Last week we had the first character death in my 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign. That is a good opportunity to talk about death and penalties in D&D, in comparison with other games. So, what is death in a role-playing game? Basically it is the game telling you that somebody made a mistake. Maybe that frontal assault on the red dragon wasn't the best possible tactic, or the group ran out of healing spells. It isn't necessarily the person who died who made the mistake, it might well be another player, or in D&D even the DM; but as long as we are in a cooperative multiplayer situation (and in D&D that includes the DM), the responsibility is somewhat shared, and the death of one character is to some extent a message to everybody.

And having that sort of message in the game is important. If you believe in Sid Meier's maxim that a good game is a series of interesting decisions, you need to realize that there is no success without the possibility of failure. I am not at all unhappy that a death occurred in my campaign. Due to the group having 6 players, of which 2 are healers, in a system that is designed for 5 players with 1 healer, it wasn't always easy to keep up the sense of danger necessary for a good game of adventure.

But if I say that this was the first death of the campaign after two years, I need to clarify that it wasn't the first time somebody was down and dying. 4E has basically three levels of death: You go from fully active to "dying" when you drop to 0 or less hit points. But then there is still a window of opportunity in which you can be saved as long as you succeed "death saves" and don't incur further damage. And the penalty for going into "dying" state is light as long as you get revived before dropping to "dead": You might miss a turn or two until somebody heals you, but then you are back up on your feet with no penalty.

If you don't get revived and drop to "dead", all is still not lost. D&D always had resurrection spells, and in 4th edition that spell is a level 8 ritual in a game of 30 levels, so not all that high. My level 7 group doesn't have it, but finding an NPC priest who can do it shouldn't be impossible. And the rules allow that resurrection to happen within 30 days, and even longer if a ritual of preservation is cast on the dead group member. Resurrection from an NPC costs gold, but not all that much; the group lost more money when they had two magic items eaten by a rust monster. And once resurrected the death penalty still is moderate: A -1 to dice rolls for the next 6 fights.

Sometimes a character can't be resurrected. Maybe he died somewhere where his companions couldn't recover even a part of his body. Maybe he got disintegrated or suffered some other unrecoverably fatal condition. Now obviously the player is still sitting at the table and you still want to play with him. So the death penalty in that case is that the player needs to roll a new character. At that point we are firmly in the domain of house rules. No D&D edition ever was very firm on rules for rolling a new character into an existing campaign. A few DMs insist on new characters being level 1, but in general large level differences in a group cause more problems than it is worth. In my campaign all characters always have the same level and the same xp, to stress the cooperative multiplayer part, and avoid somebody going off on his own to get ahead in experience points. So a re-roll character in my campaign would also have the same level and xp than the others. The death penalty for a re-roll would be handled by the magic items that I'd hand out to the new character, which would generally be common magic items and thus less interesting than the equipment the previous character had.

Of course changing your character also has lots of other effects, but I hesitate to classify those as "death penalties": You need to put some work into creating a new character, you lose story lines linked to the previous character, but gain new ones instead. Replacing an old character who died by a new one is as much an opportunity for a new start as it is a penalty. That is why in my campaign I don't insist that a character needs to be dead beyond the point of being resurrectable to allow a player to roll a new character. If somebody really had enough of his old character, he could even replace him without needing to die first.

And sometimes I wonder why computer roleplaying games don't have that option. Wouldn't that make for an interesting option to be able to reroll a character without losing progress in character power and/or story? On the other hand, computer games are often short enough that starting anew at level 1 isn't that much of a burden. In a way the next expansion of World of Warcraft is offering improved re-roll capabilities, with the possibility of skipping the first 90 levels. If you grew bored with your old character, or your guild / group needs a different class, why not?