The fact of the matter is that the ‘Step On Up’ element in D&D 3.5 has *absolutely nothing* to do with survival, life vs. death or XP.

The ‘Step On Up’ in playing D&D comes firstly from designing your character in a way that is cool and original and effective, and comes secondly from designing your character in a way that meshes perfectly well with your party in a cooperative way. Those two points are the whole point of playing D&D at all. Anything else is ‘drift’.

And… neither of those things has anything to do with death or XP penalties. These two things are included in the D&D rules, I believe, largely as a result of a misguided assumption that they need to be there in the first place.

-ALL- of D&D’s structure, strategy, design and rules revolve around and focus on designing your character, growing your character, showing off how you chose to make your character, finding new features for your character, making your character perform a cool trick that you planned in his design, etc etc etc.

It is a character-design focused game.

Once you’ve played enough D&D to realize this basic fact, You come to realize that you can easily do away with both character death and new character penalty rules altogether.

Once you can be comfortable with doing this, the REAL Step On Up of D&D becomes clear, and it’s pretty much all ‘character design’ and ‘party design’.

My players are free to resurrect their characters for free with no penalties. They are free to bring in a new character every session if they like. Only rule is that the new character has to have the same exact treasure and XP as the previous. They never lose their treasure or XP in any way. They are free to allocate those resources individually and cooperatively as they see fit, at any time.

What’s been the result of this? Smashing fun. It’s not deep, it’s not serious, it’s not official, but man, it’s just FUN. I would never go back to playing the old way.

So, in the end, ironically, if you are a person that thinks that death should be a part of play and that it should bering consequences for the player etc., then D&D is possibly the wrong game for you. As weird as it sounds, at its root, D&D 3.5 is about you making a character, not about whether that character lives or dies or what happens to them.

Additionally, I think a lot of confusion over this comes from people who really don’t quite grasp the term ‘gamism’ and just try to apply stuff they’ve read in a generic manner. This is where stuff like assuming that ‘gamism’ automatically means that everyone is trying to accumulate XP as much as possible. What? Sorry, not even close.

I am a pure gamist, my players are all pure gamists, and we can tell you that, if you understand the D&D game and what’s going on in it, you’ll know that the ‘gamism’ part comes in the CHOICES you make for your character, NOT in any XP you may have or not have. It’s just not relevant to the game.

Wham! Hit the nail right on the head!

If you have good backstories and recurring villains, permanently losing a PC can really torpedo an entire storyline. Assuming the player doesn’t hate their current character, try to find a way to keep them in the game. Go ahead and raise them on credit or something

One of the best ways to keep players tied to their characters is to make sure that every character has at least 1 big goal they’re trying to accomplish. The easiest one is to give them a recurring personal nemesis to hate. Then, when their character dies and the player wants a new one, remind them that their character’s nemesis will win if the character stays dead.

The reality of bringing in a more efficient character after character loss seems to be the norm for our group. I personally frown on resurrection but our group has tried reincarnation, resurrection, rescuing a character who was turned to stone while the rest of the group continued on the quest. Character death and penalized resurrection costs the party in multiple ways.

Our DM is now trying to formulate a resurrection penalty bank instead of an outright loss of level. The character is over time penalized XP instead of an entire level and I believe this is working out so far.

I have seen a player (granted, not the best player in the group) do something incredibly stupid with their character, resulting in the GM having no choice but to let the character die (rather than perform an entirely obvious intervention just to save the character). The player goes home, writes up a new character that has slightly different stats, but the way he played the new character was entirely identical to the original character. So much so, that the other players had to be reminded to use the new character’s name. This is more like penalizing the other players.

If the group is a focused team, replacing the fallen team member with another of the same type and level (played by the same person) is often no different than using a GM intervention to save the original character.

For a narativist game, this issue just doesn’t matter, because a narativist character isn’t about power, it’s about being a vehicle to address premise to create theme. In that sense, the death, or retirement of the former PC make a statement. The new PC will also make a statement, but the real meat will show up in continued play.

Frank

That being said, I do make allowances for certain changes when the characters first start out or are trying out a new class.

The first thing I do is allow players to make changes to their characters for the first 4 levels of advancement without any penalties. This doesn’t disrupt the makeup of the party too significantly, as I have certain players who like filling the face man, healer, and front line roles.

After that, I allow players to make changes to the most recent level they took without penalties as long their XP is 40%-50% below reaching the next level.

If a new character comes in the GM is faced with two dilemmas. First, do you provide the new character with enough XP to bring the mechanics to level on par with the rest? Second, does the new character get a package of non-mechanical benefits like that of the previous?

The way I have always handled replacement characters whenever possible is to do a “history session” with the player. I have them build a level 1 character, then do a semi-short form session detailing their rising from the ground up. I give out a level, or a huge amount of XP after a “section” of their life has gone by. I let them use it and build up. I improv most of the stuff they do. Sometimes it can take 2 sessions or so, but because it is 1 on 1 it goes faster. We keep going till this character is up to the level of the others, and then we make the 2 storylines merge. It is intensive but preserves the sense of achievement.