Making Resurrection cost
 

I want Resurrection to cost something more than just money. Dying and spending time in the Realm of the Dead should be a harrowing experience, not something that you can just walk off. So I propose the following rule:

If you are resurrected, you lose 25 points. This is most often in the form of new disadvantages - meeting Death made you a little... strange. The first time you're resurrected, one of the disadvantages is Killjoy [-15], representing the after-effects of your visit to the Grey Realms. Other suitable disadvantages include Callous, Chronic Depression, Phantom Voices, Flashbacks, and Delusions (I am dead*). Unsuitable disadvantages are those of passion and living life, like Gluttony, Lecherousness, and Overconfidence. You can buy off all these normally.

Bolded text would depend on your cosmology - I'm thinking of death like a gray waste where they eat dirt and drink dust, like in Greek, Norse, or Sumerian legends.

What do you think?

* Side note: This is so common that it has it's own distinct diagnosis, Cotard's syndrome.

Re: Making Resurrection cost
 

Resurrection should cost the equivalent of $30,000 per casting at TL3, as the cost requires ceremonial magic involving loads of casters, assistants, and participants, as well as 20 hours of ceremonial magic. In fact, $30,000 might be low for a realistic economic cost, as healers have better things to do with their time than bring back the dead.

Re: Making Resurrection cost
 

What setting just lets you pay money for resurrection? Do you mean paying a mage to cast the spell?

Powers had an advantage approach to that so if that's meant to emulate the spell you could apply limitations to reflect costs.

Re: Making Resurrection cost
 

Divine Favor p.13 covered this.

Re: Making Resurrection cost
 

I think that the only time it's happened in my Gurps gaimng it was for an npc and he wasn't gone for more than 5 minutes. I didn't feel like punishing the poor sap for being part of a plot device.

It does look like punishment to me though. That's certainly I read it the way it's set up in those other games.

Note that if the alternative to bringing back an old character is bringing in a new character brigning back the old one may not look viable. On the other hand if you don't bring in the new character at something close to the average point value of the other characters you're both punishing the player for letting his old character die and setting his new character up to die if he can't keep up. Of course that would be true for substantially weakining the old character too.

If giving the old character 25pts' worth of angstyness doesn't weaken the character in-game it might be punishing the player by making him roleplay all that angst which I would find rather boring.

To me the bottom line is that a player needs some kind of character to play in the game and making that more difficult or less fun is undermining yhe game itself at a pretty fundamental level.

Also, 25pts odf Disads is a lot. Less disads is a smaller objection. It'd probably be enough to roll a Fright Check.

Re: Making Resurrection cost
 

I am broadly opposed to anything that causes a lasting difference in power level between PCs, though a transient effect that gradually goes away on its own would be tolerable.

Re: Making Resurrection cost
 

I wouldn't forbid those "passion for life" disadvantages, but instead reframe them as a desperate (and possibly hopeless) desire to feel alive.

Re: Making Resurrection cost
 

I think that a possible balanced consequence of resurrection would be gaining a permanent window into the world of the dead. The character would suffer -25 CP worth of negative traits or reductions in positive traits but would gain 25 CP worth of abilities/power talents related to the foci of Death and Spirit with each resurrection. So, a character who was resurrected four times would have acquired -100 CP worth of negative traits or reductions in positive traits but would also acquire 100 CP worth of abilities/power talents from the foci of Death and Spirit.

Re: Making Resurrection cost
 

That's an interesting thought. Maybe "cost" is too harsh, but I think Resurrection should change you. It is, after all, traveling to the Great Beyond.

Edit: 25 points is from Extra Life.

Re: Making Resurrection cost
 

If Resurrection is "free" Extra Life is a worthless advantage.
If, when your character dies, you can simply replace it with a new character worth equal points, then Extra Life is worse than worthless--I find that characters made from scratch at a particular point value are stronger than characters that organically advanced to that same value.

In my DF campaign, Resurrection is not automatic (target must succeed on a HT check, with cumulative penalties for future resurrections). Furthermore, you come back with 10 fewer CP. However, new PCs start with much, much fewer CP, so it's still way "better" to be resurrected.

However, I also have a "catch-up" mechanic whereby PCs with fewer total CP than the party max (for any reason) earn CP at a faster rate, so that they're not forever doomed to be weaker than everyone else, they just have to focus on surviving for a while rather than being the big hero of the party.

We've had one player who has lost more than one character. He always has fun making new characters, and his latest character started hundreds of points below the rest of the party but now has around the same CP total as everyone else (~1000).

The catch-up mechanic, for those who care: if you are behind the party max by more than 25 CP, you gain a CP "multiplier" for all CP awards according to the following formula:

points earned multiplier = [3*(max - 25) - 2*current]/current

max: the current part max CP total (before the CP award)
current: your current CP total (before the CP award)