an equivalent death, and the players have to find somebody to kill. The quest could also be on the other side. Imagine the characters can revive their ally immediately, but to prove that the character is worth coming back to life, he or she must perform some task as a spirit. This is a good time for a one-on-one session with the player, or for a quick side story as spirit allies (run by your other players) assist the character on their journey back to life. This redirects the campaign to a new temporary focus, but it makes death meaningful without being permanent.

Another option I like is allowing the character to return, but having them somehow wrong. Maybe a devil piggybacked on the soul as it returned from death, and now the character has an infernal influence helping to drive its actions. Maybe the character didn’t come back fully, taking a permanent penalty to something related (like a -2 to saves against fire for a character who died to red dragon breath). Or maybe the only way to bring them back is as something grotesque, like making them undead, putting their soul into a construct, and the like. It keeps death meaningful by applying an ongoing effect, it doesn’t necessarily derail the current plot, and it opens new roleplaying opportunity, but some players really don’t like the potential for a life-long character trait based on one bad fight or even one bad roll.

Perhaps your players aren’t in a situation where they can revive their ally. For example, if the character drowned in lava, the lack of a body prevents all but the rarest, most powerful resurrection magic. It could also be as simple as the player leaving the game or wanting to take the opportunity to change to a new character. In that case, you should be fine with letting the character stay dead, letting the other characters mourn or move on appropriately, and planning for the potential addition of a replacement character. This doesn’t mean that the character can’t come back later in some form, like being revived by an enemy as an undead minion or transformed into a saint in the afterlife and willing to help the players from another plane. It does mean that the players think the change would be more fun than focusing on their dead friend, and it’s the DM’s job to allow players that fun.

I’ve rarely seen a bad approach to a player death. Even if you disagree with your players on how much meaning death should have, or if some players disagree with others on whether or not to revive a character, there’s still opportunity for role-playing, world-building, and general fun. Really, the only way I know to turn a player death into a negative experience is to make the players feel bad about the death of the character by continually reminding them of their failure or blaming them for getting into a situation where death was a possibility. Chances are they feel bad enough about it without you. As strange as it sounds, I’ve actually seen a DM do this, and the only thing it accomplished was making the players like the DM less.

I’m usually of the opinion that death and revival should be interesting. I don’t like the cheap resurrection of high-level D&D, which typically has a high cost but only applies an uninteresting blanket penalty to rolls; 4th Edition made it even worse by turning the “high cost” into pocket change except at very early levels. My generic go-to is to make the remaining characters physically retrieve the dead character’s soul from a holding place in the afterlife, though some campaigns don’t work as well with that construct. If my players really really wanted simple resurrection, I might allow it, but they might change their minds the first time the campaign villains come back from the dead.