The Inability to Tamper with Mortality

 

Dark Soul, the Zaharan trait that imposes a -1 penalty per level on being raised is a custom drawback worth 1 power.

What's the value of a complete inability to be raised at all (given the restoration of life is possible in a given game world?)

I think making it more than 2 custom powers is risky.  I suspect the reason things stop at -1 for 1 custom power is because after a certain point any additional negatives are meaningless.  In particular, consider the bizarre situation where you take a -5 to raise rolls and spend one of your custom powers on the barbarian's hardiness to reduce the chance you die in the first place.

I'd agree, in general. I'm the one in charge of what anybody gets for it, since it'd be as part of a racial build, so there's some checks on what can ultimately happen.

What I don't have developed yet and should do is what the Dark Soul penalty means in the long-term - at what point does the penalty move from "disadvatageous" to "improbable" as far as getting raised goes. Worst case you're looking at around a -11 for a 14th level character, being acted upon by a 7th level cleric in their temple, for a *maximum best* roll of 10, ignoring WIS bonus. But that's a character who has been experienced in the fullest - I'm more concerned about the mid-levels.

It's a wierder situation than the raw numbers. There's a vast gulf of difference between it being hard to be raised (via inherited penalty, or just making Raise Dead higher level, or whatever) and not being able to be raised at all - espc. when it's applied selectively (albeit at the player's choice) Aside from fallbacks to reserve XP or the like, or Judge fiat, it just seems like a softer problem than power tradeoffs, given the array of fickle fates available.

Eyeballing it though, taking Dark Soul "twice" is a -2 penalty per level, which at least kinda feels like it's closer to impossible in the mid-levels anyway, so I may just punt. 1.5 would probably be a better decision in a published product, as it severely limits one's tradeoff options.