How do I add any sort of weight or tension or consequence to

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>>51234898
Give them people to care about that can't come back.

>>51234898
playing 5e?

Introduce a Coup De Grace rule: an angry vilager with a knife while you're asleep can and will drop you down to Death Saves instantly.

Also Suffocation Rules.

Death Saves are easy because players should be making a lot of them.

>>51234898
Same way you keep weight and tension when players have the ability to "just make another character".

Dying will do nothing to solve whatever conflict you currently face. Sure, you'll come back in a few hours, or even days. However that won't do anything to help the poor family who're being hunted and will likely die if you're not there to save them.

There are worse things that can happen to a player than their character dying.

>>51234898
Make them care about less durable things, then threaten to smash them. Alternatively, threaten them with injuries of the mind or soul that persist beyond the resurgence of their body.

>>51234898
Their death doesn't matter, but the deaths of others do.

If you can't create interesting, meaningful consequences in a game without the threat of death to fall back on, you have a lot to learn as a GM.

Figure out what your players care about. Watch and listen to see what things about the world they are invested in, and then threaten them.

'Threaten them' should be clarified, as while it seems obvious so many bad GMs seem to take it as 'kill/destroy it instantly'. While effective in creating short term drama, long term it's incredibly wasteful, denying yourself resources you can turn into plot hooks and degrading any sense of a players investment in the world.

>>51234898
You can kill a Guardian pretty easily. Places with extreme saturation of Darkness stop revivals. Shooting the ghost before it can revive them can stop them as well. So can just carpet bombing them so the ghost will inevitably also get hit.

Apply similar strategies/caveats to any other setting/game you are having these problems in.

>>51234914
>>51234955
>>51234959
>>51234963
basically all of this

>>51234898
Brain damage/soul erosion/far side taint.

Basicly they always come back less themselves, whether they loose skills, forget people, grow detatched or take on outsider traits.

>>51234898
What do characters do?
No matter what the answer, there is always failure condition. Thus tension and consequences.

Unless characters are unkillable zombies, who just try to survive, in which case you done fucked up.

>>51234898
by including literally any character punishment other than death, and any character motivation other than fear of death.

Money
Power
Prestige
Family
Unsolved Mysteries
World Damaging Threats
etc...

There are a LOT of possibilities.

>>51234898
Some sort of sanity erosion mechanic could work if you don't want to think too hard about giving them things to care about (also, just plain getting looted and reviving in your underwear could be kind of a bitch to begin with).

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>>51234898
Well to name one example from the Souls series, when you come back to life as a Chosen Undead you run the risk of hollowing out the more you do it and the only reason the player doesn't encounter this is because of player fiat.

Regarding Destiny, because of your pic, Guardians get fucked if their Ghost gets stolen or separated for a long period, or they encounter too much Darkness. Any time you enter into a Darkness Zone playing that game and you die. that means you're supposed to be dead and your Ghost cannot bring you back. The only reason this does not happen to the player, who is instead booted to orbit (year 1) or has to start over from a checkpoint (year 2), is again, because of player fiat.

>>51235688
>you run the risk of hollowing out the more you do it and the only reason the player doesn't encounter this is because of player fiat.

Actually, there are a few examples of undead who don't hollow. Patches and Andre both survive because they have hope.

>>51234898
Geist does this pretty well.

1. Give them things that they care about that is more important than staying alive.

2. Make death have an effect on the character. Dying over and over should be traumatic as fuck. When you come back from the abyss you should have to leave a part of yourself behind.

>>51235699
I've always supposed that the player character is simply remarkably resolute and only gives up when you, the player, ragequit and don't come back.

>>51235718
Precisely.

>>51235714

How to you make a mechanic out of dying being traumatic and losing bits of yourself?

>>51235699
>>51235718
Some undead don't hollow because they have enough purpose not to, notice that every undead you encounter who is resolute is also a merchant of some sort. Those undead still have their purpose which keeps them from falling into despair and hollowing.

>>51235699
Andre is a giant, not undead afaik

>>51235742
Humanity from DS1? Say if you ran a DS game where your players could come back indefinitely; well, say the mechanic behind this is something the player can lose or gain, Humanity. Players gain it by doing shit like killing strong foes, binding ties with each other or NPC's, and lose it by dying or something doing particularly stupid to each other.

>>51235699
I always presumed that the fact that you continued playing meant you had hope, and if you stopped playing, you hollowed out and gave up.

Two words:
Limb damage.

>>51234927
>Also Suffocation Rules.
Late reply, but 5e already has rules for holding your breath and suffocation. You're a moron, they're right there in the PHB.

>>51235770
They also collect souls from others, which helps.

>>51235742
I believe in your referenced game, Geist the Sin Eaters, you play as a person bought back to life by a nebulous facet of death itself. How you die influences what Geist chooses to bring you back. But once you're back alive, the Geist is constantly piggybacking off you. It's in your head and in your body, and it has wants and needs as well as you. You need to indulge it or it fades from you (I think, been a long time since I read the book), but at the same time if you indulge it too much it just takes over your body and mind.

It's worth it for the awesome magic powers though.

>>51235838
>Obligatory Black Knight reference

>>51234898
Robbed and stripped on death

>>51235870
Partially correct.

The player characters in Geist cannot die. If anything kills you, you come back. But you come back when dementations, you come back with less willpower, etc. Constantly going through the blender of death and being pulled out by the ghost piggybacking your soul eventually leaves you as a barely-cognizant husk driven solely by the ghost's desires.

Also, not indulging the geist doesn't make it fade away. It makes it uppity. You gotta have a balance between indulgence and control or you end up with a shitty geist either way.

>>51235742

Cold Ruins of Lastlife (a dungeon world version of Dark Souls) does it pretty damn well.

You've got two tracks, Memory and Radiance. Radiance is creation. Memory is restoration. Every time you die, you permanently strike off improvements on those tracks.

Other methods include the good old Night Angel Trilogy method: You might come back in two days, but dying hurts like fuck, someone'll probably loot your corpse, and if important stuff is happening which you'll be unable to intervene in until you get back up.

>>51234898
Each time they 'die' they must eat (n) numbers of fresh, crushed red habanero chilli, where (n) is the cumulative number of deaths they have experienced. The pain is a neural simulation of being burned alive and their journey through hell before being resurrected.

>>51236261
I assume you mean the players?