Raise Dead now costs 5000 GP!

[Storminator]

Man, E-B! You are highly dismissive! Perhaps the designers thought of that, you know? How 'bout if, just once, you give an idea the benefit of the doubt before you go around blasting it?

PS

It sounds interesting but it seems like that would only serve to exacerbate the negative impact of Raise Dead on party composition--namely the increasing level difference in the party.

Taking a hypothetical 8th level party of a fighter, a cleric, a rogue, a sorceror, and a bard, let's assume the bard dies. The party gains xp for that adventure and goes to the temple to ask about getting the bard raised. Quest time.

So the four PCs go with one "really important NPC" on a quest. No problem. Assuming the NPC is able to contribute to the action of the quest, the bard's player has fun. They finish the adventure, the four PCs and the NPC get experience and the bard is raised. Now, you most likely have a party with 4 9th level characters and one 7th level character--a character who is significantly weaker and is most likely the next character to die as well. If the party was not equal in xp at first--say a 9th level fighter, a 7th level rogue, 8th level cleric, 9th level sorceror, 7th level bard and the bard died, he most likely comes back at 6th level when the rest of the party is 8th-10th level. The 4 level spread in the party will make it even more challenging to construct encounters in which the bard can contribute.

Now, OTOH, if the PC is raised before the party goes on the quest, at least the level difference isn't exacerbated any more than necessary.

 

[Nail]

As magic is capable of almost anything, it can create demiplanes, slay from a distance, turn solids into gas, cause the blind to see, sow hate amongst friends, ... SO much so, that it becomes boundless. At high levels, "who killed the king" is unanswerable, as the king's enemies are all so powerful in their own right, that the capacity to decieve and delude any investigator are complete.

Hey Green!

Boy, are we OT here, eh? But still....can't ....resist.......reply......

I agree that magic can make things much different, but I disagree that things become so "boundless" as to make investigative adventuring pointless. This is for two reasons:

#1) There still are rules governing what can and can't be done, and these rules apply to the magic as well as to the mundane. (That's the reason for a gaming system like 3e, rather than purely free-form cooperative story-teling.) If you know these rules, you can still peice together what is true.

#2) At every level of magic, for every Nondetection-type spell there is a spell that can counter it. This will always be true, even if you bring in 3rd party or home-brew material. Spells like Commune and Scry come to mind. The magic of the BBEG is not invinsible. (And if it is, you should redesign your campaign.)

As for Raise Dead costs:
No one has yet argued that the cost should be zero. So then, what should the cost be? I'd say about 10% PC wealth at the minimum level you can cast it. Sounds fair to me.

....Oh my. Would you look at that! That is what the cost is in 3.5e! Amazing.

 

[Keith]

“This change was based on a couple conclusions:

1) Raising from the dead was too cheap. It wasn't "special" or even "unusual"--it was so commonplace as to place significant strains on the believability of the system.”

Having taken this position here a couple of times before, I feel vindicated. It’s not much to cling to, I grant you, but I’m at work, so it is something at least.
I always priced it out of reach anyway. Plus I use a death god who does not take kindly to meddling.

I have no problem with people enjoying a setting where they pop back to life every few months. I suggest at least trying one where you don’t, though. It can add some realistic and enjoyable tension to deadly situations.

 

[National Acrobat]

Hmm. I doubt that hardly any DM out there is going to stick to the 5000gp on Raise Dead. I am sure that there are already tons of House Rules out there regarding the use of the spell anyway.

I know that as a DM, I always attach a Geas to the Spell if it is your own church. That Geas usually takes precedence over what you are currently involved in (or is used as plot device later). If you are attempted to be raised by a faith other than your own there is no guarantee that you will come back. If you do, not only will the cost be significantly higher, but you get the Geas as well. Sometimes, death just needs to be final.

Now, that is my take on it. I am sure that most folks who DM probably don't see it this way, but none of my players (9 in all) have any problem with this whatsover. They actually like it, because we role play the request of the priest to bring the soul back to life.

 

[Malin Genie]

I know that as a DM....

Yes, but with you as a DM, the last time we merely spoke with dead the entire party ended up traumatised ..... I don't know we'd be game to actually try raising....

 

[Tzarevitch]

The primary problem I have with paying to return from death is why should any god care that you want to pay money to return from death? The clergy might need the cash but the god certainly doesn't and the deity is the one actually granting the return from death. It fundamentally turns deities into mere insurance brokers. ("Uh god, I have the final insurance premium payment, could you please restore Bob here.")

In my current Rokugan campaign I use a Hero Point mechanic to avoid the Raise Dead spell problem. If you are affected by something that would have killed you, you may spend a Hero Point to be "left for dead" instead of trully dead (i.e. you at at -9 and unconscious). As far as my game is concerned death is THE END. Once you cease being heroic enough death is possible if you are careless.

Raising the dead is strictly against the rules of the cosmos and even the Fortunes themselves can't or won't violate that rule. No mortal magic can restore a soul to true life. Only violating the laws of heaven and using forbidden necromancy to convert to an undead will avert true death and only if done BEFORE the Fortune of Death passes judgment.

