5E Hardcore- Using the Candle

#1

  1. When the players almost die and they use the candle to go back to the save point. How do you handle traps/encounters that they have to replay. Like if its a trap they have to perceive, would you give em like advantage on the checks to see if they notice the trap again or is it just like well since they know that a trap is there you just assume they skip it/disarm it?

  2. If they use it and then go on to an area where they had a random encounter, do you use the same encounter or reroll and they could get the same one or maybe have a different one?

#2

I’d treat the Candle’s effects as local to the players. They go back, but the world is otherwise unaffected. As such, they know what they know what they knew, and if they previously encountered a trap they’d remember it was there.

A random encounter in a location wouldn’t repeat at that location unless there was some specific triggering event (something more than just “the book or module says to roll for a random encounter here”). The aftermath of their first encounter, if any, would still be there.

I could also see it as the characters “reset” and forget all that they’d encountered, but that’s a little harder for the players to maintain. If you did this, I’d allow EASY rolls on that trap perception and the like, explaining it in the fiction as “their souls feel something stirring” or similar.

#3

I’d play it the same way Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne does : it resets and plays out the exact same way it did before. Sure, the players have extra meta information now, but so is rewinding time to prevent someone from dying.