Just a quick note so I don't forget the idea. In some recent games, the players who had characters die in the dungeon or on the trip to or from the dungeon have immediately tried to get their newly rolled up characters back into the game ASAP....so they can go find their old characters' bodies and loot them. This led to several discussions about Player Knowledge vs. Character Knowledge which then often digressed into the topic in the previous blog post. But I think I have an idea which allows this mixing of knowledge bases.
Allow me to present it this way: How do the characters know of the dungeon? Did they stumble upon it while trying to do something else or had they heard rumors about it? If rumors, how often had they heard rumors? Was it part of the evening "stories by the fireplace" as they were growing up? If I continue down this track, then I'll be as bad as some of the nitpickers who have to have multi-page backstories explaining every little detail of a character's background. I think I've pretty much said "I couldn't care less" to such things. So, since this is a fantasy world, I have decided that when the survivors returned they told everyone who died and where they died. Thus, the newly rolled up character has heard the rumor of adventurers' bodies being left behind, unlooted, in the nearby dungeon. Granted, only fools go into the dungeon....and we all know adventurers are the biggest fools of all. So, sure, you can go looking for your old character's body....but remember, others have a chance of finding it first. Hmmmm, wouldn't it be funny to meet your previous character as a zombie?
2 comments:
This is actually one of the reasons I often have new PCs show up as prisoners or lost wanderers in the dungeon or near it.
As to the location of the previous character's body... Surely his comrades told the new PC? ;-)
Or the comrades brought the corpse & gear out to give to next of kin?
Or stashed the gear...or it just disappears into some other treasure horde.
I don't care how fast players *think* they can get their new PC back into the action, it's usually a week or more unless they're in someplace like CSIO, Greyhawk, or Lankhmar. In which case there's a good chance an NPC party already did clean-up.
But maybe that's just me.
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