Why do you lose experience after dying and then reincarnating?

PC's don't learn from their mistakes.

Experience, as well as the gaining and loss thereof, is a purely mechanical element. It does not exist in setting, and is purely an abstraction to facilitate smooth gameplay.

Besides, if characters got XP for dying they'd be throwing themselves off cliffs willy nilly.

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>>52881684
>Allowing revives in your game
>People don't die when they are killed

>>52881732
>Besides, if characters got XP for dying they'd be throwing themselves off cliffs willy nilly.
That's assuming overcoming death is common

>Character dies
>Can't listen to the dead without "Speak with dead"
No wonder they can't learn anything.

>>52881793
There wouldn't be a whole lot of point to rewarding XP for dying if it wasn't, now would there?

C'mon, use your head.

>>52881977
It can be possible, just not common.

There's an interesting game called Dawn Command: Rise of the Phoenixborn, where the only way your characters level up is through death.

Each PC is a Phoenixborn who can die and level up seven times, but after that they're permadead. It's a pretty interesting notion.

>>52881996
Again, then there wouldn't be a whole lot of point to it.

Sure, you can reward XP for combat, but if there's only 1 fight every 6 or so sessions, then that's not a very viable reward.

>>52881684
Why does your setting has reincarnation?

>>52881684
Well do you remember how the last time you died you... oh no you can't. That's the xp loss, dumbass.

>>52881684
It shouldn't be easy for the "spirit" or mind or whatever to recover from a sudden shock of such magnitude and then be forcibly cast again unto flesh.

Reviving should be a rare thing that doesn't come easy anyway and the xp loss also gives the players a very good reason to care for their own asses, plus it makes more tempting to pursue certain forms of undeath, particularly at mid levels when ANYTHING can happen to you (or at least it should feel like it could).

Reincarnating is even worse, since you're supposedly going through a cycle of half forgetting your own sins and your reincarnation is a different lifeform often related to your karma or the actions you took during your previous run, thus one should barely if even remember anything about past lives, and only those who have traversed the cycle enough to know the glitches in the system should be able to (remember) their asses and carry over one or more numbers to the next life (and that is only if they abandon the chance of transcendance and getting away from the cycle of Samsara, that's why they're considered fucking saints).

Now, near death experiences, particularly those that are guided or where the person meets the ones that they need to meet in order to get free from the shackles of illusion and duty are the ones that have some chance of granting XP if not straight up wisdom because let's face it, we all have issues that need unstucking, but those aren't likely to reveal anything about the great beyond.

A great thing that I liked to do with atheist characters (not necesarily players) in settings with gods was that, if they could remember anything about the "other side" instead of getting stuck in a lame wall or walking endlessly through the land of shadows (still possible tho) was themselves swimming amongst the stars until some unspeakable horror came from all directions at one with the intention of devouring them.

cont'd from
>>52886655
The trick is, the monster itself was more like the edge of space, as if it was conscious, and nothingness devoured them from outside as well as from within, which was described with a sense of urgency and vertigo, like -yeah you know that even the "gods" have limits, that they're not infinite, that they depend on mortal worship and shit, but that insight drives you away from all of them, and in turn, makes you entirely conscious of the ultimate truth that every soul, even that of the universe will somehow face its own extintion. The gods sometimes rescue them from this anguish (unless you're dealing with asshole gods, which may even forge the souls into shit) and postpones it even starting the cycle anew (while the experiences mostly stay with the chosen god and expand their realm), but even they can die, and this is something that they know well. The monster represented the emptyness before birth, and the "Silence", the true name I gave to it when our resident psy-wizard tried to learn its true name, which he managed at the cost of even more XP and going insane for quite a while.

Rescued from this fate or not, the trauma, the willingness to seal it all away might have been the biggest reason for the XP and memory loss experienced. The mind defends itself from that memory, the brain resets and goes on as if nothing had happened.

Basically because of that element of angst players started to really feel and fear the death of their characters and paradoxically live life better than before, being much more conscious about things like the life of NPCs and the like.

I also was going to DM for them once more after the wizard started to brew a plan of what to do with this entity's true name and shit (Obviously planning to thwart his plans because cosmic constants), but I wasn't able to continue playing with them because IRL stuff.

>>52881684
I can offer my setting.

Reincarnation is your soul being reborn into a new self. Powerful souls may be divided and thus reborn in more than a new self. If that wasn't the case, Creation would have the same population as it did in the beginning. In Crunch, this is represented by a character losing a level each year he spends dead. His soul is being recycled into many new ones. So a 6th level PC can be revived until the 7th year, when there is nothing more to revive.

Reviving is when your present self dies and is brought back. This either requires much sacrifice to the gods and/or lots of people wishing you back, showing that your present self is more desired now than your reincarnation(s) would be. The alternative is traveling into the Ley Lines and rescuing the dead one's soul, with all the peril that such a journey implies.