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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5867087" data-attributes="member: 2067">There's more middle ground than he's considering.What he refers to as "revivify" -- get to your ally in a round or two and light off some magic and they might come most of the way back -- isn't a bad way to deal with the "I'm at 0 hp! Blargh!" kind of death. It's good combat medicine. It's sort of why the "bleed 'till your -10" rule was introduced. It's a good idea.A slightly more powerful ritual -- though one not quite as exotic as he's talking about -- could be used within, say, a day. Enough time for you to drag your ally's corpse (assuming there is a corpse) back to town and hire a healer, or enough time to perform some exotic rite. It takes time for the spirit to pass completely beyond the body, even when it's not showing any "signs of life" (which fits most pseudo-medieval mythography: people were buried because no one actually dies, and when the Second Coming happens, they're going to get right back up again whole!).Then you have the more exotic stuff, the legendary kind of magic that brings back forgotten kings and heroes, and that stuff can be rare, exceptional, one of a kind, unique, and special. Not everyone can come back like this, but maybe a few people can, and maybe the PC's can be some of those few people, if they play their cards right.Traditional resurrection magic in D&D has been mostly of the latter part in power. I don't think there'd be anything wrong with making them more the former part. There's also a much broader context about failure in D&D. You don't need death to have challenge in the game. If death can be undone with magic, what about the consequences for failing the other three pillars? What happens when you fail an exploration challenge or a social challenge? And can a magic spell simply undo that?That all plays into the "challenge" of the game -- what happens when you don't overcome the challenge you're trying to overcome? Or, at least, when SOMEONE on the team doesn't?And that's pretty subjective.There's also a lot of ways to handle death that don't make an orc's sword swing the one thing standing between you and a new character -- death flags and nonlethal damage and the like all mean the story can go on, even if there's no death, even with a failure and a high challenge level.I dunno. Lots of things get conflated in these discussions. It's probably useful to tease out a lot of the tangled threads to see what you want from each one, rather than reducing it to the old "Resurrection in D&D MAKES NO SENSE and everyone who likes it is STUPID!" madness.</blockquote>

Verification