D&D: How to Get Over Your Favorite Character Dying
Sometimes the dice just don’t come up. And your favorite character dies with no resurrection in sight. What do you do?
It is harder than it’s ever been for player characters to die in Dungeons & Dragons. For all that 5th Edition is a touchstone for those 2nd Edition feels, the lethality of old-school D&D is a thing of the past. But even in 5th Edition, it still happens. You make a character you absolutely love, and then they die.
And worse, nobody has enough money to afford a resurrection spell. Or maybe your body got turned to ash, or into a zombie. Whatever the reason, when it happens, it can feel like a gut punch. That’s a big part of the appeal of D&D, we get immersed and invested in these fictional lives.
Even Critical Role isn’t immune to this. An especially deadly session nearly broke the internet with the backlash from fans who had become invested in the characters.
And when it happens at your table it can be hard. Because you’ve put a lot of time and work into that character, and it feels like that’s all for naught. But, as the old adage goes, losing your first character is a tragedy; losing your fifth is hilarious. Here’s how to get over your favorite character dying.
Come Up With an Epilogue
Especially if it’s your first character or one that has become particularly meaningful, don’t be afraid to give yourself a little picture of how the world is. Your character might have died, but, canonically, D&D has multiple afterlives and places a character’s soul might reside once they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil.
Per the DMG, when a creature dies, its soul “departs the Material Plane, travels through the Astral Plane, and goes to abide on the plane where the creature’s deity resides.”
No deity? No problem. If the creature didn’t worship a deity, its soul departs to the plane corresponding to its alignment.
So take a moment and imagine what that next phase of existence, even if it’s a mystery might be like. My personal favorite take comes from stories like the Sandman and Discworld, with the souls of the departed just getting the barest peek into the hereafter. You don’t need much. Just enough to have a sense of motion. Of a ship sailing out past the grey rain curtain of this world, where all turns to silver glass and then white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
Make Your New Character Wildly Different
One of the best ways to get over your favorite character dying is to find your next favorite character. And often, one of the best ways to do that is to really shake things up with your next character.
One of my favorite techniques is to pick a vastly different playstyle or ruleset to play with. This can be as simple as switching from a spellcasting character to, say, a Fighter. You might play with a new class, a new species.
But especially after a character you care about, it can be good to play against type. Is there something you don’t normally play? Now might be the time to try it out. Especially because you’ll want to…
Play Them Like You Stole Them
When rolling up your next D&D character, after you’ve had one you’ve cared about for a long game, it can be tricky. It’s tempting to want to immediately dive right back into that long-term role where you can really think about your character and dig in.
But I find it’s often freeing to not even care too much about your character’s fate (to start off, obviously). That is, take the big risks. Drive the car like you stole it, so to speak. Especially after losing your first character, you’ll want to get to the point where you’re ready to lose your 5th character all the faster.
Charge that Beholder, and challenge that Dragon to a duel. Make big swings. Play your character like you don’t have a social security number for Roy.
Be a Goblin
When in doubt, play a goblin. It works every single time, without question.
Happy Adventuring
