Raise Dead: A nice big bone to the simulationists

[JohnSnow]

I feel the same way - and it's something made trickier in Eberron by the very fact that magic IS an industry. For me, the principle of Eberron has always been "wide magic" versus "high magic". Low level magic is common and seen all over the place, from the continual flame used in street lamps to the prestidigtation the innkeeper uses to chill the wine and clean the inn. House Jorasco can cure disease for a fee, resulting in a world that has fewer poxes and plagues than you might otherwise expect. But high-level magic - teleportation, raise dead, and the like - is still supposed to impress people. Perhaps in a hundred years everyone will use sending to communicate, but right now they're still using the whispering wind-based speaking stones. If you compare it to Stephen Brust's Dragaera books, it's closer to The Phoenix Guards than to Vlad's era.

I actually am quite impressed with your take on magic in Eberron Keith (I think I mentioned that over on the WotC boards back in the preview run-ups, along with making a few oddball Micronauts jokes).

While I don't necessarily like all the things that have been done in Eberron, some of them I really love. And I realize that some of my likes and dislikes are a bit incongruous. For example, I love the bound-elemental airships, but bound-elemental coaches (there was one in one of the early adventures) are a little too "medieval automobile" for me.

Does that make sense? No, not really. I guess I just prefer dialing back the "magical technology" so the setting feels more pre-1700 than post industrial revolution. On the other hand, I kinda like the "cyclical" nature of civilization hinted at in Worlds and Monsters. So there might be elemental galleons, but they're relics of a previous age, or a magical oddity, rather than something that people see every day.

But all this has nothing to do with raise dead.

On topic, I have The Phoenix Guards. Sounds like I should pull it down and actually read it.

EDIT: For the record: "Frequent die-er card" almost made me spew water out my nose...

 

[Clawhound]

You ever try running a high-level (14+) game without resurrection magic?

In 3E, raise dead was not optional unless you were prepared to either stick to low-level play, do some serious house-ruling, or tolerate one to two PC deaths per session. Resurrection magic was very much hardwired into the game, and the game broke down without it.

The hardwire is what I disliked about Raise Dead. You had to have it. For many of us, that broke genre. That turned death into a joke. You had to houserule Raise Dead out of the game, then you had to houserule new negative hitpoint rules.

I like the other way around better. You write good negative hitpoint rules to begin with. Downed characters should mean "now my own character does something heroic to save my friend." Death becomes rare because your characters act like heroes and have an in-genre means of explaining how a character got saved.

Once you have that, then you can add in Raise Dead as you please, or not, depending on your final genre. That way, the DM can make the call about how he wants the game and you are not stuck with all societies having this weird get-out-of-death-free-card messing with the setting.

 

[Hellcow]

And I realize that some of my likes and dislikes are a bit incongruous. For example, I love the bound-elemental airships, but bound-elemental coaches (there was one in one of the early adventures) are a little too "medieval automobile" for me. Does that make sense?

Sure. I don't like "land carts", for exactly the same reason. Originally, the vehicle in the adventure you're talking about wasn't a free-ranging elemental land cart; instead, it was a "Lightning Runner", a single-coach vehicle designed to run on lightning rails. Essentially, the equivalent of those old hand-carts - a limited passenger vehicle that still relied on the rail. This was also why you couldn't take it all the way into the Mournland; the rail is damaged at Rose Quarry. So it was supposed to just be a logical extension of the lightning rail - if I can run 10 linked coaches over the rail, can't I make just one? - as opposed to an entirely separate and arguably superior form of vehicle.

 

[SmilingPiePlate]

"...To blaive…"

"He distinctly said 'to blaaaive', and we all know to blaive means to bluff. So someone was probably playing cards, and he cheated..."

 

[Marmot]

Don't forget the gods

There's no need for a DM to ever directly make the decision about destiny outside the game.

Gods exist in D&D, and the 4E clerics' spells that bring people back to life are "prayers" to those gods.

The normal destiny for good people is to be rewarded by their good god with some sort of "heavenly" afterlife. This is reliable fact to people who live in D&D worlds--no less so than elves, magic or the existence of dragons.

