D&D 5E Revivify - where did that come from?!?

[I'm A Banana]

That being said, the *impact* is has on the game is huge. When someone drops to zero it's a big, dramatic moment. The injured PC has to be shielded from vindictive enemies that may perform a coup de grace on him/her, and must be healed/stabilized before death follows. But with this... eh just leave him/her, let's deal with the enemies and we'll revivify him/her right after. The dramatic tension is removed, and the overall risk are also reduced.

Is it just me?

You're not wrong in your impression.

The big question is about the play experience you're going for.

Revivify exists to keep PC's up and alive. Death in 5e is fairly gentle for this very reason, as well (death saves give you a pretty good chance to stabilize and minimize the possibility of bleeding out). The game's assumption here is that PC's who don't die, especially at mid-to-high levels, are a good thing. You've spent some time with this PC, you're invested in this PC's story, them being alive is generally more interesting than them being dead, bam, we get a spell to keep them alive.

It's fair enough to disagree with that - to want a higher risk of death and a higher permanence to it, with death being more of a Big Deal. 5e is just a bit gun-shy about letting PC's die. It lets it happen, but it puts a few roadblocks in the way to ensure that if it happens, it's not just due to one unlucky roll, and even then, it's not the end of the world.

 

[Ancalagon]

It's not so much that I lust for PC deaths... it just too easy to avoid. I'm perfectly fine that the 5th level party takes their dead companions to a temple and get him/her raised and brought back. But to me the fairly generous death save while dying (it's definitely more lenient than -10) rule is protective enough.

 

[Saeviomagy]

The prime motivator in D&D isn't fear of death - it's fear of failure. Otherwise most adventurers wouldn't go adventuring. They'd take on their first quest, then retire, rich.

If you make death difficult to recover from, then players will just roll new characters instead, which I think is to everyone's detriment: the best games I've played in feature a long-running cast.

That said, I do think that 5e makes death too difficult to achieve, and also makes it have this weird inverse relationship between occurrence and severity. At low levels, it's much easier to be instantly killed, and dying is far from guaranteed to be reversible. At high levels it's almost impossible to be instantly killed while the effect of dying becomes more and more a speedbump.

I think a return to death at some fixed negative number would be a positive change, increasing the risk of using small heals to stand someone up in combat, and reducing the risk of instant death from bad luck when adventurers are starting out.

 

[I'm A Banana]

It's not so much that I lust for PC deaths... it just too easy to avoid. I'm perfectly fine that the 5th level party takes their dead companions to a temple and get him/her raised and brought back. But to me the fairly generous death save while dying (it's definitely more lenient than -10) rule is protective enough.

Yeah, 5e ain't a precious princess snowflake about that stuff. Take it out, it'll be fine, your death count won't appreciably increase.

 

[Edwin Suijkerbuijk]

Just think, a level 1 version could revive someone who's only mostly dead.

I think revivify is alreadt the sopell that cevives people who are only mostly dead.
Like a magical defibrillator

 

[RotGrub]

I feel like it came from 4E. 5E can be swingy, so this spell serves as a "Protection from Oops" so character dependent plots aren't ruined. It's as bad on stories as Raise Dead, Resurrection, and True Resurrection, it just shows up earlier.

I'm not sure why Raise Dead and Resurrection create bad on stories. It's D&D and IMO, such spells are part of the story. It's not good or bad, just different. In D&D death is just a status and it's not perm unless there is no way to raise the person.

Heck even in 2e, we used the short casting times assigned to magical items to resurrect companions in the middle of battle. The idea has been around for a very long time.

Of course, I think it's far more jarring for a fighter to recover in the middle of a battle without the aid of magic. For example, we had our fighter drop after being pushed into an acid pool. The PC with the healer feat restored him and then watched the fighter use his second wind to return to normal, no magic needed. I'd rather him just die at 0 and then be raised.

 

[RotGrub]

If I recall, the revivify spell was created by Chris Perkins. I do recall some comment about it in the 3.5e rules compendium.

 

[Xeviat]

I'm not sure why Raise Dead and Resurrection create bad on stories. It's D&D and IMO, such spells are part of the story. It's not good or bad, just different. In D&D death is just a status and it's not perm unless there is no way to raise the person.

That was sort of my point. I was saying that if the OP thinks Revivify is bad on the story of their game, then Raise Dead and Resurrection are too. "As bad as" didn't necessarily mean that they were bad, just that they have the same level of badness, which is subjective. Personally, I don't like the spells out of the hands of adventurers. It makes some plots rather weak. But I like legendary/epic story telling, and a rather common thread is that quests to bring someone back from the dead usually fail.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[devincutler]

The problem is the loss of significance over the years. In AD&D, there was a hard cap on how often you could be raised (your starting Con Score), and you had to succeed on a Resurrection roll (fairly high % chance). Characters died fairly often, and returned fairly often, but you still worried about it. Clone (and some other spells) gave really powerful character's an out, but required preparation.

3E had the level loss mechanic, but it never worked for me. It didn't have the "permanent" death threat that AD&D had (since it was automatic and you could regain the level). In some ways it actually sucked more because you were more likely to cascade into a series of deaths, since you were weaker than the rest of the party.

4E and 5E have pretty much taken the sting out of death. It's often more of an inconvenience once you reach 5th level, than an actual threat. I've considered requiring a Con Check (DC: 5+number of deaths) each time you come back as a way to encourage survival. I've also considered adding the Raise Dead penalty to Revivify (for half the duration).

I have a feature in my 3e and 5e games called The Touch of Death. Once you've felt death's embrace, it becomes harder and harder to resist it. Each time a PC dies and is brought back, there is an increasing chance the soul will not want to come back...no matter what. It is sort of the god of death putting his foot down and convincing souls to join the afterlife. The chance is usually very low at first, but a 1 on a d20 always fails. So every PC in my game has at least a 1 in 20 chance of perma death.