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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 3694614" data-attributes="member: 7635">I played Star Wars Revised d20 for over a year (got to tenth level, more on that). No res in THAT, and there is plenty of ways to die. (Vitalty/Wound vs. lightsaber, nuff said). So I'll use that as my baseline for "no-res" D&D...Unless you are removing Expensive Spell Components (ESC), I fail to see how the raise spells will fix this. My group has began a cartel on the purchase of 100 gp pearls, for example...Unless you are dumping energy drain, this one is hanging around too...Nope. You get two types of players usually in a "dungeon crawl" style game without res...a.) Turtles who stock on every magical and mundane protection available, search every 5' square, spend 15 minutes discussing strategy at every door, and run as soon as things fall apart in any given encounter or such. The game begins to feel like "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", but without the funny parts...b.) Battering Rams who tweak their characters to strike first, strike hard, strike often. They squeeze every last bonus out of a build, favor power-combos, and whose sole goal in combat is to kill it with SWAT style precision and power before whatever monster can act (or act often). Both of them do this for the same reason: there are no second chances. So they prep for the worst, either with a good defense or a good offense (or both!) because that's it. It can lead to a bigger powergaming problem then with Raises IN, since if Players know that they may have a second chance, they are more likely to take risks, and thus advance the game along. Um... Ever heard of Knuckles the Rogue? How bout Knuckles the 2nd, Knuckles the 3rd, Knuckles the 4th...This goes doubly for "Bob, Knuckles just died. Roll up what you want, but we don't have a rogue right now..."BUZZ! Flat wrong. By the time Raise comes around, PCs are fighting against no only magic missiles and spears, but disintegrates, finger of deaths, devourers, beholders, lethal poisons, and other extremely deadly nastiness. Survival often comes down to a roll or two, and those odds don't break for the PCs nearly as often as they should to survive that kind of onslaught.  Action Points help, but they aren't nearly enough in a "one hit kills" world. This leads to the mentality of extreme protection (Turtle) or Kill it before it kills me (Battering Ram).Unless the game has no internal continuity and really is a series of dungeons with PCs are pawns of the players. THEN I won't worry bout death, or a lot of other things (like names or histories) either. See above. There are plenty of other ways to break a DM of the Pet PC scenario, but really, isn't epic story telling about watching ONE person grow? Imagine of Frodo inherited the one ring, but Gromo (the 15th hobbit encountered by the fellowship after most of them dropped like flies in Moria) was the one to chuck it into Mt. Doom? If I want fear, I don't need to resort to killing PCs or threatening them with never playing their favorite PC again. In a world of interventionist deities, powerful wizards, ancient curses, and soul-imprisonment, Raise Dead is nothing more than a way to counteract a night of bad dice rolls.</blockquote>

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