Quote Originally Posted by Bjarkmundur View Post
...You do realize that I run the enemies, right?
Yes, but that doesn't negate the fact that the rule exists solely to introduce a big ol' gaping vulnerability that players are probably going to look at and want to cover.

Like, if there's a wizard in your party, you personally probably don't go out of your way to have NPCs to try to steal their spellbook, right? But it's a thing that happens in plenty of campaigns, and smart wizards will want to defend their source of power and greatest weakness, so wizard players often take steps to defend their spellbooks even if the DM explicitly says they don't need to worry about it and it won't ever come up ('cause some bad DMs will say that and then have NPCs do it anyway).

Likewise, this houserule doesn't actually do anything to "balance" resurrections, it just adds a major gotcha for resurrected PCs, and there's really no reason to have it unless you intend for it to take effect somehow, much like a DM asking you to give him descriptions of NPCs that would motivate your character for revenge if they died under mysterious circumstances while claiming that those NPCs would be perfectly safe.

So it's just me that thinks that is AWESOME?
I'd say so. The stereotypical "the tanky fighter defends the squishy wizard" dynamic isn't everyone's cup of tea; not everyone who likes playing fighters wants to be obligated to (or feel pressured to) spend his time running interference for the wizard, and not everyone who likes playing wizards wants to be the primary target for most enemies. Making the entire party's survival dependent on the cleric's forces the fighter dynamic on the entire rest of the party and makes the cleric even more of a target, and where the fighter accidentally letting someone get past him and gank the mage is a big screwup but recoverable if the party can retrieve his body and escape, anyone letting the cleric die is irrecoverable and likely to make that player feel really crappy and/or have the rest of the party blame them for the TPK.

Having one lynchpin character that the rest of the party protects can be fun, if there's player buy-in; I played in one campaign where one character was a vapid overconfident noble and the rest of us were his long-suffering bodyguards and handlers, and it was a blast. But that's very different from a DM forcing that dynamic on the group.


Now, it's entirely possible that neither of those things would be an issue for your group at all--perhaps they actively prefer the tank/skirmisher/blaster/healer dynamic, perhaps they trust you implicitly not to screw over their characters, perhaps they find sudden TPKs hilarious and great story fodder--and if so, that's great! But I figured I should raise those issues because (A) those implications aren't necessarily obvious from a one-line houserule and you might not have considered them and (B) anyone else who borrows these rules might not have the same group dynamic you do and those are things to keep in mind.

I love this! Thanks for the suggestion, I'm sure to steal some of this, since it lines up perfectly with my design goal of creating more "oomph" surrounding resurrection. To counteract the obvious flaw you mentioned, i have mechanic in the works called "Mark of the Grave" which would be some special ability granted to the resurrected character.. Who says death can't be fun ^^
In that case, something you might want to consider is tying together ghosts and resurrection thematically. The whole "coming back wrong" trope around resurrection has a lot in common with the ghost's "unfinished business" trope, a fading ghost and a soul that's been resurrected too many times both have that shadow-of-its-former-self only-loosely-tied-to-life thing going on, and ghosts are varied enough in aesthetic and theme that there are tons of sources of inspiration for Mark of the Grave effects. Heck, if you can get your hands on Ghostwalk from 3e, that describes a whole mini-setting based around ghosts being a common thing, people bouncing back and forth between alive and ghostly in their (un)life, different paths of power ghosts can focus on, and so forth, so you could borrow a ton of stuff from that.

And not only could you say that some ghosts are people that were supposed to get resurrected but it just "didn't take" if you wanted to introduce some uncertainty or failure chances around resurrection, but one way to address the issues with the existing rule that I mentioned above while retaining the soul link idea would be to say that if your resurrector dies the jolt of their soul leaving the body and heading to the afterlife yanks your soul out of your body as well, turning you right from a living creature into a ghost as your corpse crumples to the ground.

That gives you a similar "Well crap, Friar Tuck just died, now we're boned too" consequence for resurrected PCs, but leaves such a PC still able to act and try to help the rest of the party escape (in the case of one or a few deaths) or avenge their own deaths (in the case of a TPK). It also leaves a party of ghost PCs with the job of trying to get themselves resurrected while they may or may not be able to carry their bodies or communicate with anyone else, which leads to a lot more fun hijinks than "Welp, TPK, time to roll up a new party."