The dead soul is judged by the fortune of death within the 21 day holding period mandated by cosmic law. The judged soul is either reincarnated (NOT the same as the druid spell) back into the mortal world, promoted to paradise or sentenced to any one of the 10,000 hells based upon the soul's deeds in life. (A reincarnated character is a new person. It has some vague memories of its past but it is a new character. It has none of the old guy's stuff or abilities.)

I have found in this way that the Fortunes can show favor on heroic (and anti-heroic) characters with the cinematic "he didn't really die" trick, but the spectre of True Death always remains in the background if the characters don't continue to do great things worthy of heros. (As the cliche goes, "fortune favors the bold.") It also allows BBEGs to be lasting foils for the PCs to test their mettle against and it means that the general populace just dies when their time comes without the absurdity of paying god to bring you back.

Tzarevitch

 

[National Acrobat]

Yes, but with you as a DM, the last time we merely spoke with dead the entire party ended up traumatised ..... I don't know we'd be game to actually try raising....

If I recall correctly, some of that may have been due to the method in which a certain cleric performed the Spell...

Now, I agree the description of the effect may have been over the top....I am certainly hoping that we don't have to have anyone raised.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

No problem for me. Evil has to be like EVIL. Not just your average goon/drugdealer. At least, that is the way I read it.

OT: I still don't get why people think this solves the "problem." When I'm running games, it doesn't ruin anything precisely because it detects so many people that it isn't a substitute for Detect Bad Guy. Any of the 5000+ people in the city (of 15000 people) radiating evil could be the bad guy (assuming he's evil) or they could just be average goon/drugdealers. However, as soon as you say "it only detects EVIL", then it is Detect Bad Guy and it's pretty much a license to smite.

Or it could be an illusion of a dog barking, and the window was smashed after the fact. Perhaps the window isn't really smashed, it is a permanent illusion...

Could be an illusion of a dead body, could be cut after being held, could be the religious trying to fob it of on to some rogue, needn't be a local, they could have scry-buff-teleported in from the darkside of the moonn. So no local knowledge of illegal purchases. Nor registered arcanists. It is the job of the DM to drop hints, obviously, but paranoid players just sit there and go, "This is a set-up..."

You end up with such circle arguments from the players during this, that it becomes pointless (although it can be fun to listen into, for a while, but not an entire evening). Magic can do almost anything in the game.

That problem has nothing to do with magic. It has to do with paranoia and the sense that the DM is not creating a world in which things are often as they seem but a world in which nothing can be trusted.

Such deception is conceivable in mostly or entirely non-magical milleaus as well. Maybe the fabric fibres were deliberately left on the wound and the DNA was planted on the subject. Maybe the fingerprints were left intentionally and the window was smashed by a random vandal who came by 2 hours after the crime. You could go through the entire plot of any detective show spinning conspiracy theories like that. And you would probably have to come to the conclusion that they are all possible--if not likely.

The same thing applies to the magical world. It's always possible that it's a set-up and the bad guys Scry-buff-teleported from a long ways away and used Nystul's antimagical aura to cover the effects of the teleport just like it's always possible that the victim of a more modern setting murder was really a secret agent perfectly living out a double identity and that he was killed by an Illuminati hit team that framed a local ne'er-do-well for the murder (leaving fingerprints, DNA evidence, etc on the scene) before they flew out on experimental silent black helicopters. However, investigators generally ignore that possibility and PCs should be able to ignore its magical equivalent unless the campaign is set up for them to expose the magical Illuminati in which case they will not ignore the possibility but look at it as the preferred hypothesis. Fox Mulder would always be wrong on CSI and the CSI characters would generally be wrong on the X-Files. It's a question of the campaign's assumptions not its magic level.

 

[Al]

And the extremes to which a killer must go to eradicate someone

Probably easier than assassinating someone without magic at all. Teleport makes strikes much easier, and Improved Invisibility, Nondetection, Mind Blank, Ghostform, Etherealness and a host of other spells make infiltration much easier. A Summon Monster VIII (barghest) then has a 50/50 chance to finish the job, or a Trap the Soul/Soul Bind is an expensive but reliable way. Animate Dead is cheap, dirty and messy, but can work.

The clergy might need the cash but the god certainly doesn't and the deity is the one actually granting the return from death

And this is what I was talking about...roleplaying, not mechanical restrictions. Some deities IMC do not allow the dead to return *full stop*. Others allow it freely- for a quest. Yet others are just happy for it to go ahead.

I'd say about 10% PC wealth at the minimum level you can cast it. Sounds fair to me.

Again, I think that this is prohibitively expensive. We'll have to see how things pan out.

 

[ForceUser]

Then I guess you've never been in any type of near fatal accident.

I had to relearn how to walk when I was 15, even though I learned to walk when I was an infant. Funny how because of a simple injury (water skiing accident), I suddenly became "dumber" and had to relearn things.

I had a friend who was in a car accident about three years ago, and he is just now returning to complete fluency in English (which is his native tongue) and a 12th-grade reading level.

And remember... neither of us died and returned to life, so I'd say that our experiences were somewhat less harrowing and traumatic than DEATH would be.

So, in summation, it makes perfect sense for a character that is brought back from the dead to be weaker.

Thanks for this; I've been trying to work out a rationale for my players on why I intend to use actual level loss IMC (we traditionally don't).