Raise Dead: A nice big bone to the simulationists

[Nahat Anoj]

All this talk about destiny has got me jonesing for an Al-Qadim 4e game ... which is set in Zakhara, the Land of Fate, of course. The Loregiver strikes me as a priestess of the Raven Queen, incidentally (naturally, the RQ will have a different name in the AQ setting).

 

[Njall]

Love the change.
I've always wondered why, say, a good deity should grant a cleric the power to resurrect an evil companion, just because he's a friend of him.
And the fact that the average mid level adventurer died and was resurrected a couple of times per week was something I always hated. It made death less...special, if you get what I mean.

Is it DM fiat? Yes. However, so were some uses of Miracle and Wish: you could get what you asked for, or you couldn't.
Now you can ress people, or you can't, depending on what the entity that hands you the power wants.

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

You're character is Bob, he's a Cleric. He can cast Raise Dead. One week your adventuring companion Mirt the Stinky dies. You don't like him much (particularly how he smells), but out of fellowship and duty you case Raise Dead. Because "he has a Destiny", it works. The next week a band of orc raiders sweeps through your home town and (mercifully) kill Bob's sister. You rush home to "save" her, but your spell fizzles. You cast it exactly the same as last week, but she just doesn't "have a destiny." Too bad.

Heh, we are going to have to agree to disagree, because I think the above is an example of great storytelling and a way to add drama to the game.

The "hero who can save the world but lives with the shame of being unable to save his sister" is a great thing to roleplay.

BTW, if you don´t believe me, read Rich Burlew´s excellent "Order of the Stick" webcomic, it once featured a similarly dramatic event, regarding a failed Raise Dead spell.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

All it does is change he base assumption from "anybody can get raised unless there's a good reason not to" to "no-one can get raised unless there's a good reason they can".

This sums it up for me. What a great change. I love it.

Fitz

 

[Plane Sailing]

*sigh* Because we, as you might notice, are discussing D&D. We are not discussing Robert's Homebrew of D&D. The RAW is the common ground we share and generally take for granted when discussing a system. Moreover, the mere fact that there is such discussion on the topic shows that unlike Death Doesn't Inhibit Actions or Cleave + Bag of Rats, there is no clear consensus on particular applications of this rule being bad and wrong.

Well, no.

There isn't any point in discussing some theoretical basis of whether a rule is "bad" or "wrong". All rules exist as a baseline to be tweaked to meet peoples preferences and campaign qualities.

Eberron is a 3e setting. Forgotten Realms is a 3e setting.

One of them has few high level NPCs, one has boatloads of them.

One of them makes it impossible to resurrect those dead more than about 7 days, the other doesn't.

But they are still both 3e settings.

On that scale of things the choice of whether to have a campaign where the default is "easy resurrection", "no resurrection", "only resurrection for those of destiny" or whatever is a completely reasonable thing to consider in the discussion.

Changing the way this works is several orders of magnitude less complex than (say) deciding to use armour as damage resistance or other major mechanics changes. Like it or not this is essentially just a flavour change and can be tweaked up and down with pretty much zero impact on how the play of your game varies from the play of his game.

Regards,

 

[Irda Ranger]

Rituals, as I understand them, might be a place where resurrection makes sense in my concept of the world. Bad guy conjuring some horrible ritual in order to bring back a dead god, ancient evil, or his long dead master. In short, it's a plot device, not a way to fix a game issue.

Ooh, I like it. Basically, like how Voldomort avoided death - but at a cost that makes it impossible for PCs to really emulate.

"You can come back, but you won't come back the same, or alone. It goes without saying that having spent time in the Raven Queen's Lands, you will never be the same. But far worse, when you crossed over, something came along for the ride."

Good, plot oozy goodness.

*****

As for the thread, going forward I entrust my votes to Robert Liguori to use at his discretion. Good show, sir!

 

[DandD]

I disagree. I actually agree with the 4E tiers.
At Heroic tier, you follow the rules of the world. Ressurection is serious, scary stuffs, beyond your ken.

At Paragon tier, you can bend around the rules slightly. You can journey to the underworld, and make a bargain with Hades, and hey, that's a 43 on your Perform check, so you have his approval...under these conditions.

At Epic tier?
"...he punched out Charon, seduced the shades of thirty different women, swam the Styx while carrying three amphora of wine, drank the wine, sought out Eurystheus's father and murdered him again, shattered Sisyphus's boulder with the explanation 'Yeah, Dad can be a real dick sometimes.', and then stole my dog? On a dare?"

Wait a minute. The way I read your posting, you basically agree with me in every way regarding raising people by making a dangerous voyage to the underworld, in contrast to the standart D&D-way of using dumb "Raise Dead"-spells and other stuff like "Ressurection".

Either I can't read right, or you disagree with me on something I can't really fathom.

 

[Falling Icicle]

If it wasn't someone's destiny to get eaten by a troll, how did it happen? This is one problem with this approach. Just what is destiny and just how much control does it have over events? It is inconceivable that in a world of multiple, very imperfect, different and rival gods, that destiny could be some kind of divine plan. There's simply no way the gods of good and evil would agree on what should be. So if destiny is not a divine plan, then what is it? Is it a power that transcends even the gods? And if so, then as I asked before, how is it that what is destined is not what always comes to pass? Who or what in the setting determines whether someone is "destined" for another chance?

 

[HeinorNY]

I was thinking about a sim raise dead rules.

The cleric heals and regenerates the body until it's in perfect shape, or recreates it magically from a small part as hair or a nail or some blood.
Than the character must go to where the soul remains and bring it back to the material plane to puts it back inside the body.
If the soul was weak, it just went to some unreachable place or just vanished. If it was strong it may remains somewhere.

 

[pukunui]

Ooh, I like it. Basically, like how Voldomort avoided death - but at a cost that makes it impossible for PCs to really emulate.

"You can come back, but you won't come back the same, or alone. It goes without saying that having spent time in the Raven Queen's Lands, you will never be the same. But far worse, when you crossed over, something came along for the ride."

Good, plot oozy goodness.

Oooh, I really like that too!