NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3362025" data-attributes="member: 2067">It's about availability, in many cases. A Junk may cost more than a raise dead, but the junk can be made by any halfway-decent shipwright. A mid-level cleric is rarer.Now, for the party, this kind of goes out the window, but the PC's have access to a lot of things that the rest of the world can't get easily. For the PC's, this may become a regular "time to break out the diamonds" kind of scenario, but that doesn't ruin it from a world-building aspect. The PC's, even in a default world with occasional 20th level NPC's, are pretty dang special. PC's will sell or discard +2 swords when +3 versions come along, the rest of the world probably doesn't see +2 swords that often in their entire life, and would be lucky to see +3. It can also be about cosmology. The afterlife isn't really a great mystery in D&D, it's not some great beyond through which human beings cannot pass. It's fairly well understood what happens to a spirit after death, by powerful enough spellcasters and sages. And it's known that people can come back from it, if they are of amazing cosmic power (as mid-level D&D characters are beginning to be), just as they can travel to it, summon beings from it, or destroy a soul to animate an undead monstrosity, so that the soul may never reach it. It can also be about tone. In D&D, one could easily see a "life is cheap" kind of outlook. First-level commoners die in droves when faced with even one 2 HD gnoll, and 90% of the world is 1st-level commoners. This is why the world needs heroes, but even heroes meet their match -- there are dungeons no one ever returns from, monsters that no mortal can ever slay, dark plots that no human can hope to unravel, alien minds that no being can comprehend. There's a million ways for an average bloke to die, and a thousand ways for even that 20th-level cleric to die. If life is cheap and death is common, it won't take much of an "exchange" to get it back. The gods of death may be ravenous, but so many people are dying that their hunger is easily slaked, and they can be mislead with some bauble and some magic for a time. They will get you eventually (no spell can raise you if you die of natural age , for instance), but because your existence isn't highly valued to them, they are willing to trade for  you. These possibilities show that death doesn't have to be trivial, and even when it is, the world is still a believable and consistent place. It's about perspective (because the PC's are exceptional, death remains important for 90% of the population, but not for them), it's about cosmology (even for that 90% of the population, there is a factual empirical knowledge of the afterlife), it's about tone (the life of a first level commoner as nasty, brutish, and short, worth only a couple of diamonds to the gods).It's only trivial if you let it be. Of course, you don't have to let it be, and you can even change the rules to make sure that coming back is nigh-impossible, but it's not necessary with a little imagination. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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