Most good people would choose their god's heaven over going back to the material world. While I know I am stepping outside D&D for the following analogy I think it's apt: Even Buffy, a true hero, had trouble dealing with returning to life after visiting her heaven...

I was happy. Wherever I ... was ... I was happy. At peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time ... didn't mean anything ... nothing had form ... but I was still me, you know? And I was warm ... and I was loved ... and I was finished. Complete. I don't understand about theology or dimensions, or ... any of it, really ... but I think I was in heaven. And now I'm not. I was torn out of there. Pulled out ... by my friends. Everything here is ... hard, and bright, and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch ... this is Hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that ... (softly) knowing what I've lost... (gets up, walks towards the sunlight, pauses, not looking back) They can never know. Never. (continues into the sunlight)

Once in such a heavenly afterlife, even those who formerly feared death will no longer do so for the most part. A good god would not see it as blessing to one of their followers to send them back out of their heavenly realm back out into the material world.

However, a good god will recognize that sometimes the necessity exists to grant such a prayer. The god will of course use his knowledge of the person and the world/planes--including possible knowledge about the future--to decide whether to grant the prayer. Some gods may even ask the dead person, "What have you got that's worth living for?"

In simulationst terms, it is up to the god being prayed to--acting according to their definition as an NPC--to decide whether any person's "destiny" is unfulfilled to such an extent that it is appropriate--again from the god's perspective, not the DM's meta-perspective--to answer the prayer to bring the person back to life. The simulationist DM will treat the god as having no meta-knowledge about PC status.

Even more evil gods will engage in a similar assessment of whether they see the dead person's "destiny" as justifying the expenditure of power to bring them back to life. Of course they will place weight on the factors that are most important to them--e.g. they probably won't care if the person is happy about being brought back to life but will care whether it furthers their godly interests. Evil tends to see destiny from a more self-serving perspective. (Evil gods also have other alternatives in the material world such as turning the dead into the undead to have them continue to serve their evilly divine purposes.)

Neutral gods might say "that's the way the cookie crumbles" or they may not even be bothered to take notice of prayers to revive the dead.

This approach allows for campaigns where death is permanent except for those rare cases where the gods themselves have identified someone as having an unfulfilled destiny that is so important--in the eyes of the god--that the god has decided they will use their divine power to restore them to life.

 

[Wulfram]

See, I guess I just prefer the defaults as laid out in Worlds and Monsters. Even heroes can die, and only the mightiest of them (Paragon or Epic) ever "come back" from beyond.

An ordinary person can't be resurrected because the "cost" of coming back (not "financial cost," but "cost" in terms of heroic deeds) is just beyond them.

I don't disagree with any of this necessarily. Raise Dead only working on powerful people could work for me given the right fluff - for example, you could say that it simply gives you a thread to find your way back, but you've still got to fight your way out of the shadowfell, which wouldn't be a walk in park I'd guess.

I like this set-up because I like death to be meaningful. "Woe is us, the king is dead!" should get more of a reaction from the PCs than "So? Just have someone cast raise dead."

I'm certainly not saying 3E's method of handling death was good. I just don't think that changing to rely on fiat is a good way to go. Better to find a real way of addressing it - for an off the top of my head example, prod Raise Dead up a level or two and scrap the Resurrection spells, though Miracle might be allowed to mimic their effect. That way, the scenarios we get are

NPC: "Woe is us, the King is dead - and the assassin's taken his head
PCs: "We'll undertake the quest and fetch it back for you in time for him to be saved!"

or

NPC: "Woe is us the King is slain by foul necromantic magics. Only the famed St Holyman can use the mighty magics necessary to revive him, and he lives in Remoteland, beyond the Desert of Death."
PCs: "We'll go fetch him!"

Miraculous healing is fine. But coming back from the dead more often than a comic-book superhero bugs me.

Obviously, this is just my "genre preference."

I haven't read anything which suggests 4e will address this much, really. PCs are the guys who are die all the time, and it seems they'll be left largely unrestricted.

