OD&D Level drain recovery houserule

[cavalier973]

Throwing an idea for level recovery if a PC has been level drained.

Add one to every level that has been drained, and treat it as a multiplier for XP gained until the PC is back at the pre-drain level.

For example: a 5th level fighter is drained three levels during a fight with a wight. The fighter’s effective level is 2, now, or three levels below the one prior to the wight fight. Add one to that number to get four. The fighter earns four times the XP until reaching third level, then earns three times the XP until fourth level, then two times XP to fifth level.

 

[Jmarso]

Why?

Let 'em slog it back the hard way. It makes that Wight an enemy to be feared, and maybe dealt with a little more carefully. Or avoided.

I hate it when DM's nerf opponents or their effects. Give monsters their teeth, and let the players be afraid. It makes for better games, no matter the sting when something bad happens. It makes the victories far sweeter.

 

[Yora]

Is OD&D different from other TSR editions in how XP requirements increase?
Because the way it is in AD&D and BECMI, XP requirements per level generally double with each level. It isn't even slogging it back the hard way. If a drained character stick around with the same party and manages to survive an adventure or two tagging along (and being unaffected in non-combat obstacle solving), you're going to gain a lot of levels very fast. You're not going to ever fully catch up again, but even if you get drained down to 1st level, in time you'll be back to just one level behind another character who never got drained at all.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I use a different method. I expanded the efficacy of clerical spells at restoring lost levels (pp 5–6 of my house rules), but at the cost of rendering both the cleric and the healed target bedridden for a number of weeks. Given that my campaigns operate on the "1:1 time" and "PC stable" models, this means that if a character gets level drained and wants to have the lost level restored, that player has to convince the player of a sufficiently leveled cleric to bench both of those PCs for one or more adventures. Seems a reasonable penalty to me.

 

[GreyLord]

I use a different method. I expanded the efficacy of clerical spells at restoring lost levels (pp 5–6 of my house rules), but at the cost of rendering both the cleric and the healed target bedridden for a number of weeks. Given that my campaigns operate on the "1:1 time" and "PC stable" models, this means that if a character gets level drained and wants to have the lost level restored, that player has to convince the player of a sufficiently leveled cleric to bench both of those PCs for one or more adventures. Seems a reasonable penalty to me.

Similar to ideas incorporated during the 2e time period, which I think came under the moniker of Restoration and Greater Restoration. You find great use of it in the CRPGs of the time.

I believe it continued into the 3e period though restoring different things than levels as level-drain was sort of extinguished with that edition.

 

[overgeeked]

I’d prefer to keep it as written, but if you want to make it easier to recover from, make it into something fixed (like a month or 101 days, etc), or make them perform a grand quest for it. Something that would likely net them enough XP to get back to where they were but also get some cool story out of it, too.

 

[cavalier973]

In the RC, the 7th level clerical spell “Restore” will, well, restore one level that has been lost to a wight, etc. The cleric casting the spell loses a level of experience, but gains it back after resting for a while (two to twenty days). The spell restores only one level, but presumably subsequent castings can restore additional levels, if the target had been drained more than one level.

This is a safe way to regain levels that had been drained.

The narrative reason for my proposed house rule is that the drained character “already knows this stuff” but can’t quite remember it. Like relearning to ride a bike, or program in BASIC. You haven’t done it for a while, but you relearn it more quickly than it took you to learn in the first place.

 

[DarkCrisis]

cleric uses restoration via spells or scrolls or head to the nearest large church and pay a cleric there to fix it

 

[Jack Daniel]

I’d prefer to keep it as written, but if you want to make it easier to recover from, make it into something fixed (like a month or 101 days, etc), or make them perform a grand quest for it. Something that would likely net them enough XP to get back to where they were but also get some cool story out of it, too.

One fun house rule along these lines that you see floating around the blogosphere: you have to kill the very undead that took your levels in order to get them back.

 

[overgeeked]

One fun house rule along these lines that you see floating around the blogosphere: you have to kill the very undead that took your levels in order to get them back.

That’s great. So stealing that.