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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9472183" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Now this is your opinion, and I'm not going to argue with an opinion- you're allowed to have it and that's fine (especially since the creator of the spell apparently held the same opinion!).  But the question I would have is "why?".  If we can accept that magic can revive the dead, why does "how you died" matter, exactly? We're talking about a divine miracle here, if God says you can bring someone back from the dead, you can, regardless of how they died.Otherwise, you'd have to have a variety of different spells- "revive from poison, revive from fire, revive from trap, revive from sword, revive from white dragon breath, revive from being stepped on by a giant" and so on.And as it would happen, whoever created the 5e version of the spell seems to have a similar opinion to mine, since it states "This spell also neutralizes any poison and cures nonmagical diseases that affected the creature at the time it died."Even if removing all conditions is normally something a higher level spell does, it's not like that's all that Heal does- further, let's say Raise Dead did remove conditions.  It's not like you're really doing yourself any favors by killing yourself and being brought back from the dead to remove those conditions and do an end run around Heal, since you're also losing 1 Con whether the spell succeeds or not!Again, if I really wanted to make resurrection rare, this isn't the way I'd go about it.  Making mechanics annoying to use can be a really poor method of balancing them.I should also point out that I can count the number of times I've seen a PC brought back from the dead on the fingers of one hand in over 35 years of playing D&D.  Generally when characters die, one of the following is true:*The party has no access to Raise Dead.*The party has no money for Raise Dead.*Raise Dead won't work (some examples I've seen in actual games: turned into an undead, body parts missing due to homebrew critical hit charts/swords of sharpness/etc., level drained, turned to stone, disintegrated, soul stolen by demilich, is an elf/outsider/construct, is against character's religious beliefs, character doesn't trust the source of the revival, character made a deal with a devil and their soul was forfeit).*The player willingly stays dead rather than put the burden of bringing them back on the other players.ORThe player would rather stay dead than having all their gear sold to bring them back.ORThe player doesn't want to deal with "resurrection baggage", ie, Con loss, level loss, being reincarnated into something they aren't keen on playing, gaining some permanent "battle scar" or other penalty on top of being brought back- as an example, someone I used to play with is particularly harsh with his players when he DM's.  A few years back, another friend's Cavalier died rescuing people from a burning building, and when they were brought back, the DM had them lose 8 points of Comeliness (no, really!) due to "horrible burn scars".*The player had an idea for a new character anyways.*The player quits the game.  Not necessarily because their character died (though I've seen it happen!), but maybe they were unhappy about the circumstances, they were already contemplating leaving due to real life issues, issues with other players, or issues with the DM- either way, this proves to be a good spot to leave the game.Granted, some of this willingness to ditch characters is due to most DM's being loath to force someone to start with a new 1st level character when everyone else is higher level, but not all of it- I've played in many AD&D games where all characters start at level 1, no matter what (and as a result, I've had a long string of low level PC's over the decades, lol)!This has really informed my opinion about raise dead and similar magic, and why I don't really see the need in making it particularly harsh- if it's something the players aren't really keen on interacting with in the first place, then extra hoops aren't really necessary.Anyways, that's my philosophy on it, and why I find the restrictions on AD&D Raise Dead to be kind of silly.</blockquote>

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