Raise Dead in your 4e Game

[Hand of Evil]

not part of my world view, planes and mythos that I have set up for my games.

 

[S'mon]

A long standing practice IMC 9 (pre 4e) is to take the heads of defeated foes so they can't come back. It can be kinda Highlandery.

 

[Plane Sailing]

To be a little different: Raise Dead is free, doesn't require anything, and can occur immediately between encounters if the player wants. The caveat is that death changes the character. At least one significant encounter or daily power must change to be from a different class or race or use different keywords (or primary ability scores must change). No characters have actually died yet, but for example:

Half-Elf Paladin changes a feat to Deva Heritage with higher charisma
Dragonborn Cleric (multiclass warlock) becomes a Cleric / Warlock hybrid
Halfling Rogue becomes a refluffed Gnome

Sort of the Dr Who regeneration approach? Quite an interesting idea.

 

[Dausuul]

Not allowed. I don't hold with raising the dead as a standard procedure.

I did give my PCs a limited amount of resurrection magic (with attached plot strings) that requires enough of the corpse to lay a magic severed hand on the corpse's chest.

 

[drothgery]

Come play with me, during my last campaign I had more than 12 PK's /flex

I may be a midwestern US native, but I've lived in southern California for the last 8 years. Denmark in January doesn't sound like a fun vacation spot .

More seriously, I've been away from my game for three months due to some long-term contract work that's kept me in another city, and didn't start regularly playing 4e until last year, so my PC's have had less opportunity to die. I took one character from 1st to 4th level, and another from first to sixth, and that's it.

 

[dangerous jack]

Sort of the Dr Who regeneration approach? Quite an interesting idea.

I hadn't thought about it in that light, but I suppose so. (And since my campaign is intended to involve time travel, perhaps it's a doubly appropriate comparison)

But it was really intended to just be a quick change they can make between encounters, since we only get to play 1/month and making someone sit out for a significant time wasn't appealing.

 

[Jack99]

I may be a midwestern US native, but I've lived in southern California for the last 8 years. Denmark in January doesn't sound like a fun vacation spot .

I can assure you that Denmark is not a fun vacation spot, no matter the time of the year..

 

[Jan van Leyden]

I can assure you that Denmark is not a fun vacation spot, no matter the time of the year..

Hey! We spent our honeymoon in Denmark! OK, it was because our first choice suffered from a flood, but still!

 

[Jan van Leyden]

I can assure you that Denmark is not a fun vacation spot, no matter the time of the year..

Hey! We spent our honeymoon in Denmark! OK, it was because our first choice suffered from a flood, but still!

 

[Victim]

When 4E came out, several people were complaining about the phrasing of raise dead. In previous versions of the game, disintegrate was really cool because it destroyed the body--thus preventing the villains from using a handy raise dead to get that villain back into the action. Many players felt that the ritual denied them a great way to keep a pesky villain dead.

Some players argued that they could use any part of a body, and hence left a clipping of their hair with a trusted temple or the like. In one case, a player argued that you could use raise dead on a single hair. This prompted my own campaign's guideline of exactly how much of a body was required.

Sort of. Raise Dead required a body and had other restrictions (no death magic, etc). OTOH, with Resurrection, any tiny part of the body would do as well - so you could res a disintegrated target too with some of the dust. And the two spells were pretty close in level. And 3.x had True Res, which basically required nothing except a really expensive component. So it's not like 4e is unique in hard to prevent resurrections.

It seems like you could reasonably argue that 4e combines Raise and Res, but makes the cost depend more on the level of the target than what you needed to bring them back from.