[hewhosaysfish]

Originally Posted by runeghost

"Where's Bob?"
"Back in the last room, with his head cut off."
"He didn't rez?"
"Nope."
Players slowly realize how screwed they are...

I was once a player in a 3.5e Tomb of Horrors game. The DM felt that expectation of "disposable characters" from earlier editions wouldn't mesh too well with the players' 3.5-inspired expectations - but on the other hand he didn't want to water-down such an iconic dungeon.

Warning: a couple of small ToH spoilers:

Spoiler

The solution was to put in a magical fountain near the entrance which would give free ressurections for as little as 1gp.
We didn't trust it (for obvious reasons) but the party rogue stole all the gold out of it and we pressed on into the dungeon.
When the party wizard got killed by a fireball-trapped altar we decided we had nothing to lose (apart from maybe the wizard, who was in no position to object) so we thought we'd give it a try.
The wizard duly came back to life with no apparent side-effects but we still didn't trust the fountain and decided to catch a few hapless frogs from the nearby swamp to experiment with the parameters of the fountain.
We found that:
1) The fountain would only ressurect creatures that died in the Tomb, explaining why people weren't flocking to this place from across the land.
2) Creatures ressurected by the fountain would dissolve into a puddle of black slime if their payment was later removed from the fountain, meaning that the rogue had killed hundreds (possibly thousands) of people when he tooks all the gold out of the fountain before and that the wizard would have the threat of the same fate looming over him for the rest of his life.

So we had unlimited ressurections for negligible cost but no-one wanted to use them. We did have to use one though, when the rogue fell victim to a green-slime tapestry.

And then once we beat the fake-Acererak at the bottom of the tomb we found a copy of the deal that Acererak had made with friggin' Asmodeus to make that fountain. And the small print did indeed include a software-EULA-style clause stating that my using the magical ressurection fountain you were implicitly acception the terms of use for the magical ressurection fountain... and there were a few T&Cs that our expirementation with frogs hadn't revealed.