Dungeon Master: No or Limited Death

Having talked about the various ways to handle death in role-playing games (and specifically D&D 5^th edition), I think it's the perfect time to talk about how to handle campaigns without player character death at all (or at least, player character death in the traditional sense) or with restricted character death. Is this heresy? Yes, but just stay with me for a little bit.

No Death Doesn't Mean No Consequences

Just because you don't have death for player characters doesn't mean there can't be consequences. If we take for example a campaign where the players are gods and when they die they just create a new avatar, you can still impose consequences on the players for losing an avatar. Maybe they will be weaker after wards. Maybe they will have 2d4 weeks of time missing. Also, a campaign without player character death doesn't necessarily mean there can't be a total party kill (if everyone dies, everyone dies or a bigger penalty is given).

Why Would You?

There can be many different reasons to motivate the decision to remove player character death. If you don't allow a permanent character death but do allow a temporary death, you can save a lot of time and frustration from your players when they die horrible painful deaths in a campaign whose difficulty is cranked to 11+. It also allows you to emphasize different aspects of the campaign. Instead of focusing on staying alive and accomplishing something, the players can be fully focused on accomplishing an objective. While this may not sound that impressive at first glance, it allows a whole slew of suicidal tactics that won't be punished (normally, suicidal tactics are punished by the game rules) as well as much less lenient time constraints (if the whole party dies, it may take 7 days for them to get new bodies by which time the big bad has won and the players will need to do damage control) that may force players to fight on without rest. 

It's Hard to Get Right

I'm not going to lie; getting a campaign that doesn't have player death isn't easy. It should make sense in the game world. The players themselves should be fine with it as well. If you still have hit points, they should mean something (in the god example, it's the hit points of the body and not the god). It basically has to be tailor fit for the situation. It should not wear out its welcome and it should mean something.

No Death Examples

• Epic eternal fight between life (living people) and death (undead army of evil). Naturally, you got some weird turn coats. Necromantic energy is leaking out of the ground itself, reanimating the dead unless it can be resealed. Dead characters will be revived as they were in life but upon completing their quest, with no more necromantic energy to sustain them, the player characters who died during the campaign will die with the rest of the undead.
  Note: Dying as an undead means you will be a corpse until you reanimate some time later (maybe 2d6?).
• The characters are gods. Their avatars can be destroyed but doing so does not kill their godly soul. They can regain a body 2d6 days later a certain number of times (chosen by DM, could also use hit die). After regaining a body too many times, they must wait 2d6 years (or decades) to gain a new body. For this to work, the story should span an extremely long time.
• * Includes above variants. Both players and villains cannot be permanently killed. They are bound by certain rules. Their success or failure is determined by how they influence the world itself.
• Give the players an artifact or multiple artifacts that allows them to revive the dead. This takes away player character death but doesn't remove a total party kill (if there is no-one left alive to use the artifact, they are dead).
• Give each player a certain number of free deaths (represents favours from the god of death). Instead of dying when meeting the conditions for death, they regain all hit points and lose all conditions (unconscious players can also spend a favour, though you can do this by points and rule that this kind of favour costs half as much as revival from the dead).
• Make all the characters liches.
• Make all the characters revenants, having to succeed on their revenge on the same guy before their time runs out.

Note: Techniques above can be used for the villain instead, in order to discourage head to head confrontations unless necessary. Can also use a lich instead.