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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 4117063" data-attributes="member: 32164">See, the problem (such as it is) with this approach is that it just doesn't work for the kind of stories some of us want to tell or the kind of worlds we want to game in.The notion that the rich can avoid death if they can pay the tab might be philosophically inconsistent with the kind of world we want. By insisting on an actual monetary "cost," you invalidate a number of sayings so essential to our conception of the world that the whole thing becomes irrelevant.Many people would do anything, literally anything to bring a loved one back to life. Peasants in the real world rioted over poor working conditions. You don't think it would be worse if people knew that with enough money, you could bring people back to life?!Ask yourself: What would people do today if they found out that some company had the ability to reverse death? Anything that didn't have an expensive (read: rare) consumable would be MANDATED in order to prevent civil unrest.Some people love to talk about "creative" solutions to the questions raised by 3e's rules, like Derren's absurd "diamond mine" scenario. And that's a creative solution to part A of the problem. But A leads to B leads to C, and so on.The ultimate problem with the simulationist approach is that, if you think it through sufficiently, you realize that A doesn't actually solve the problem - it just raises more quesitons, which need more creative solutions, and so on. At some point, if you're honest with yourself, you are forced to admit that fully conceptualizing a world where death is as easily reversible as it is in 3e is actually impossible. It changes so much that there really is no way to have a "realistic" world based on the premise.But if it's actually determined by factors beyond people's control, like whether it's someone's "destiny" to die now, people will gripe about it, but it's nothing they can change. And that's not so different from the real world.But the reversal of death as a purchasable commodity that the wealthy can afford but the poor can't? That's a much thornier problem. Since it's under the control of mortals, some people would inevitably try to change it. And following the repercussions of whatever decisions you make through the whole of society...It makes my brain hurt.</blockquote>

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