So, when Misha escapes this ritual, she apparently turns herself into energy and shoots herself at Illoopion. But our DM reasoned that she was weak and couldn't really aim it or control it. So, it did 150 points of radiant damage to everything in a line between her and Illoopion and going out past him for miles. No attack roll, no saving throw, no protection of any kind. Now, people who have played 4e know that 150 points of damage in an attack in an absurd amount of damage in that edition. There are level 36 solo monsters who can't do that much damage. We're level 13. My friend Jim, who is a bit of a rules lawyer points out to the DM that 150 damage is a stupid amount. Our DM points out that my character(an assassin) managed to combine poison, encounter powers, and daily powers to do 100 damage in an attack earlier in the battle and that a GOD should surely do more damage than some assassin. It is followed by a brief discussion, mostly by Jim, about the fact that in 4e, player damage is on a completely different scale than monster damage and that 150 damage kills everyone in the party immediately from full hitpoints and that even some ACTUAL GODS in the monster manual can't do that much damage(with the implication that our DM would know that if he'd actually bothered to read the rules). Meanwhile, it barely scratches Illoopion, who is a solo.
Yikes....
Okay, first, I need to fess up: I just hit the pcs in my game (who are about 20th level) with a 120 point attack during our last game.
The villain in question is a possible end of campaign villain who they provoked into meeting them in battle. She has a
robe of the archmage, which lets her maximize her damage on an arcane attack, and she's from a previous universe (and the days of 1e) so she has a bunch of "archaic" (by which I mean 1e-style) powers.
So, for instance, she has a 20d6
fireball.
Which, admittedly, is above recommended damage even at her level (which is... 33? I think), and the combo is ruthless.
Now, there was an attack roll involved, and half damage on a miss; and my group is six levels higher than yours. Nonetheless, there's a certain level of parallel here, so I have to say, I've done something (a little bit) similar to your dm's 150 points of God damage... so bear that in mind when evaluating my perspective.
(For the record, none of the pcs died, and they pulled out all the stops to make an amazing escape.)
Our DM doesn't care, he says it's the last session of his campaign ever and he said 150 damage and he's sticking with it. It kills 2 party members. One of which is a cleric of Misha. He gets a little annoyed that his GOD would kill him like that. The other one is Jim. The DM re-explains that she couldn't control it because she was so weak(though, obviously, we didn't really know this in character).
A round later, our Warlock runs over to the device and picks up a glowing gem that is sitting on the same pedestal that Misha was hovering over. Our DM takes her into the next room. Then when they come back, he announces that the Warlock has vanished. Then her voice appears in the heads of the dead people's spirits and offers to bring them back to life now that she has the power to do so. Everyone at the table figures out pretty quickly what happened: The device was supposed to transfer a god's powers into someone else. It was almost done and she touched it, so she now had the powers of a god(the Warlock that is).
Apparently, the two dead people who had been sitting there getting a little annoyed out of character that their characters died in one hit with no chance to stop it, both said no. They didn't want to be brought back to life. They said that if she had the powers of Misha now, that she basically was Misha. And Misha just killed them. They weren't accepting any sort of Raise Dead from a god who would be petty enough to kill them. She tried to explain that she wasn't Misha, she was still Meva...our Warlock. They still said no.
Wow, what poor grace. I don't know what kind of relationships their pcs had with the warlock, but it sounds like the players let their personal butthurt get in the way of playing the game.
The DM pointed out to Meva that she WAS a god and didn't have to respect their wishes if she didn't want to. She had the power to bring them back against their will. She said "Fine, I do that. They shouldn't have been killed and I'm going to right that wrong." So, they come back to life.
...snip...
Meanwhile, Jim continues to complain about how he never wanted to be brought back in the first place. He says to me "This is a perfect ending to a perfect campaign"(with heavy sarcasm). He tells me quietly, "You NEVER give a player god like power. It's stupid. I didn't even want to come back. But I was forced to." The player of Meva finally says, "Fine, you don't want to come back to life, you don't have to. I revoke the gift of life and you die again."
Jim sounds more and more like the type of player who drags the game down and makes it less fun for everyone else. I don't know if he's as bad as you make it sound, but if he was in my group, we'd be discussing whether to drop him.
