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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Petrosian" data-source="post: 170913" data-attributes="member: 1149">"With the raise dead spell and the resurrection spell, it seems that dying isn't quite the penalty. There are times my players get into a situation, and they think, "is it worth dying and losing a level" for. I really don't like them having this choice. (The party had a cleric who can now cast raise dead, so as long as there is a body, they will get raised). "here we go.By the exact same token, when they get to a river and the bridge has been destroyed by those they are pursuing, the wizards says "hmm.. is it worth burning all those 3rd level spells to get us across?"this reminds me of the "wow i remember the days when +1 swords were a wonderous thing and now they ain't that great a deal. Why aren't magic items mysterious?"Answer is, this ain't that world. in this world by 6th level your typical wiz can give you a +2 weapons for hours. A 7th level cleric can too. a 9th level cleric can raise you too, if you die the right way.Is that inherently bad? No. it just changes the significance of PC death.Now, IF you were in a world where PC death always came from dramatic events or PC error, then auto raise dead wouold be a potential problem.But, barring house rules, you are in a world where the difference between PC live and PC dead is a bad die roll the PC could not control.Two of the characters fighting a beholder each rolls a 20 followed by a 1 on two successive rounds of saves. one is turned to stone, the other is disintigrated. As the rules stand it will take a higher level spell and a level loss to raise the latter than the former. WHY even should that much difference exist? Now you want to talk about extensive quests or chances of not coming back at all or a PC time clock on how many times.Here is the rub.its not OUT OF CHARACTER for a character who knows the spell raise dead or how it works to think of the consequences. its very specifically in character. (Sure the character doesn't think level but thats just PC shorthand for "lose these things......")if you want to treat death as some big no-no then you need to from the outset rewrite the death rules BUT you darned well better also address the casual death by failed saves and lucky crits and the like. otherwise your wonderful roleplayers are being taught BY YOU to not get too interested in their PCs cause they might just die for no good reason.I took the reverse approach.In 9 levels of play, with six PCs, the sorcerer died once (failed save at wrong time), the ranger-druid once (went down and party stupdiity didn't get him out of harm's way), and the barbarian died twice (not stopping for healing while she was raging, go figure.) In each case i ran a post-mortem scene of the afterlife with interesting character development and stuff going on in addition to the scenes leading up to the 'big decision" of whether to come back or not. in three cases, the characters underwent some changes, some more significant than others. i have also introduced the notion of cults or sects of death gods who view those who have come back from beyond the "veil" as either abominations deserving to be hunted down or as special people who brought back insights that need to be cultivated and nurtured and plumbed for wisdom. In other words, without saying "burn your character sheets your work is all for naught" and doing snoopy dances over the ashes, i still manage to make death more than just an interlude between raises where the player can go make a beverage run.NO RAISE rules, whether they be roll-a-die, countdown, or even quest based no-raise rules, only hurt the people you ought to be wanting to keep, those who get into and care about their character's and the stories. You do not need to hurt them, you need to cultivate them.The guys who don't care, who see the character as "just the playing piece of the moment" probably have a "backpack full of characters' and won't be discouraged at all by the "no-raise" rules.So unless the latter are what you dream of having in your group and the former something you want to discourage, start making you world recognize that raise deads exist and like fly spells and sending spells, they make the world a whole different place but not necessarily a bad place.</blockquote>

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