We’re no stranger to death here at the D&D Dispatch.

We’ve already covered all sorts of things on the subject, from how to make death saving throws more exciting, ways that characters can be instakilled, and exactly how death saving throw rules work according to Rules as Written.

Check these out: 

• 3 ways to make death saving throws more exciting in D&D 5e
• 13 ways a character can be insta-killed in Dungeons and Dragons 5e
• Here’s everything you need to know about death saving throws in D&D 5e

But even with all of that being covered, we still don’t think that we’ve ever really gotten into the nitty gritty of something that’s been bugging us about D&D for a while now; that death just doesn’t feel, well, deadly in D&D 5e.

You can blame it on too-nice-DMs, you can blame it on death saves favouring stabilization over succumbing by a factor of 55% to 45%, or you can blame it on the wide variety of resurrections spells that are first made available to players a QUARTER of the way into a level 1 to 20 campaign, but we thinks its likely a combination of all that and more.

And yes, we understand that a lot of players, DMs, and parties alike recoil at the very notion that a party member may be gone for good, but if that isn’t a possibility, then what even are the stakes, here?

I’ve noticed it lately in a recent playthrough of Baldur’s Gate. Sure, I was playing on a Balanced level of difficulty, but I was shocked to see the sheer number of revivify scrolls being handed out willy-nilly. It made me a little less worried about spending my precious action economy to help up a comrade, figuring that I’d just revivify them later if the worst should happen.

The same can, to a lesser extent, be said of the D&D campaign I currently play in. My character, being the naïve 16-year-old that he is, summed it up succinctly after a party member failed his death saving throws and was immediately revived by our Cleric: “Oh wow. We really can’t actually die, hey? We’re basically gods!”

…Which of course led to the other party members hushing the foolish boy for his blasphemy, and a knowing smile from the DM that said “Oh, just you wait.”

But between the Cleric’s Revivify, the Druid’s Reincarnate, and coffers full of enough gold and platinum to hire out a high-level spellcaster to bring either (or, more likely, both) of them back if it were ever needed, there really doesn’t feel like there’s any way, short of a TPK, that would result in someone being gone for good once you reach fifth level.

Well, actually, here’s a brief list:

• Disintegrate: It feels like this spell was made specifically to counteract the majority of Anti-Death Spells, as it even states; “The creature can be restored to life only by means of a true resurrection or a wish spell.”
• A Beholder’s Disintegration Ray: Pretty much the same deal. If there’s no body to bring back, there’s nobody to bring back.
• Lava: See above.

We’re sure there are more examples of ways to completely finish off a character, and we’re all ears for any ideas on your end.

But, barring filling your entire world with Lava (hello, Avernus), or removing spells like Revivify, Reincarnate, and Ressurrection from the game entirely, we do have a few more suggestions for making death actually feel like something to be avoided at all costs in your own games.

Lasting Impacts of Dying

Here are some ideas that you can introduce for characters that have died and been brought back.

Scars: The Bard, the face of your party, went down after getting an axe to the head? Congrats on being brought back to the world of the living, buddy, but that gnarly looking slash across the side of your head isn’t going away any time soon. Maybe the folks you’re trying to seduce will find it endearing. Maybe.

Death saving throw debuffs: Consider forever altering the parameters for how death saving throws work exclusively for members of the party why have fully died before. Instead of 1-9 being fails and 10-20 being saves, shift the scale up by one for each time they’re brought back, making 1-10 fails and 11-20 being saves if you’ve been brought back once, 1-11 as fails and 12-20 as saves if you’ve been brought back twice, and so on.

Added faults: this one is a little less intense than the previous two, mostly because it is up to the PC to act on it, but you can give ressurrected characters a new fault to add to their character sheet, such as “always dreaming in nightmares,” “Getting headaches from sunlight,” and other similarly cryptic traits.

Obviously, these are all just suggestions. The main point of this article is merely to point out to DMs and players alike that, when played as laid out in the Rules as Written, D&D 5e can make the worst possible fate feel a little underwhelming.