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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marmot" data-source="post: 4119323" data-attributes="member: 62395">Don't forget the godsThere'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...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.</blockquote>

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