How Does "The Rules Aren't Physics" Fix Anything?

[Thyrwyn]

5,000 gp in diamonds is exactly the same as 5,000 gp in cash - by definition. As long as there is ANY fleck of diamond dust to be had, the spell should work. It does not say a 5 carat diamond. Value, in terms of gp, is determined not by size, but by supply and demand.

 

[Kordeth]

5,000 gp in diamonds is exactly the same as 5,000 gp in cash - by definition. As long as there is ANY fleck of diamond dust to be had, the spell should work. It does not say a 5 carat diamond. Value, in terms of gp, is determined not by size, but by supply and demand.

Suddenly I have the image of a Lawful Evil tyrant painstakingly throttling the import of diamonds into his kingdom so that the value of one fleck of diamond dust is worth 5,000 gp, just so the Royal Diamond Vault can be used to resurrect him a million times.

Hmm...is resurrection magic influenced by the local economy, or by the act of purchasing? If the former (i.e., if I take diamonds I bought for 50 gp to a place where diamonds are worth 100 times as much, does the spell work?), it suggests that economics is a real, tangible force in the D&D world akin to gravity or the strong nuclear force and opens up a potentially fascinating field of arcane study. (protection from inflation, 10' radius, anyone?) If the latter, it suggests that the gods are monitoring your offering purchase and, as Greek myth proves (and as is borne out by D&D deities having stat blocks), it should be possible for a twinked-out Bluff-focused rogue to pull a fast one and have the king raised for the offering of three pebbles and a bit of string.

 

[Mallus]

Unless of course, you're someone like me who, not being dog ignorant of physics, cringes every time he sees 'airplanes in space' and wonders what the hell is so hard about making an accurate space flight sim.

No-one said making more accurate space sims was difficult. They'd appeal to a tiny audience that you happen to belong to. Me, I'd rather spend my free time zooming around in a virtual Tie-Fighter...

Similarly, if the rules are not actually how things work in the game world, but merely how my character perceives things to work, then I'm not really playing that character as far as I'm concerned.

What?

A permanant heat metal means you can have central heating. ("But they didn't have central heating in medieval europe!" someone whines. So what? The Romans did, although powered by slaves instead of magic.) A permanant chill metal = refrigerators.

This is only important if the thrust of the campaign involves a kingdom going condo.

 

[Spatula]

I'm not sure what you mean. Step 2 in grappling is a touch attack.

Which grappling monsters bypass via the Improved Grab ability.

 

[Rex Blunder]

Stormbringer, no offense taken. I just like to debate, and don't take it personally. I think I understand your position now.

Personally, I believe the tweak to Raise Dead is a change, and a good one. I'll offer my argument:

(NOTE: Before anyone mentions it, I know that a good DM can get around the problems I'm going to mention. I'm just saying that, if it's now easier, then hooray!)

One interesting thing about the 3.5 rules as written is that Raise Dead is not very hard to achieve.

1) 9th level clerics are common. On page 139 of the DMG we see that the highest-level cleric in a small city is of level 6+1d6 (roll twice). So the odds are, I believe, 8 in 9 that a small city has at least 1 9th-level cleric. (Large cities are just brimming with clerics of level 9+.) Knowing this, I'd imagine that most smart kings, dukes, and barons would live within a week's ride of a city. (A pretty safe bet in any case.) In order to prevent access to 9th-level clerics, you'll have to run a campaign with lower-level NPCs than the rules assume. Also, if the clerics refuse to cast Raise Dead for the king, duke, or mayor, that sounds like it's pretty close to treason - at least, it will be difficult, politically, to pull off. I think Eberron was partly inspired by a dissatisfaction with the ubiquity of high-level magic like Raise Dead.

2) Money is not that scarce. A 9th-level NPC, for instance, has wealth of 12,000. That means that the very same cleric who raises the king can probably afford to pay the entire price himself (even if he has to sell all his gear at 1/2 of its actual value). Not that he'd be asked to: I'm sure that most royalty and nobles have put away 5000 GP if it means that they can cheat death. In order to prevent important political figures to have access to 5,000, you'll have to choose to live in a fairly impoverished world.

