I'm fairly new, played for about 2 years and just started DMing a PbP 5e game. My year of playing was mostly one campaign that I went through a few characters. I like building new characters so I never knew people could get really attached to characters...until recently in my first DMed game.

We had 6 players. Running the LMoP module. At level 1 had a character die in the initial cave encounter. Like die die, no one stabilized him and he failed his death saves. I wanted to keep him in the game, as he was one of two experienced players, but I didn't want him to have to roll up a new character. Through some blood magic I was going to have him reincarnated...into a body similar to whomever stepped up to sacrifice blood to him. He was a human variant wizard, his savior turned out to be a halfling. His soul was willing to return until he figured out he would return in a halfling body. I even tried explaining that he would retain all of his stats, traits and his variant feat along with getting the halfling racial traits. He said (preface this with he was speaking about the character, not himself) "Yeah no I'll commit suicide. Lol Just let the character be dead and say it failed. I'm not interested in playing that." He followed up with "...the idea you had is creative and interesting. I'm just not interested in playing a character not as designed.". So I guess some people are just hard set on characters have to be the way they made them and only that way. Personally, I don't understand that kind of attachment, especially to a level 1 character. But oh well, I'm not going to force someone to play something they don't want to. I swung it into a way to bring in a new player of death domain cleric as the Phandalin undertaker as she provided somewhere to bury the body. Hopefully he will decide to play again and bring in a new character later, I hope I didn't run him off with my "style" of DMing.

Did I commit a sin here? Should I let it go or should I try to talk to him and get him back in the game with a new character? I feel bad, probably feel worse because it's my first game and my first PC kill. IDK, I just feel horrible. Any advice?

To be honest, I wouldn't worry about it. His character is only dead in your world and he is probably already playing him somewhere else.

Unfortunately not. This is an IRL friend. We do PbP game because we all work and have different schedules. We can jump in and post whenever we have a free moment. He DM's the in person games that are after SCA practice every now and then. (Maybe 1 game a month if we are lucky). Which also makes me feel even worse because I know how much fun it is for a DM to get to play.

I don't think you made a mistake offering to let this character continue.  But you have to remember that players like to make the decisions that impact their characters, and appearance can be a big factor for some players.  Players have a mental image of their player so a burly barbarian is very intimidating, a rogue is like the character in assassins creed, and a wizard might be like Merlin.  The player is enjoying playing the character they imagined.  Now some players may have been fine with it but some are not going to be.  If my current Bard died and my DM offered to let him be reincarnated as a dwarf I would have wondered why was I being told it is dwarf or nothing?  I was enjoying playing the charismatic half-elf.

I guess I would ask him what he wanted to do.  Does he wish to create a new character that is almost a bookend match to his former character, or does he want to start over?  It's all supposed to be fun so let him have his fun.  I hope it is not going to impact your fun either way.

I probably wouldn't have taken the halfling deal either, to be honest. When I make up a character, I make it up as a whole character, not as component parts of some min-maxed "composite Avenger." If I picked variant human, it was for a reason, and the stats had little, if anything, to do with that. I mean after all, what if you'd said, "You can come back, but as the opposite sex." Would you be surprised if someone who had signed up to play a male character didn't want to suddenly play a female, or vice versa?

It's not that there is anything wrong with halflings or female characters, but if I signed up to play a male human and that is my character concept, and all my imagination of that character is based on male human, making it a halfling or a woman would not interest me. I might very well make up a new character who is a female halfling to boot, but that would be its own concept, and not something that was hodge-podged into the character by someone else.

I'm 100% in agreement with BioWizard here.

For many Players who are embracing the Story/Character style of play, Characters aren't just interchangeable avatars in a game. They're a fully realized person, who is an experiment in a fictional type, and it's exploring that fictional type that's interesting to them. If that type changes, it's not the same to them. Personally, I like your Players attitude a lot.

