Reincarnate: Good spell or best spell?

[Shiroiken]

Nobody wants to waste time questing for their original body?

I have never seen the lack of a body be the reason for reincarnate. Reincarnate has only been used IME when only a Druid is available, instead of a Cleric. Most players have a specific idea in mind, and randomly altering the race can really mess it up, both mechanically and socially.

I had a paladin in 3E that went from being a human paladin of the god of beauty to a freaking kobold. Putting aside the severe mechanical problems (-4 Str penalty, and weapon size reduction making my holy greatsword unusable), kobolds did not fit my definition of "beauty." Thus, my character lost faith in his goddess and lost paladinhood, turning to become a blackguard/anti-paladin. I MIGHT have considered continuing to play the character, except the DM had a "no evil" rule, which the character now violated.

 

[Olrox17]

As others have mentioned, the main selling point of reincarnate is that it works on a body part. Raise dead requires a full body, while resurrection is really high level.
For these reasons, reincarnate was used multiple times in my campaign. There are no clerics of 13th level around, so it was the only way to bring back ruined corpses. And interestingly, none of my players complained that their "build" was ruined when they got a "sub-optimal" race. Of course, I allowed quests to get back their old body, if they wished to.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

It's my opinion that "DM empowerment" actually leads to stuff like this. I'm leery of DMs that rail against "player entitlement" and games that go out of their way to support the "DM is god" playstyle. A benevolent dictator is still a dictator. I basically won't play 5e outside of Adventurer's League because of this.

Fair enough - I'm implying that you might be whining, you're implying that I might have a DM god complex. I'm sure if we observed each other playing, we'd see neither is true. But for the purposes of discussion...

Call it ("it" = "player entitlement") what you will, but if a player starts whining about something being unfair at our table, I don't really even need to say anything as DM. The other players jump in to tell the whiner to knock it off. We're collectively trying to have fun. We don't have time for someone getting all bent out of shape because the dice land a certain way, or the DM provides a seemingly restrictive dilemma, or another player chooses a sub-optimal action in a game. That behavior is antithetical to the fun we're trying to share. I'm sorry your experience has been with a DM whom you feel is messing with characters for their own amusement - but IMO there's a fine line between that happening and the player not just going with the flow of the collectively generated action.


And to bring things back on topic just a little bit, this is a great point:

As others have mentioned, the main selling point of reincarnate is that it works on a body part. Raise dead requires a full body, while resurrection is really high level.

 

[toucanbuzz]

...was there ever a time when druids got reincarnate before clerics got raise dead - level-wise? As for 500gp by 9th level that is not a significant cost in most campaign expectations i have encountered.*

In AD&D, it was 7th level, then it dropped to 4th (which is where I saw most application), and now it's back to 5th level, and it had no monetary cost in several variations, unlike now. I should have clarified that I haven't seen Reincarnate used in 5E (yet). I'm somewhat disappointed they basically made it a Raise Dead variant.

Raise dead works just fine in the wilderness. there is no requirement for getting to a city.

It's a great option when you don't have a 9th level cleric around. In lore, there's a druid circle for every geographical region, which gives the DM options if someone dies away from town. Once, we role-played the reincarnation ritual, and afterwards the party viewed druids as pretty freaky, enigmatic beings. After all, they were crafting a body from wood and clay, animating it, and imbuing it with a lost soul. Playing that part out was a lot more fun than a simple video-game solution of "poof, you're at the graveyard."

personally, i would like to think that the memorable parts of "my character's story" was not that "the gods kept making him a kobold so he gave up."...But, that said, we each have our preferences. thats why there are more than 51 flavors.

Yep, very true to each their own. The moral to that story is that a single random die roll can take you in a very unexpected direction. Sometimes, those will lead to very unique storylines. Someone earlier posted a memory about questing as an intelligent bear (prior edition). That's not stuff you plan out, and that's the stuff we are talking about years later.

 

[5ekyu]

In AD&D, it was 7th level, then it dropped to 4th (which is where I saw most application), and now it's back to 5th level, and it had no monetary cost in several variations, unlike now. I should have clarified that I haven't seen Reincarnate used in 5E (yet). I'm somewhat disappointed they basically made it a Raise Dead variant.

It's a great option when you don't have a 9th level cleric around. In lore, there's a druid circle for every geographical region, which gives the DM options if someone dies away from town. Once, we role-played the reincarnation ritual, and afterwards the party viewed druids as pretty freaky, enigmatic beings. After all, they were crafting a body from wood and clay, animating it, and imbuing it with a lost soul. Playing that part out was a lot more fun than a simple video-game solution of "poof, you're at the graveyard."

Yep, very true to each their own. The moral to that story is that a single random die roll can take you in a very unexpected direction. Sometimes, those will lead to very unique storylines. Someone earlier posted a memory about questing as an intelligent bear (prior edition). That's not stuff you plan out, and that's the stuff we are talking about years later.

You know, there are a lot of cases where a spell or power is great when the other things that do that job and are better are not available. Sling is great when you need ranged weapon attacks and no other ranged weapons are around.

 

[Maxperson]

In AD&D, it was 7th level, then it dropped to 4th (which is where I saw most application), and now it's back to 5th level, and it had no monetary cost in several variations, unlike now. I should have clarified that I haven't seen Reincarnate used in 5E (yet). I'm somewhat disappointed they basically made it a Raise Dead variant.

Just as an addition. In 1e wizards got the spell at 6th level, albeit with a different list of things you could come back as. You didn't need a druid.

 

[Sunseeker]

I wouldn't call him a bad DM overall, he just occasionally had this particular desire to "mess with" pcs in a permanent way. In a RIFTS campaign he ran, another player was knocked unconcious and woke up with a bionic hand. The character in question was a mage, and in that game bionics interfere heavily with magic, meaning the character no longer functioned in the same way.

This DM didn't advertise himself as a "killer dm", and he usually wasn't. He encouraged the players to build characters focused on RP rather than mechanics. Then he'd basically randomly spring something like this once in a blue moon. TBH, it's why I'm such a powergamer now. I do my best to avoid leaving my fate up to the whims of the DM and randomness of the die rolls.

It's my opinion that "DM empowerment" actually leads to stuff like this. I'm leery of DMs that rail against "player entitlement" and games that go out of their way to support the "DM is god" playstyle. A benevolent dictator is still a dictator. I basically won't play 5e outside of Adventurer's League because of this.

I play with a similar DM. Like you, it's one of the reasons I power-game. In a recent short game, we all awoke with our weapons missing. The character I had made needed a certain weapon in order to work right, so now with *some other weapon* the character didn't play properly. When that character, unsuprisingly, died a few rounds later, my next character was a monk. Take my weapons? Got my fists. Take my fists? Got my feet. Take my legs well..

 

[Fauchard1520]

Ironically, since I first posted this question one of my buddies has decided to roll up this thing in a Pathfinder game:

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/cor...es/paizo-druid-archetypes/reincarnated-druid/