On Sunday morning, one of my D&D groups assaulted a fortress full of ogres. It didn’t go so well, and one of them ended up dying, but I used an NPC ally of theirs to bring them back to life. I have some reservations about this all the way through.

To start with, it’s possible that I designed the encounters to be too difficult. Let’s just get that admission out there right now, that this could be the problem.

Two of the five PCs separated from the rest of the party, as well as from their lizardfolk NPC allies, on a somewhat half-baked scheme to draw some of the ogres out of the keep. I am a little surprised, in retrospect, since one of these two players is well aware of the appropriately popular advice for D&D, “Never split the party.” To make matters worse, they went to the opposite side of the keep from where their friends were. When their plan to draw out some of the ogres instead drew out some very swift-moving manticores, it took a very long time for their friends to join in on the fight. This was definitely a tactical blunder, and perhaps that falls on their shoulders pretty squarely, but it also felt a little rushed, and the plan was uncertain, and it turned out not everyone was very clear on what was going on. When players are unclear about what’s happening—not just what’s going to happen, but actually currently happening—I will usually put some of that blame on myself.

While two of the four manticores fought the rest of the party, the other two manticores got the better of the two separated PCs, and one of those, after rolling a 1 on a death saving throw, died. A little bit of tough luck, but I’m not sure he would have survived anyway if he had just rolled a regular failure (anything 2 through 9 on a 20-sided die). Still, it was a bit sudden and unexpected. That part wasn’t anyone’s fault, but it wasn’t how I imagined a very colorful member of the party going out. Maybe I just need to be more comfortable with this as a DM, that sometimes glorious and beloved characters meet their demise in ways that are memorable only because the character is then so missed.

The party eventually killed the manticores, as well as the ogre and troglodytes manning a ballista on top of a tower, and carried the body of their friend back to safety. From there, one of them remembered that they had given one of their sending stones (a magical item allowing two characters to send messages to each other across any distance, or even usually across planes of existence) to an angel who was guiding and, to a limited extent, aiding the party, and used their sending stone to send a message asking if she could bring him back to life.

I faced a critical fork in the road. Do I bring this character back to life, thus mitigating or eliminating the consequences of the risk that the players took? Or do I let him die and let the emotional toll be taken?

The characters had decided to explore a potentially viable option to bring back their friend, so I wasn’t just looking for ways to save this character’s life when I turned to the Monster Manual. I hadn’t created or chosen any stats for this angel NPC (which wasn’t exactly an “angel,” or at least I hadn’t used that word at any point) that was helping the PCs, so I looked in the entry for angels in the Monster Manual. Sure enough, all angels contained in those pages could cast raise dead once a day, and while the spell usually costs 1000 gold pieces to cast, for angels it doesn’t cost anything.

In some ways, this made the decision even harder, because if you know that you can die once a day and be brought back to life by your sugar-momma, for free, what’s really a risk anymore? But the players had invested a resource, their sending stones, into this ally, and I should allow them to feel that there is a payoff when they cash in on that investment.

I decided that the angel should bring him back to life, with the caveat from her that this was a one-time boon, and the next time they sought her aid, it would cost them. Maybe that cost will just be the 1000 gold pieces that the spell normally costs to cast, or maybe she’ll demand a tribute in the form of one or more magic items. I haven’t decided.

Did I make the right choice? I can only wait and see how my players react to this moving forward.