After the game was over, however, Jim continues to complain to me(even after the DM and everyone else went home) about how that was the stupidest game he had ever played in. That our DM didn't know any of the rules and it frustrated him so much. If you bring someone back to life, they have to agree, it says right there in the ritual description for Raise Dead. I pointed out to him that gods technically don't have to cast the ritual that's listed in the book, they can probably make up their own rituals and likely don't have to follow the precise rules in the book. He gets angry and says that's stupid. As a DM, you can't just make up rules as you see fit.
Jim expects a certain style of dming that he wasn't getting. In many, possibly most, dming styles, you certainly
can just make up rules as you see fit, and in some styles, you
must.
You can't just say gods are all powerful. They follow rules as well. There is a monster entry for Bahamut. He doesn't have the ability to invent whatever ritual he wants at will. He has a limited set of powers and he forms the basis of how powerful gods should be. Which our DM would KNOW if he read the book.
The dm is never constrained to follow what's in the book just because it's in the book.
He got super angry and said that we were ruining the fun for him so he didn't care if we enjoyed it or not. That having a DM who didn't follow the rules was the absolute worst thing to happen and the entire campaign was no fun for him.
Okay, this is the crux. If Jim isn't enjoying the game, he needs to stop playing and do something else that's fun for him instead. But this whole "You must cater to my fun requirements!" attitude just screams to drop him from the group before he has another fit and ruins a campaign in the middle of things instead of just throwing a tantrum in the end.
I told him that I wouldn't hesitate to bring people back to life as NPCs after the player refused to allow them to be raised. That, IMO, I can't force a player to continue playing a character they don't want to...but once they give up on that character that they become and NPC and I can do what I want with them. He told me that if I ever did that, he'd quit the campaign immediately and didn't want to discuss it anymore and stormed off(he lives with me) and went to his room.
I disagree with your reasoning. Maybe he's decided that he's happy to be in the afterlife. Why return to a hard life if you feel fulfilled?
Which finally leads me to my questions: Should the DM have the ability to bring people back to life without their permission?
Depends on the campaign. If the "you must be willing" clause is a cosmic absolute, then no, probably not. If it's not absolute enough to apply to the gods, then maybe, depending on the nature of the gods. Or maybe the clause only exists in the raise dead ritual because whoever first invented the ritual was highly ethical, and circumventing the limitation is as simple as researching a new, original, different ritual.
Should the DM be allowed to give infinite power to a player as a plot device for the last hour of a campaign? Should gods be all powerful or are they limited to a few interesting tricks?
The dm can do what he wants, at least in my playstyle. The question to me is really more like, "Is it a good idea to give a pc infinite power for part of a campaign?"
I've done it- the pcs in my old campaign at the time of the apocalypse assembled an artifact that gave them absolute mastery over (when fully assembled) matter, energy, life, dead, time and space. And they still failed to save the world.
So, can the dm do this? Clearly, the answer is yes. Should he? YMMV.
Yeah, he's my friend and lives with me...but he likes to rules lawyer a lot. He argues about strange thing. I've played with him in nearly every group I've played in for 20 years now. I remember one game I ran where I ruled that even if you could breathe water, it didn't let you speak underwater. So, I wouldn't let him use spells with verbal components while underwater. He argued that given the lack of rules saying you CAN'T cast spells underwater, you should be able to. He argued that the default should always be that you are allowed to do something unless the rules forbid it. I told him I understood his point of view, but I was the DM and I was ruling that it didn't work. He then proceeded to argue about it for the next hour or so. He then brought it up again for the next year or so every time he'd get angry at any of my rulings. He'd casually say "Oh, is this another situation like not being able to cast spells underwater where you just change the rules?"
First of all, your ruling exactly matches the rule (obscure though it is) as it was in 2e; there was even a higher-level version of water breathing that would allow you to speak and circumvent the problem! (Cf.
Of Ships and the Sea.)
Overall, Jim sounds like a frankly horrible player. It sounds like he needs to let go of his fixation on how he thinks the game 'should' be. He might actually be happier playing a game where he doesn't know the rules.