For many DMs - especially newer ones - it's sometime hard to let the Characters fail, or die. It's something you need to get used to. Without the possibility of failure or consequences, victory loses a lot of it's impact as well. The sweet spot for us is when the Party has been subject to sudden death the whole time, but is still all alive, stressed, bloodied, beaten up, but triumphant. We want them to win, but we want them to feel like they had to work damn hard to do it, so they feel like they really accomplished something significant.

You seem worried that he won't want to continue in the game. So be proactive and ask. Ask him what he wants to play next, and offer to figure out a way to work his new Character into the Adventure.

It really all depends on the player. I would have possibly taken the deal just to roleplay the transition into a new body. But I am not the average player, I’m a weirdo. Dying and coming back in a different body would not be the strangest thing that has ever happened to one of my characters. But again, I would probably be more of the exception than the norm.

Quote from IamSposta >>

It really all depends on the player. I would have possibly taken the deal just to roleplay the transition into a new body. But I am not the average player, I’m a weirdo. Dying and coming back in a different body would not be the strangest thing that has ever happened to one of my characters. But again, I would probably be more of the exception than the norm.

I might possibly do so as well. It depends on how attached I am to the concept.

But most of the time I have a fairly specific concept in mind and I want every single detail of the character design to be exactly a certain way. One of the reasons I am highly frustrated by the old MMO design that your appearance is tied to the quality of your gear. So if you want that awesome +3 plate, that is butt-ugly, you're going to have to walk around being butt-ugly, even though the cool looking chain is more your visual style. That annoys me. Some games do allow you to have a separate appearance from your gear but for years that was not the case. Heck in SWTOR, I was driven bananas that almost every Jedi robe that had the stats I needed also had a hood that you could not optionally turn off or "take down," so my character HAD to wear a hood even in the middle of combat while acrobatic flipping all over the blasted battlefield (which Jedi in the movies do not do!).

If I'm gonna be annoyed at things like hoods.. you can be sure I will not be happy to have my whole race changed into something I didn't want.

Again... most of the time. There may be cases in which I am not that attached and would find the RP of switching races a fun challenge. But most of the time... no.

Quote from BioWizard >>

One of the reasons I am highly frustrated by the old MMO design that your appearance is tied to the quality of your gear. So if you want that awesome +3 plate, that is butt-ugly, you're going to have to walk around being butt-ugly, even though the cool looking chain is more your visual style. That annoys me. Some games do allow you to have a separate appearance from your gear but for years that was not the case.

 I always hated that too. But for some reason D&D is different for me. It probably has something to do with how I was introduced to the game back in the day when the vast majority of PCs died before 3rd level. I guess I just kinda expect to start with a concept and then have the character develop through the campaign. I never expect my characters to do or be exactly what I want past Session 0.

I expect them to develop too. But I don't expect them to become another race, or class.

My point was that if someone is bothered by the little things like how the clothing looks, that person will be massively bothered by having the character's race change.

Quote from BioWizard >>

One of the reasons I am highly frustrated by the old MMO design that your appearance is tied to the quality of your gear. So if you want that awesome +3 plate, that is butt-ugly, you're going to have to walk around being butt-ugly, even though the cool looking chain is more your visual style.

 You mean you don't want the epic-tier level 150+ artifact plate armor that's vomiting acid from the shoulderguards, BioWizard?

In seriousness, and to the OP, you didn't do anything wrong.  When a character dies early on there's not a whole lot you can do without breaking the seriousness of the campaign most of the time.  You made an effort to bring the character back in a way that wouldn't trivialize death, and he decided it wasn't for him.  There's no one at fault here.

I would do what you were thinking of doing and approach him to see if there's any way he would still be interested in playing in your campaign, either with a fresh character or work to see if there's some other way to bring the old character back that makes narrative sense but still leaves them intact; hopefully he'll still be interested, and I think the fact you're showing that you want to have him will be encouraging, but if he decides against it then don't beat yourself up.  Again, these things happen, and nobody here did anything wrong.