 

[JohnSnow]

Sure. I don't like "land carts", for exactly the same reason. Originally, the vehicle in the adventure you're talking about wasn't a free-ranging elemental land cart; instead, it was a "Lightning Runner", a single-coach vehicle designed to run on lightning rails. Essentially, the equivalent of those old hand-carts - a limited passenger vehicle that still relied on the rail. This was also why you couldn't take it all the way into the Mournland; the rail is damaged at Rose Quarry. So it was supposed to just be a logical extension of the lightning rail - if I can run 10 linked coaches over the rail, can't I make just one? - as opposed to an entirely separate and arguably superior form of vehicle.

Okay, now that makes a whole lot more sense. Not that I'm entirely sold on the lightning rail, in the sense that it lends a bit of fantastical "cool" to almost any setting in the same way that (IMO) the bound-elemental airships do,* but in the context of Eberron, it works. And as a "lightning runner," I think that vehicle makes a whole lot more sense.

I guess it really comes down to the fact that everyone draws the line somewhere on how fantastical they want their setting to be. And some things bother some people more than others. Bringing this back to raising the dead, I think it follows into a similar category. Some people like the implications of the rules as written in 3e, and find that those rules inspire them to be creative and make a setting that is interesting to them.

Others (like myself) find those same implications either silly or disturbing, and would be happy if they no longer had to jump through hoops to make a different kind of setting work.

Different strokes I guess.


*One of my favorite bound-elemental airship moments came from a short story. Two deckhands on a bound-elemental galleon were talking and the younger, less-experienced one said something like: "Do you smell that? I think something's burning..." to which his older compatriot said "Kid, we're powered by a friggin' fire elemental! It always smells like something's burning!" Priceless...

 

[JohnSnow]

I haven't read anything which suggests 4e will address this much, really. PCs are the guys who are die all the time, and it seems they'll be left largely unrestricted.

Well, all I have to go on is this quote from Worlds and Monsters. Take it how you will...

Death Matters Differently: It's generally harder to die than in previous editions, particularly at low level. When a heroic-tier player character dies, the player creates a new character. A paragon PC can come back from the dead at a significant cost. For epic-tier characters, death is a speed bump. Being raised from the dead is available only to heroes, and it's more than just a spell and a financial transaction. NPCs, both good and evil, don't normally come back to life unless the DM has a good reason.

For the record, I would like to point out that up until that last sentence, it's specifically talking about player characters, not NPCs.

Quite frankly, I prefer this. I'd rather it was harder for a PC to die than have him popping back from the dead all the time. By epic-tier, I can swallow that, but at the heroic-tier level? Sometimes even heroes die.

 

[Mostlyjoe]

"He distinctly said 'to blaaaive', and we all know to blaive means to bluff. So someone was probably playing cards, and he cheated..."

Ah....I was going to post something meaningful in this thread and then you just killed my mind there.

 

[Ahglock]

For the record, I would like to point out that up until that last sentence, it's specifically talking about player characters, not NPCs.

Quite frankly, I prefer this. I'd rather it was harder for a PC to die than have him popping back from the dead all the time. By epic-tier, I can swallow that, but at the heroic-tier level? Sometimes even heroes die.

I actually dig the idea that you can't be rezzed at heroic tier. I'd be cool with hard set rules must be X level+ in order to be raised form the dead. Or instead of a hard level limit make it a check that could only be possible by people of a certain level. Just because I like earthdawn I'll make an earthdawn reference, something like need a thread weaving skill of 5 in order to be raised, while the ritual is happening you as a spirit must tie 5 threads(need that 5 ranks) to the ritual with a DC X check.

In D&d 4e terms since you get +.5 per level in every check it could be a inherent ability that requires at least 5 ranks, and a check DC 20 where all you get is your level bonus and maybe something from the power form the ritual.

This way it is not so DM fiatish, has some hard coded rules for how the world works and kings etc don't come back from the dead unless they were heroes in there own right,and you can still always say they did not want to come back they were happy in there gods embrace.