RAISE DEAD: get rid of it and make D&D better

[ruleslawyer]

I prefer action or fate points to raise dead, myself. IMC, I use glory points (a variant of a rule presented in Mastering Iron Heroes), which PCs can earn through performing heroic deeds. Glory points can be spent to improve a die roll either before or after the roll is made (+1d10 before roll, +1d6 after roll), or to negate a condition (including death) entirely. In part, this system is necessitated by the lack of spells that instantly remove conditions in Iron Heroes; in part, however, it functions as an IMHO superior variant. It seems to me a bit more in line with D&D's fantasy literature inspirations to have someone narrowly avoid death, be left for dead, or simply muster his will to stave off the inevitable until treated by a skilled healer rather than for that person to die and be restored to life again and again. [It also has the side effect of *encouraging* players to act heroically and take risks in combat, because they'll earn *more* "get out of jail free" cards for doing so.]

Now, I'll agree that D&D is its own genre at this point (or maybe always has been), and that raise dead is a convention of that genre; however, I prefer the classic film and literary convention of narrowly avoiding or impossibly surviving for purposes of my own campaign. It's pretty much the same from a mechanical perspective (spend a resource to negate the condition of being dead), but seems to my mind superior from a narrative perspective.

Would exchanging raise dead for an action point/fate point system "make D&D better"? I dunno. Others have correctly pointed out that the option already exists in several d20 variants. That said, there is certainly a degree of discomfort with raise dead in D&D messageboard communities; note the number of responses in this thread that talk about "nerfing" raise or making it harder to use or get, even if the posters support the idea of keeping it in the game. There have also been a number of threads (including some gigantic ones on the WotC boards) about the deleterious effects of raising on a campaign. Whether those communities are representative of the larger gaming population is an open question.

One other point: Raise/res has always seemed to me to be one of those elements of D&D, like teleportation and more powerful divinations, that's relatively fine when confined to PC use, but has a tendency to do weird things to campaigns when made available to NPCs. Obviously, if one is playing in a world like Eberron where the PC cleric is probably the only person on the continent capable of casting the spell, it's fine. In Greyhawk or FR, it gets more complicated. Assassination techniques start straying into the baroque, and so on. Shifting to action or fate points would simplify that problem.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

http://home.earthlink.net/~duanevp/dnd/resurrection.htm

I wrote it as a bit of a rant concerning a slightly different aspect of the topic - DM's who decided that resurrection magic needed to be 50 times more expensive, only available in the year of the Hamster during a quarter moon, had the side effect of turning you into a revenant half the time and some other freaky undead 49% of the time, etc. But my own opinion hasn't changed since.

The problem is NOT with resurrection magic being in the game. The problem is twofold - first, it's in the game for PURELY meta-game reasons. It's not there to help create a deeper, more interesting game world. It's there simply to allow players to RESUME playing characters that they like instead of having to lump it because the DM got a lucky die roll on a crit or they happened to miss ONE freakin' saving throw. Resurrection magic is strictly for PLAYERS - not for their characters.

The other part of the problem is that death and resurrection are treated so cavalierly by EVERYONE at the table. DM's that means YOU too. In fact, IME, MD's are a bigger problem in that regard than players. Although it IS a meta-game mechanic masquerading as in-game magical effects they never try to handle it by simply giving it the roleplaying attention it needs and deserves. People want players to treat death and resurrection with more finesse, but how do they have NPC's respond to it? Do they ever treat the PC's differently because they are known to habitually return from the dead - utterly unlike any NPC? Do they treat resurrection and raise dead ceremonies as solemn, grave, magical, magesterial occasions, or more like cash transactions of component costs? If your NPC's don't handle it the way you want the players to handle it, the players certainly aren't likely to treat it any different.

The point of having resurrection in the game is to prolong the fun. Character gets killed and you don't want to roll up a new one? Well, we have a solution for that. PC gets killed just when he's becoming vital to your unfolding plots? That can be fixed. That's really all it's there for. If THAT's not a problem for you, what IS the problem?

 

[Mort]

I just haven't seen much of a problem with Raise Dead - it's as easy or as difficult as the DM wants in his given game.

As for "making it work" in a D&D setting I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned Brust's Vlad Taltos line of novels.
In this setting, raise dead is easily available to people with means (not everyone but certainly everyone important). Assassination has taken on a bit of a new meaning. If they simply kill you, it's to send a message (stay away being the obvious one). If someone wants you to stay dead, there are (much more expensive) means of assuring that (just like there are in D&D until very high level - at which point death shouldn't be your biggest problem).

 

[Lurks-no-More]

Part of the problem, I think is that people tend to think that Raise dead and the like is easy. It's not. Raise dead requires you to have a fairly whole body. There's just all sorts of death out there that negates Raise Dead.

Cutting off the head and taking it away, for example. (Which keeps everyone else from using speak with dead to ask about the killer, and, depending on your DM's interpretation, may allow you to use the spell for posthumous interrogation.)

 

[Hussar]

Cutting off the head and taking it away, for example. (Which keeps everyone else from using speak with dead to ask about the killer, and, depending on your DM's interpretation, may allow you to use the spell for posthumous interrogation.)

Exactly what I mean. Heck, real world cultures did that regularly. There's a reason Japanese committed seppuku rather than being captured. They knew what they were in for and that included all sorts of desecration of the bodies.

Raise dead is not easy. Or rather, its as easy as you want it to be. There are just all sorts of death that takes Raise Dead off the table.