Level Drain

Over at Pits Perilous, there's a great post about using the Holmes Blue Book as a complete game. This is actually a follow-up to and expansion of an older post on the same topic. I highly recommend reading both posts, as well as this thread, where Geoffrey McKinney makes a similar proposal (though its specifics naturally differ). There's a great deal of food for thought in all of these, even if you're not sold on the idea of limiting the game to levels 1 through 3.

A good case in point is the rule regarding death, which read:

Should a character die, whether in combat or similar misfortune, they fall unconscious, losing one level.  If recovered by their friends (within a reasonable amount of time), they awaken with 0 HP, but very much alive, and may be further healed, although never beyond what their new level allows.  First-level characters aren't so lucky and die, an all-too common fate, noting that lost levels may only be recovered through further adventures.

I find myself intrigued by this, since the matter of levels and level drain have long been matters of debate among players of D&D (and, sometimes, players of other games as well). I've never really had a problem with level drain in principle, which I think puts me at odds with many of my fellows. As an attack, it's appropriately dangerous and makes high-level undead genuinely frightening. To the extent that I have any issues with level drain, it's that it breaks the imaginative frame of the game by focusing too much on game mechanics. A level, after all, isn't something that actually exists in the game's setting. Characters and NPCs don't talk about having levels; they're a convenient mechanical way of representing experience, ability, and power, but don't really have an independent existence. Given that, what then is level drain supposed to do to a character?

One of the things that makes Empire of the Petal Throne so interesting as a game text is the way that M.A.R. Barker adapted OD&D's rules to his setting. For example, there's a spell in EPT called petrifaction, which, as you might imagine, turns its target to stone. What's interesting about the spell is that its primary effect is automatic, but a saving throw is still permitted to determine whether the target also loses one hit die in addition to being turned to stone. This actually came up in my House of Worms campaign, where one of the characters – Znayáshu – was turned to stone by a strange sorcerer they encountered beneath the Naqsá city-state of Miktatáin. Znayáshu was eventually restored to flesh, but he lost a hit die and the hit points that came from it. This is a permanent loss, meaning that, even after Znayáshu gains a new level, he will still be down one hit die from where he should be.

After reading the blog post above, I began to wonder if something similar could be used in the case of level drain. Rather than inexplicably (from an in-game perspective) sapping a character of experience points, perhaps drain simply steals hit dice, which levels the character permanently weakened, unless a spell like restoration is restored. That makes more sense from the perspective of the game world, with the undead employing the literal touch of the grave to enervate the target. It's a serious disability that has lasting consequences but not one that strips the character of level-based skills and abilities that, to my mind anyway, shouldn't evaporate simply because an undead being has touched you. 

It's not a pressing question for me right now, since I'm not playing D&D, though there will be undead in Urheim that have traditionally had level drain. My mind isn't made up one way or the other. All I know for certain is that I don't want to abandon level drain without finding a different approach that's just as fear-inducing.