I’ve been thinking about how you can make a immortality feat balanced. I don’t personalty find the feat appealing but I know that some other RPGs has a system like it, like Mutants and Masterminds and i thought that it maybe could work for Open Legend.
I thought i could be something like this
Immortality Cost 6
Your character can not die, no matter what happens to it. When you die your total exp you’ve gained get’s halved (rounded down) and your level will be adjusted accordingly.
If you get decapitated you’ll be just a head rolling around without it’s body. If you fall into a pool of lava you’ll be a sentient pile of ash and you attribute points and feats need to be adjusted in according to you new form. In these cases it’s up to the player or GM to decide if your character has outstayed it’s usefulness.
Without healing of your dead body, It will always take two days to resurrect. When someone else heals your body, the points of health your character should receive instead removes that many hours of the Resurrection timer to a minimum of 8 hours.
For a PC I would bring closer in to line of a Revenant from 5e. So you wouldn’t ever be a head rolling around or loose levels but you would return back to where you died 48 hours later. You are immortal until you are able to complete a specific task.
With extremely weird (from a rules perspective) effects like this I’d always suggest not having it be a feat. If you want something like this for narrative reasons then you can grant it as a GM, if for example it’s just part of how your world works, Dark Souls style.
The reason I say to not have it be a feat is that if you open it up to all players then it either becomes something everyone wants (at which point you may as well have just given it to everyone anyway) or it becomes a bad investment of feat points (making the one or two players who get it feel like they’ve wasted their levels).
From a gameplay perspective, I don’t like the “losing xp” part of it. If a character has this feat and dies once, they’re more likely to die a second time because they’re lower level than the rest of the party, which then makes them more likely to die a third time and so on. It also requires players to spend a lot of time choosing what attribute points and feats they lose. All in all, it just seems like it would feel bad for the players; if I was a level 6 player that had this feat and died, I’d be 3 levels below the rest of my party and I’d strongly consider just making a new character.
For a suggested improvement, taking all that into account:
For the duration of this campaign, no player character can die. If your body gets destroyed, you live on in what’s left of the body until your full body resurrects, 48 hours later. Once per day another character can attempt to heal you, removing hours from the resurrection timer equal to the healing rolled.
just tell your story and let it play out. If the boss is immortal in some way, then so be it. Don’t need to create a mechanic for it, just make it happen. Understand how it works and if your players cut off his head put it on their mantle and you never get to use it, great! It’s not your story, it’s a shared experience.
As a player, I would love for my character to not be able to die. I feel that it might take some of the excitement out of combat if there is no risk other than losing xp. Maybe get other characters involved and their is a set ritual that has to be performed for the return for players or a specific place they need to be buried (like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the one guy has to be buried in Africa, I think?) I think making it slight more difficult and including other players in the process somehow would be rewarding for everyone and promote teamwork. Maybe make it a taboo in your world as well or a dirty secret and have a Highlander like weakness that once they figure out you are an immortal everyone hunts you and knows how to kill you? These are just my thoughts and suggestions.
While I can see a ruling like this for things like vampires (when “Dead” really just in a sort of sleep - ie when staked Only really die in sunlight/fire typically)
Just make it so it’s a storytelling cost to balance the immortality, whether it’s disadvantage against banes or having them trigger at times other players might be fine ^^"