Raise Dead now costs 5000 GP!

[Pax]

No one is saying that a first-level character should be able to afford it. (Even if he could, the spell would fail, because the level loss would bring him to 0 HD.) The issue is that with the increased cost, even a party powerful enough to cast the spell would likely be unable to afford the material component.

What should have been done, is, in the spell description, simply note that churches/temples/etc typically require a LARGE additional donation to the faith, before they even consider petitioning for a character's return from death.

That would have reinforced Andy's stated intent (make the spell be cast more often by the party Cleric) actually HAPPEN.

If the coin cost is levied no matter WHO casts it ... then what does it matter if the party cleric casts the spell, of Father Bob back in town does?

That said -- in general, I dislike it, and I'm not going to use it as-is. I'll bump the material costs up to those levels in the case of cast-for-hire, but not for PC clerics casting it on their friends. The extra expense will be a donation to the faith, too, so PC clerics won't be making mad profit raising people from teh dead at cut rates.

 

[3d6]

No bones about that. The problems stem from the "believability" of your games. Part of the fun we're talking about here is from immersing yourself in a world that "makes sense". Cheap raise deads tend to make the world make less sense. As always, YMMV.

Not really. My campaign simply assumes that anyone who can afford a 5th level spell will never die for more than a few days until old age claims him. Actually, because some churches cast spells in exchange for favors, there are theocracies where even normal people never truly die until old age.

The world just makes different assumptions about death, and the people of my world have a different attitude about death.

 

[coyote6]

So, I don't want the headache of constantly intigrating new characters, but I don't want death to be a non-issue for them.

Note that the spell has a material component; normally, when one casts a spell or has a spell cast on one's behalf, one provides the component. There is, however, nothing that says that is an absolute rule.

In other words, somebody else can pony up the diamond dust for the PCs. Naturally, the PCs would then owe that person a rather sizable favor.

Me, I'll call that a "plot hook to be named later".

But then, I'm fond of the terms imposed by Sagiro to return a PC to life in his campaign.

The problem with that [Power Components] is you tend to have a session or two where one player may as well not show up as you quest for his ressurection.

The way to get around that is to have the church doing the raising/resurrecting have the power components they need to raise Joe PC on hand. The PCs (including just-back-from-the-dead Joe) then get to quest to replace those components, somehow.

If the PCs are often going to that church for resurrections, then they may consider such quests as "paying in advance."

 

[JoeBlank]

FWIW, I'm a player, and I like the change.

Seconded.

Primarily a player, and like the change.

In the campaign I have been playing in since 3.0 came out I count 14 character deaths with only one Raise Dead. And that was not something the characters sought, it came about as part of an ongoing plot.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Reading Andy's "reasoning" on the changes takes away what little faith I had in his game design abilities.

1. "It's not special"

This is the second time this justification shows up (the first time was in the "keen and Imp Crit" don't stack fiasco) and it's no more convincing than it was the first time. I don't care what Andy Collins thinks is "special" or "not special."

And the change doesn't make getting raised more "special" it makes it more punitive. As far as I can tell, special in this context means that raising the dead is either rare or a plot device.

What will determine the frequency of raise dead and/or resurrection in a game are the death rate and policy on replacement characters. Any campaign with frequent death will have either frequent resurrections or frequent character replacement. A campaign with

As far as the relative commonality of raising NPCs--village mayors, etc goes, there are two answers. 1. This depends upon the assumptions that you make about the clerics in the region. According to the 3e PH, for instance, Raise Dead costs 950gp (450 for the casting, 500 for the material component). If the commoners could get Raise Dead for 500gp then you've already assumed that good clerics (and maybe neutral or evil clerics) are accustomed to casting their spells for free. Assuming that commoners have even that kind of gp on hand also assumes that non-adventuring NPCs have at least a significant fraction of the property value as adventuring NPCs. If they only have 1/10th the property of adventuring NPCs of the same level, they won't generally be able to afford it--even at 3e prices. (That analysis excludes characters obviously much more wealthy than even PCs of the same level--such as the merchants and nobles who buy, sell, and trade magic items with the PCs--they will be able to afford Raise Dead even at 3.5e prices)
2. As others have pointed out, it depends on the assumptions you make about death. There's no reason, for instance, to suppose that many NPCs want to come back. PCs who are raised are obviously the driven types who want to complete their tasks on Oerth (or Faerun) and change the world. That could be very unusual.


The other possibility for making Raise Dead "special" would be the requiring of quests as can be seen in Sagiro's story hour or Nemmerle's story hour.

The cost of a raise dead spell has little to do with either the frequency or the plot device factor of raise dead. The price increase won't change the frequency of PC raise deads much--it'll just make it cost more when PCs elect to raise an old character instead of creating a new one. It won't explain why NPCs don't get raised more--explanation wasn't necessary for commoners to begin with and it will still be necessary for the wealthy folk. And a price increase doesn't make raising the dead into a plot device.

2. "Everyone goes back to town and gets True Resurrection cast."

This statement makes me wonder how often Andy plays D&D and who he plays it with. In all my time playing 3e, I've seen only 2 True Resurrection spells cast. I've never played in a campaign where there are enough 17+ level clerics running around that True Resurrection is commonly available--even for people willing to shell out the money.

