volcivar said:
Truenames are another big limiter. If a character chooses to be unbound, then they will be significantly harder to bring back. And cannot be brought back permanently.
That's true, and I will have to see how that plays out to see if it's meaningful (everyone may just decide the drawbacks to being unbound totally outweighs the advantages, rendering the distinction meaningless). Never let it be said I don't give people their due for raising good points.
How hard did you expect it to be. How rare? Monte did not specify. He was general. He said harder, and it is harder. The level are which characters will be doing these things will be significantly higher.
Monte said that people should die, and that if people never die the feeling of accomplishment for success diminishes right along with the consequences for failure. He's even said it's just outright weird to have a campaign where death is just a speed bump. Volcivar, it's like you skipped right over all of that to focus on the part where he said it could still be done. That last bit isn't some loophole that gives him an out on all of the stuff he said before it. Based on his statements
as a whole, I don't think anything I've said (or go on to say below) is based on unreasonable expectations. If raising the dead just amounts to a spell--even one that requires higher levels and more costly components or even a Con point--then this does not bear out Monte's assertions. People still come back from the dead all the time even at lower levels (see below), and that's still weird.
How hard do I think it shoud be? Well, if we're talking solely about my opinion, and not speculating on Monte's designs, then here we go: magical defribulation is OK, but once the body has grown cold and stiff, or the head has become detached, or there's nothing left but a pile of ashes, and so on--well, you've got a serious problem. Fixing it should genuinely fall under the "DM's purview" Dinkledog alluded to. It should not just be inconvenient, it should be like unto a
quest. It should require special permission from the powers that be, and should not become an everyday event for even high-level adventurers. Perhaps something more akin to the Incantations in the ELH and Urban Arcana, where characters are facing grave difficulties in raising characters, dire consequences for failing to use the proper magicks, and in the end there's no guarantee that it all pans out.
Maybe those desires are too lofty, but at the very least some conditions should be attached to resurrection that follow Monte's "give the power to the DM" philosophy. Not just scratching off some daily uses of spells and expending some treasure. I don't see where there's much room for DM's purview in that situation, other than whiting out pages on the rulebook he paid $30 for.
And it sure as heck should not be so easy that you can buy the spell off the rack. That represents a total cop-out on making death and other permanent injuries more than an incovenience. Dolcivar, did you notice that the "spells-for-hire" section makes buying high-level spells incredibly cheap? One would think, following the same arguement you use below, that the increasing rarity of higher-level casters would cause an exponential increase in costs, but in AU it's linear. Buying a 9th-level spell costs a mere 1530gp (somebody wanna check my math on that..?). That's not hard for even lowbies to scrape together. And here I figured it should require a quest. How nutty was that?
An since the level of the spells is higher there will be fewer caster available to cast it. Price is a concern, but if there is no one around that CAN cast the spell. The characte is out of luck.
Why can't you just keep the body in packed salt until you can get to Ptolus or wherever and buy that high-level spell? You do have
months, after all. At worst, the only real deadline is that the player may became impatient and go ahead and roll up a new character lol.
How many 13th level NPC casters are in your campaign? One? A few? A dozen? Hundreds? A thousand? Apart from the money, the level loss, the con loss, this is the next big limiter.
I used the Banewarrens to kick off my campaign, so Ptolus is known to my PC's. 13th-level casters aren't too hard to find, and magic shops that sell scrolls aren't either. I suspect that when The Diamond Throne comes out, you will find those 13th-level casters and magic shops won't be rare at all. Monte definitely has a fondness for spellpunk fantasy, where magic is as common in his world as technology is in ours. Again, remember that spell-purchasing has a linear cost, not an exponential one. 1530gp. Doesn't sound like it's meant to be all that rare. I still haven't heard any explanation as to why the peg-legged captain can't get that leg regenned for a couple thousand gold (less actually).
In a typical DnD campaign it takes only a 9th level caster to effect a raise dead. There a many (an order of magnitude at least) more 9th level characters in a given DnD world. Significantly so. So by this alone the "significantly harder" value holds true.
I don't follow. Why are there a magnitude more casters in D&D than AU?
At any rate, I'm afraid this particular discussion is destined to go nowhere. To me, It seems irrefutably clear that
at the very least Monte overstated the impact that death and disfigurement will have in AU, because he certainly expressed that they should represent more than temporary inconveniences. Yet, sure enough, others refute that's what he said, even though I provided the #@%$ direct quote.
Maddening! While I can live with other people disagreeing with me (happens all the time), there's nowhere for a discussion to go if we can't at least agree on the empirical evidence that's right in front of us.
Playing AU as its written, the tragic demises and acts of heroic self-sacrifice that we read about in fiction and see in movies will come to pass about as often as they do in vanilla D&D--which will be pretty much never unless the DM really guns for it (as it generally requires soul-annihlating magic). Bottom line: if you want to come back from the dead in AU, it can be accomplished in a routine manner.
(j/k)
I want to read it and like it, but it is so awfully bland looking that I get sleepy just thinking about picking it up! zzzzzzzzzzzzz
