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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 3697072" data-attributes="member: 1757">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.</blockquote>

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