Monte on Life and Death (And Resurrection)

[Grazzt]

Here is Monte Cook's latest Blog about Resurrection spells

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Have any of you actually used a resurrection/raise dead type spell as written?

We did back in the 1e days and even had a PC fail his Res Survival roll (rolled 100 and needed like 95 or less or something). We've since modified the spell (ritual now, very costly, etc.). Death in our game is "real", not uncommon, and hard to come back from.

 

[TwinBahamut]

You really need to look beyond "how expensive do we make this spell?" in order to find actual solutions to these problems. The biggest problem with the Raise Dead spell that Mr. Cook doesn't even consider changing is the simple fact that it completely undoes death.

I think I've mentioned this before, but the reasons people want to have raise dead spells and the sources of campaign problems for raise dead spells are two separate issues. People like raising the dead because it lets them to continue playing with a character who died. People dislike raise dead spells because they undo the story aspects of death. The simple solution is to both let the character come back but not undo the story aspects of death. In other words, a character who was raised from the dead is still, in some sense, dead.

Raise Dead spells should grant a temporary reprieve from death and are ultimately more akin to necromancy, rather than "curing" death and being equivalent to healing magic. A character who died once is doomed to return to death. They become detached from the reality of the living. After the campaign is done, they will simply return to the land of the dead, rather than live a long full life and retire happily like the party members who didn't die will. It doesn't change many gameplay mechanics, but it makes the story work a lot better.

 

[Mattachine]

Will "rare and costly" be like it's been in editions 1-4? In other words, not very rare or costly once the PCs are past a certain level. . .

 

[Anguirus]

I'm giggling like a schoolgirl over here that a D&D game designer actually used the word and concept "resuscitation."

Because DUH. We know that there can be a vast gulf between dead for five minutes, dead for an hour, and dead for a day. Our own medical technology recognizes that these are distinct states as far as how much hope they offer for recovery. In the real world this is because of the physical nature of the brain. In D&D that can be the time it takes for you to get to the light at the end of the tunnel.

There's already the raise dead - resurrection - true resurrection tiered revival spells. What if raise dead only worked for five minutes, or an hour?

Or here's a thought, what if ANY cure spell could bring back someone who has "merely" stopped breathing for a few minutes, since this magic can already heal any and all life-threatening physical injury. But if you wait any substantial amount of time (a DM can calibrate this, could be as little as one round, or could be a few minutes) they are dead-dead and it's time to storm the gates of Hell.

 

[Mark CMG]

Make it a DM option and, even so, rare and costly to bring someone back from the dead.

 

[P1NBACK]

I really like how the guys who wrote Adventurer Conqueror King System handled this.

When you go to 0 hp, you have a chance of being alive. You roll a Mortal Wounds check. The check is modified by how many HP you were under, your Con modifier, etc. A low roll meant, yup, you were dead. A higher roll meant you might be alive but with permanent wounds (a bum leg, or blinded eye). A really high roll meant you are fine, with only temporary side-effects.

When you die, you can be raised from the dead, but you must roll on a similar table called "Tampering with Mortality". This table works in much the same way. We had a character in our campaign die and was later raised from the dead, but his side-effect was that undead could detect him from a certain distance. He basically was a walking bug zapper for undead.

Anyways, I like the idea of consequences for failure. And, not saying it has to be death (like, dead dead), but that should be an option and if you're opening up rules for raising the dead and all that, there should be other consequences.

 

[Sunseeker]

I think once we used resurrection to revive an NPC that the DM had wanted to die as a plot device. We did this two or three times until something happened that destroyed the body, thus preventing resurrection(at our power level). It was highly entertaining.

So in all my games, only used it in one game.

So that's how I think it should be, being able to revive a "newly dead" person should be possible by most magic users, good old "shock 'em back to life" idea. But actual resurrection of a dead person should only be available at high levels and in the possession of very powerful types.

 

[Boarstorm]

This is the concept I've been toying with for my next campaign:

Raise Dead works. The soul is returned to the body, somewhat resentful of its final reward being delayed. It wants nothing more than to return to the afterlife... but as with any summoning, it is compelled to complete one task specified at the time of the resurrection (generally -- complete the current adventure). If the character's body dies again before completing this task, the soul is destroyed forever -- meaning that to raise an ally is never to be undertaken lightly.

This offers several interesting possibilities. It allows the player of the dead character to essentially "finish out" the adventure, or, alternately, to set up a heroic sacrifice on his own terms -- not just because the Orc crit and rolled max damage with his greataxe. Best of all, in my eyes, character death is still meaningful because even though it can be held at bay temporarily, it cannot be staved off forever.

This also has the benefit of explaining why nobles and such don't have high level clerics on retainer.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I also voted for 'no resurrection'.

Reason being that I just find it to be kinda of a pointless exercise. We go through all this effort and argumentation here on the boards to make sure combat is "challenging", and why hit point loss should be "wounds" or "not wounds", and because we want combat to have "consequences"... but yet we then completely negate all that effort by having Raise Dead.

If all you lose by "dying" in combat is a few hours in the day and a few thousand in gold when your party schleps the corpse back to town for the village priest to say a few words over the body... then all that effort to make combat "realistic" and have "verisimilitude" seems completely pointless to me. If we really want combat to have consequences... then there should be NO 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card. If you die... you die.

And if we're not willing to do that... then let's stop going through with the constant charade of saying PCs HAVE to die to have combat have any meaning. Cause it doesn't. When you reach -10 or fail three Death Saves... you're not dead... you're out of combat. And the consequence of that comes down to what serves the story best after that point... whether the character is actually truly dead, or just unconscious, crippled, captured, severely injured etc. etc. And we can then stop arguing about hit points, healing surges, magical and non-magical healing etc. etc. because they become nothing more than a metagame indicator of when the player doesn't get to participate in the combat anymore. No more, and no less.

 

[P1NBACK]

I also voted for 'no resurrection'.

Reason being that I just find it to be kinda of a pointless exercise. We go through all this effort and argumentation here on the boards to make sure combat is "challenging", and why hit point loss should be "wounds" or "not wounds", and because we want combat to have "consequences"... but yet we then completely negate all that effort by having Raise Dead.

I think you missed my post, where I explicitly point out a game that uses a middle-ground with consequences for death, and yet still uses Raise Dead.

You proclaiming there is no middle-ground, is kind of weak sauce.