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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5613892" data-attributes="member: 32740">I abide by the sentiments written by Gary Gygax in the 1E DMG Preface: "As the author I also realize that there are limits to my creativity and imagination.  Others will think of things I didn't and devise thing beyond my capability." EVERY game designer who has worked on D&D since then SHOULD have embraced these words as if they were their own.  The current subject at hand is all the more proof you need of that. The dying clues or testimony of a doomed NPC is certainly cliche, but cliches and stereotypes get used for a reason.  They are convenient.  They work.  However, being a cliche means it IS over-used and so a good DM should be cautious about going that route in the first place.  Rather than just go the easy route look for more interesting ways to get your information to the PC's with the limitations you want, especially since D&D has more than one means within its rules to render that tack moot.  It's not just a matter of healing a dying NPC, you can speak with the dead and bring the dead back to life.  If the healing fails then even if players are willing to accept THAT failure the more desirable the information the NPC seems to have the more likely it is the players will try to end-run around your roadblock. This is a not-unreasonable expectation on the part of players for whom the DM has not previously told them that he can and will take such liberties with "the rules".  This doesn't mean the DM is a jerk for disallowing such player actions either - the DM has a reasonable expectation of being allowed to create what he thinks is a good story (even with cliches) without the players inisisting that he must conform to the rules.  If the situation were stood on its head and it were a PC wanting to make a dying statement, it is probably likely that the vast majority of DM's out there would disallow it: "Your PC is below 0 hit points, you're unconscious, OF COURSE you can't make a deathbed speech."  Neither side is entirely wrong or right in their point of view. Gary, however, had it correct.  Just because nobody has yet built into D&D rules the ability for NPC's to make deathbed confessions, or limited clues, or dramatic and impassioned pleas for redemption, or whatever, doesn't mean that YOU CAN'T or shouldn't.  OF COURSE you should if you really feel that you need it. Personally, having bumped up against this issue before I avoid it.  A D&D world, by dint of simple logic, is not one where a statement like, "The Holy Grail lies in the Castle aaaaaauuuggggghhhh..." is generally going to fly.  If an NPC has information then the NPC will either die with that information or be able to pass it on.  If I really felt I wanted to engineer such a situation then I'd probably use some manner of poison, a curse, or ongoing damage that has some specific requirement for ending it other than the usual heals.  Still, better that the NPC should have motivations NOT to pass on information, or else to limit what he tells the PC's, and so not have to kill him off mid-sentence to create drama.  Obviously that's because he can be healed just as a PC could.  Even if not, the PC's could speak with his corpse, so if I wish to continue to keep certain information away from the PC's then I still have to have an NPC who in life would have been unwilling to just spill the beans forcing them to at least ask questions that can't be dodged.  And of course raise dead/resurrection is even harder to scratch if the PC's are willing and able to go that far, at which point you're getting deities involved in disallowing select NPC's from being raised. When I want PC's to have only clues or partial information then I present it to them in ways in which they will only obtain what I WANT them to obtain WHEN I want them to have it without playing silly buggers with how death/dying otherwise works. One change I have added to my games regards raising the dead.  Only those who are WILLING to return from the afterlife will do so.  This means that although PLAYER characters will return every time unless/until the player wants to try something new, NON-player characters will only rarely - if ever - willingly return from the afterlife.  So in my campaigns it wouldn't matter if everyone in the world got a free resurrection upon their death, only the NPC's I WANT to remain alive WILL remain alive.  Those who DO return from the dead are treated rather differently.  Some may see them as nearly cousins to the undead and shun them; others view them with reverence as if they may have some great purpose yet to achieve on the mortal plane; some may view them with sadness since they obviously have no paradise to go to which they would prefer over the harshness of mortality; most will simply not know what to think of them believing that they are probably a dangerous combination of all three. So, while _I_ don't have a need to have unhealable NPC's so that they might drop foreshortened clues before their demise, if YOU do then you should do two things: first, formalize the procedure, and second, tell your players that it can and will happen when you want it to so they have no reason to complain about it when it does.</blockquote>

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