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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 975841" data-attributes="member: 3146">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.</blockquote>

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