Furthermore, the incentive for a PC to cast the spell--taking no time out of the adventure--is not increased by the change. In fact, it is decreased. By 9th level, it was fairly easy for characters to aquire a 500 gp diamond to carry with them. 5000gp worth of diamond dust is a much more significant investment that is much less likely to be made. Thus, the PC cleric on the field is less likely rather than more likely to have the material component available after the change. And I haven't yet heard of any cleric that prepares Raise Dead when going out to adventure. It's even less likely to occur now that the material component is less available. Consequently, raising dead will still usually mean interrupting the adventure or continuing on with a bored player wether PCs or NPCs actually do the casting.

If Andy actually wanted to change the frequency in which the spell is cast and its "specialness", he should have given it a cost for the caster or had it include a Quest for the raised individual.

If he actually wanted to make it more likely for PCs to cast it rather than for it to be cast by NPCs, he should have increased the price of NPC spellcasting. (spell level squared times caster level times 10gp would have done the trick).

If he wanted to make Raise Dead into the kind of thing that PCs could cast on short notice and continue on with the adventure (note how his point 2 conflicts with point 1 "specialness" here), he should have left the material costs alone.

Whatever one may think of the change, Andy's "justifications" are just plain silly.

 

[Agback]

Raising the dead should be a miracle of religious faith, not something you pick up at Wal-mart.

It is a miracle of religious faith. But you also need a 500 GP diamond from Wal-Mart.

And I never liked that. If a god wants somebody raised, it ought to be able to do that, not need a honking great gemstone.

As for commercial resurrection, the economical approach was always and still is to build a wondrous item that grinds out a fixed number every day. According to the table on p 242 of the DMG aMitre of Raise Dead x5 per day will cost 250,000 worth of diamonds, 40,500 worth of other materials and services, 81 days of effort from a cleric of at least 9th level who knows 'Craft Wondrous Item', and personal mana from the cleric amounting to 3240 experience points. At the recommended price for such a cleric's time and bits of his soul, the cost to the god/cult would be the equivalent of 331,000 GP.

Five 'Raise Dead's per day, six days per week, comes to about 1,560 raisings per year. That would only be a prospect for a large cult, even in a dangerous D&D world. Figuring a life expectancy of 30 years, you would need a population of nearly fifty thousand Faithful to need that many raisings. But for any cult that can scrape together the wherewithal, what a wonderful thing it would be to be able to Raise any member of member's child who died prematurely!

Supposing a very generous 10% per annum real return on capital, making a Mitre of Raise Dead would cost the cult that did so approximately 21.2 GP per Raising, which I don't doubt the Faithful would be happy to pay, either 'per service' or on a contributory basis of, say, 10 SP per year. That is, providing the cult can get the volume of turnover. For a smaller cult that nevertheless has the means to make such a piece of ecclesiastical headgear, it must be very attractive to Raise the worshippers of friendly gods provided that they help to amortise the investment.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

The problem with that is you tend to have a session or two where one player may as well not show up as you quest for his ressurection.

Anything that's not fun is bad by default.

Maybe, but 'easy' does not equal 'fun'. I couldn't stand playing in a game where there was zero risk. Do you not let your player's fail on a quest because that wouldn't be fun? If you are going to make coming back from the dead a trivial experience, why bother to let them die in the first place?

As a player and especially as a DM, I'm grateful for anything that lowers the power-level of the game. It's much easier for me to cut a player some slack on a 'raise dead' because he just got unlucky than it is to jack up the price for someone who keeps dying through poor play.

You'll get far better results with your group if you charge them half of list price in an especially deadly campaign than if you charge them double because you think coming back to life is too commonplace.

This holds true for all the moaning and gnashing of teeth over the changes in 3.5. Tis far, far easier (and preferable, in my opinion) to keep the core game relatively tame (re: crits, spell DCs, whatever) and let the DM loosen it as they see fit, than to start with a game halfway over the top to begin with, and expect the DM to reign it in. This also makes it much easier for inexperienced DMs to run a game without one powergamer running rampant.

As an aside, whenever we had a resurrection quest, we had the player whose character had died DM the adventure. It gave them something to do, it helped them gain experience as a DM, and it gave the regular DM a chance to play for a change. Plus, in our experience, the player-turned-DM would come up with really epic stuff because they wanted their character's rebirth to be special.

 

[3d6]

Maybe, but 'easy' does not equal 'fun'.

"Needlessly punitive" doesn't equal "fun" either.

 

[Agback]

No one is saying that a first-level character should be able to afford it. (Even if he could, the spell would fail, because the level loss would bring him to 0 HD.)

No. According to the spell description Raise Dead does work on 1st-level characters. It reduces their Con instead of their level.

Mentioning commoners here is a red herring. Your average commoner earns 1 silver piece per day. Even if he had no living expenses, he'd have to work 7-day weeks for 136 years in order to earn enough for a single 3E raise.

Only if he was a member of a poor or stupid religion. Cults with more than a thousand members and that responded rationally to their opportunities had wondrous items that could be amortised by charging about 35 silver pieces for a Raise Dead.

Of course, things could be very different if the GM Rule Zeroed ridiculously cheap wondrous items.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

"Needlessly punitive" doesn't equal "fun" either.

And 10% of a character's wealth is hardly punitive. It doesn't even reach the level of hardship if you spread it out amongst all the party members. And since, as DM, you control the level of wealth in a game, you control the rate at which the party would recoup their losses.

Heck, I pay the government 35%, and that doesn't buy me a 'get out of the afterlife free' card.