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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 3833661" data-attributes="member: 40961">DM-Rocco:If you have save or die spells and you also have "I don't have to save or die" spells, you've placed yourself in a situation where, instead of a risk of death in combat, you have a single obnoxious chore (casting the applicable ward) that must be cast before major fights.  You don't get the risk of death from save or die at all in climactic battles because you knew they were coming and cast wards.  And you do suffer the risk of instant death whenever a save or die effect is used by a monster in a less climactic battle, because you didn't know to cast the wards for that fight.I also have a bit of a problem with your apparent belief that save or die spells only come up in major encounters which the players can predict and plan for in advance.  This has the effect of making certain types of encounter design impossible (unless of course you want the revolving door of the afterlife effect, which I do not).  Specifically, it makes it difficult if not impossible to have enemy spellcasters attack the party outside of scripted encounters against which the players are forewarned.  Alternately, all enemy spellcasters other than those in final battles must intentionally choose lousy spells so that the characters do not get killed instantaneously in minor conflicts.I could solve this in a couple of ways in 3.5.  I can quietly have my evil NPC spellcasters pick lousy spells, and hope the players never notice.  I can just very rarey use evil NPC spellcasters and monsters which have save or die effects.  I can make resurrection really easy to obtain and accept constant character death.  And finally I can just declare that my campaign involves a lot of character death, and that if or when your character dies, you just roll up a new one.Each of these has problems.  The first two involve breaking the gameworld a bit.  Enemy spellcasters and a diversity of monsters are fun.  Refusing to use them or nerfing them because they'll kill characters is kind of lame.  Making resurrection really easy is the so called "nerfing death" option.  I don't like this option because I do like the possibility of character death as a significant threat and a dramatic element in the game, and making resurrection freely available reduces the fear of character death to about the same fear as failing a fort save versus Blindness.  Just find a cleric and move on with your life.  Oooh, scary.And the final choice might be right for some campaigns, and was certainly right for older editions where meat grinder campaigns were more popular and where a significant amount of the challenge was seeing how far you got through the module before you switched characters.  But that's not how I play, and I wager its not how most people play.  If a player knows he is likely to lose his character every two or three levels, he won't invest in it as heavily.  And I think that's a loss.Now, compare all of these headaches with what save or die brings to the table.  It brings... according to you it brings the chance to cast Death Ward four times.  Hooray?  At high levels it brings the chance to buy a magical item that negates Death attacks?  Hooray again?  Contrast this with possible fixes to instant death.  Save-or-take-ability-damage is one possibility.  Save-or-suffer-a-severe-impediment-that-is-not-death is another.Save or die doesn't add enough to justify its inclusion in the game.  Other ideas can accomplish the same things without the obnoxiousness.</blockquote>

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