Need Advice: Rules & Mechanics
I must give a shoutout to for getting me thinking about this. They made a great post a couple of days ago about 10 homebrew rules they have had great success with over their D&D career, would heavily recommend giving it a read. In the post they mentioned a rule they use about having finite resurrection in their games which I will paraphrase:
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Final death threat at each level - This rule rebalances death and the use of ressurrection spells. Each resurrection spell only works once, with 2 exceptions; Revivify works as immediate medical aid and custom wishes break the rules. This means that every character can die a limited amount of times so godhood or lichdom are the only ways to become immortal.
I have never had a PC die in a campaign, mostly due to luck and not for lack of trying, so I've never had a situation where a player is desparate to keep on with the same character. But this post got me thinking about the merit of infinite resurrections and (minorly) the lore implications.
In a world where powerful mages can readily revive people daily what would stop people from never dying? If your mom passes away just revive her, the sooner the better since it's a cheaper spell slot. I like the idea of limited resurrections; that artificially restoring the bonds between ones body and soul magically has its limitations and repercussions and cannot be repeated, like you cannot keep having heart transplants as it would just fail.
I think a popular way people may already contextualise this is using Matt Mercer's realtively famous homebrew resurrections rules where there the spell doesn't 100% just succeed and requires work from the players to aid in the ritual, with a chance of failure and unavoidable death.
Would love to know people's thoughts on the topic and how they run resurrection in their games, with the rational behind it. If you run infinite resurrection how do you contextualise it? Do you even bother or just handwave it?
