About Death and Resurrection

[Raith5]

This new philosophy looks good. But the biggest cost in 3rd ed was not the gold but the lost XP (from missing out on XP from the point from which a PC dies).

I like pushing the raise dead spells up quite a few levels but I hope in 4th ed there are raising spells that have to be cast within a few rounds or minutes from death. There was one such spell in one of the splatbooks i think. This is more dramatic that carting a dead body around until the cleric can be bothered to memorise raise dead.

 

[Reynard]

I like pushing the raise dead spells up quite a few levels but I hope in 4th ed there are raising spells that have to be cast within a few rounds or minutes from death. There was one such spell in one of the splatbooks i think. This is more dramatic that carting a dead body around until the cleric can be bothered to memorise raise dead.

At least at paragaon levels, I would guess PCs won't have access to it at all, given the wording. PC raise-dead, though, sure smacks of "speed bump".

 

[kennew142]

This one doesn't excite me in the least...I like the idea of gods interfering in peoples' lives a la Xena-Hercules. But, trivially easy to play either way if so desired.

Everyone has their own style. In my own campaigns, I prefer PCs to never have any contact with a god, nor with anyone else who's ever had contact with a god. I don't like them.

I also disagree with the statement in W+M that NPC's good or evil don't come back to life unless the DM has a good reason. I say they should come back to life if it makes sense in character that they would do so...in other words, if the opportunity, wealth, and time allows and the desire to come back is there, then back they come. Again, trivially easy to do one's own thing here.

Lanefan

Since only the DM knows what constitutes a good reason ....

Seriously, I dislike the concept of people dying and coming back so easily. In my last homebrew I made Raise Dead 7th level and Resurrection 9th. In all my years of playing D&D, I have never had a character brought back from the dead. To me, it's really cheesy. That's why I'm glad to see this change in philosophy.

 

[Reynard]

Everyone has their own style. In my own campaigns, I prefer PCs to never have any contact with a god, nor with anyone else who's ever had contact with a god. I don't like them.

I thought i ahd read somehwere that gods were to be considered appropriate Epic tier enemies. That would suggest "contact" I think.

 

[Thundershield]

Well, not like death is meaningless even at Epic Tier. If the entire party dies in the Lair of Dreadful Horror or whatever, it's not really a "speed bump" anymore. Then it's game over. Hardly meaningless.

Sure, if you die at Heroic Tier, that's probably the end of that character since you'd need more resources than even a full party can boast at that point, although a DM is always free to intervene.

Dying at Paragon Tier will probably mean your allies will have to put some serious effort into getting their lost comrade back, which could take the form of a quest (where the dead character's player then can play an supporting character or maybe the church's "Witness Bearer" for the quest), but at that point it is possible.

At Epic Tier, the characters are icons of legend, and life and death are trivial matters to them as long as at least one of them still stands. By calling upon their deity's power or weaving awesomely powerful magic, they can return life to their fallen allies on a whim.

At any rate, you decide what kind of campaign you want to run. If you don't want to see your players scoff at dragons and challenge the gods, don't go Epic. If you don't want them to waddle around saving Farmer Kent's lost pigs, don't play Heroic. It's really quite simple now.

 

[kennew142]

I thought i ahd read somehwere that gods were to be considered appropriate Epic tier enemies. That would suggest "contact" I think.

Only if gods exist in the campaign. W&M states: "Gods are largely distant and detached from the world (with some exceptions, particularly evil gods). Most don't take an active part in worldly affairs, but they have exarchs and angels who act on their behalf."

They go on to state that gods can be encountered, fought and killed. But the general idea was to make the gods remote. In my homebrew, I just leave out everything above exarchs and angels. Even they don't know the true nature of the divine.

Making the gods remote, makes it easier to rule them out. Thus the goodness IMO.

 

[Dragonblade]

The problem with ease of raise dead availability in prior editions was that it was sort of a balance againt pervasive save or die effects at high level. Without save or die anymore, I suspect that DMs can remove raise dead magic even from epic levels with little effect on mechanical game play.

 

[marune]

I thought i ahd read somehwere that gods were to be considered appropriate Epic tier enemies. That would suggest "contact" I think.

It was said that fighting a God would be the finale of a campaign, and a quest about finding the right artifacts and/or circumstances to do it, not the average encounter at level 30.

 

[Lanefan]

The problem with ease of raise dead availability in prior editions was that it was sort of a balance againt pervasive save or die effects at high level. Without save or die anymore, I suspect that DMs can remove raise dead magic even from epic levels with little effect on mechanical game play.

Oh, I don't know about that.

Most of the deaths in my games come via straight-up damage, of one sort of another. Removing revival effects would be overkill for just balancing removal of save-or-die, were I ever to do such; the same number of characters would still get conventionally squashed, except only once each; and the only net effect would be my log of characters played would have a lot more names in it.

Lanefan

 

[Cadfan]

I hate to rain on people's parade, but I don't think that quote can be taken to mean that a rules based prohibition exists on raising heroic tier characters. It is an informal statement describing the norms of the game. It could just as easily mean that the spell "raise dead" isn't available until the paragon tier, and that the components necessary to cast it are not intended to be available to non paragon level characters.

If you're going to conclude that this statement means that a rules based prohibition exists on being raised in the heroic tier, you might as well also conclude that characters automatically raise themselves in the epic tier. Both statements are equally justified by mechanically parsing the informal language. They're probably also both wrong.