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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rex Blunder" data-source="post: 4153935" data-attributes="member: 60850">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.</blockquote>

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