D&D: How To Cheat Death
Do you feel death’s cold hands closing around your character’s throat? Fear not, here are a few ways to cheat death in D&D!
Dungeons & Dragons is a game of fantasy adventure and high heroics. It’s also a game where it’s fantastically hard to die unless your DM is trying to kill you. And even then, it’s still tricky, because player characters have plenty of tools to tell the god of death, not today.
Yeah, like that. Here’s how you can cheat death in D&D.
Be A Half-Orc
Perhaps the easiest way to cheat death, consistently, is to be a half-orc. These stalwart stars have the innate ability to shrug off all but the most lethal blow. Their relentless endurance keeps them in the game when any other character would drop to 0 hit points. As long as they don’t die outright, say, from a disintegration or something, they can keep fighting on at 1 hit point instead.
And that one hit point makes all the difference in the world.
Zealot Barbarian
Life is cheap. And this is more true for Zealot Barbarians than anyone else. Barbarians who follow the Path of the Zealot are marked by a god. As a result, death has a much harder time of sticking. When a Zealot Barbarian dies, it costs no material components to restore them to life. So you can skip out on expensive diamonds. All you have to have are the right kinds of spell slots free, and they will be back on their feet in no time.
Playing a Zealot Barbarian is a great way to hang out with the reaper, playing Battleship or Twister while you wait for your party to bring you back.
Death Ward
Death Ward is one way to give your whole party the chance to cheat death. And more directly too.
This spell negates an effect that would kill you instantaneously, like Power Word Kill or the like. But it also prevents you from dropping to 0 hit points one time, much like a Half-Orc’s relentless endurance.
But better still is the fact that this spell lasts eight whole hours. So you’ll cast it well before you start needing to worry about it. And that means that you can wipe that smug grin off the DM’s face when you say “actually, remember, we have Death Ward up.”
Bless
Bless is a more accessible way of cheating death for most parties. You have to have it active before you drop to 0 hit points. But as long as the person dropping to 0 isn’t the one who cast the spell, it keeps going. Bless grants an extra 1d4 to any attack roll, skill check, or saving throw, INCLUDING death saves. Which means you’ll have an extra 1d4 to nudge the odds in your favor.
Clones For All
Finally, get the party’s Wizard to Clone you when you’re high enough level. We only mostly talk about Wizards making Clones of themselves. But anyone can be cloned with the spell. It’s instantaneous, so you can just, for the investment of time and money, have backups of the party waiting in the wings. Do it early enough and everyone in the party will probably forget. Just leave a reminder somewhere so you can say “wait a minute, my Clone comes online!”