3) Diamonds aren't mentioned as particularly tough to acquire. As Thyrwyn mentioned, by definition, 5,000GP of diamonds are as much diamonds as you can buy on the open market for 5,000GP. And since a small city has a GP limit of 15,000, it'll be hard to explain why the diamonds can't be raised. Especially since royalty and nobles tend to have a lot of jewelry anyway. In order to prevent people with 5,000 GP from acquiring 5,000 GP of diamonds, you will have to resort to non-rule-supported DM fiat.

When making up campaign-world history, I occasionally like to make up bits like "Then Good King Roderigo was slain tragically on the battlefield in his moment of greatest triumph," without adding riders like "and unfortunately his body was lost/his cleric was unavailable for a week/they just couldn't find any diamonds/he decided he really liked the afterlife after all, thank you very much."

Furthermore, I would like to be able to run a "murder mystery" adventure without too much complication. Court intrigue is hampered when every assassination can be undone unless people are soul-trapped or the court unaccountably doesn't have any high-level clerics - not to mention the PCs' ability to cast Raise Dead. Sure, the DM can disallow or prevent Raise Dead - it's just that the DM has to fight the rules a little bit to do it. A minor tweak which prevents rules-wrestling is a good thing, in my opinion.

Now, believe it or not, these problems I had with Raise Dead were all things I thought of BEFORE the 4e developers mentioned them, so I personally am not just repeating things by rote. I went so far as to work on tweaks and rule adjustments to fix them (i'll admit, I like an internally consistent campaign world - I plead guilty to simulationist leanings). In 4e, I may have to houserule other things, but not the raise dead rules, I believe.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Bill Slavicsek told me access to raise dead is not restricted to PCs. It is really not much different for 3e, except the "ritual" is needed as opposed to it being someones class ability

 

[Storm-Bringer]

5,000 gp in diamonds is exactly the same as 5,000 gp in cash - by definition. As long as there is ANY fleck of diamond dust to be had, the spell should work. It does not say a 5 carat diamond. Value, in terms of gp, is determined not by size, but by supply and demand.

But the spell requires 5,000 gp worth of diamonds. I would be relatively sure that most temples or other places of Clerical worship don't have hundreds of thousands of gp worth of diamonds lying around in order to change out for gold when people need to be raised.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

As has been pointed out, Player Characters also have their own mini-system of powers that monsters can't access.

It's not that bad.

That is the other side of the problem. In 3.x, you knew there was a fairly consistent setup. While often abused in a number of places, it was still consistent and you could call shenanigans. Now, a monster can have any number of possibly wildly unbalanced powers, and there is no legitimate way of calling it without seeing first if it is really a party killing power.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

Bill Slavicsek told me access to raise dead is not restricted to PCs. It is really not much different for 3e, except the "ritual" is needed as opposed to it being someones class ability

So, we can put to rest the notion of how much better Raise Dead is handled in 4e?

 

[Andor]

Similarly, if the rules are not actually how things work in the game world, but merely how my character perceives things to work, then I'm not really playing that character as far as I'm concerned.

What?

If you encounter someone who thinks that by wiggling his fingers he can shoot balls of fire from his hands, you have in fact met a crazy person. His perceptions, have little to do with reality as you and I and the car he thinks he just blew up experience it.

Conversely if my PC encouters a group of NPCs with a problem and says "Well why don't you just do blah, that always works for me." only to have the NPCs say "Yeah but that only works for you, we couldn't do that even if Smaug and Santa Claus got out and pushed." then my character is going to start to have serious doubts about his own sanity. Did he actually slay the dragon of blackrock or is he giggling to himself in a straightjacket somewhere? Am I playing this character, or merely describing his hallucinations?

Do you see? If PC and NPCs visibly operate under different rules, it produces a cognitive dissonance that shatters my suspension of disbelief and reduces my enjoyment in the game. :\