Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9472353" data-attributes="member: 6799660">No small part of the game at the time was about* the minutiae. Dotting the i's and crossing the t's was part of the variety/goals/decision points of gameplay. Sure, if you have a cleric and downtime, having them prepare a 4th level spell as well as the 5th level one is trivial and seems like pointless niggling. But what if you are using scrolls you had to pre-emptively seek out? Or are in a dungeon environment and selecting precious Vancian spells to have at the ready? Suddenly these become important considerations, and figuring out what level of preparedness you needed to have was a tension point around which player decision mattered.*or I should say 'included design elements which supported.' How much each group actually glommed onto each of these facets is as usual highly table-dependent.Beyond that, it seems clear to me that being able to be brought back from the dead seems to be something Gary et. al. had some ambivalent feelings regarding. It was apparently deemed necessary enough to have shown up pretty early in the games tenure*, but it sure seemed like something they feared might end up being 'too easy.' oD&D's week of downtime turned into loss of Con, resurrection survival chances, the raising spell aging the caster (risking system shock and death on their part), and a maximum lifetime limit. Not to mention all monsters and cursed items which precluded it. Having coming back be as easy as a 5th level spell... but be sure to do this, and not that (and don't even think about the other thing), and plenty of water beforehand (but not for 12 hours beforehand), and no heavy lifting afterwards, and if poison is involved you also need this other thing (and maybe a note from your doctor)... seems completely on brand for someone hedging their bets on if this thing is a good idea in the first place.*I'm guessing even then there was notions of characters people were too attached to to let go too easily; or maybe of cheap/unfair deaths one might want to get take-backs on.There is a bit of silliness in the poison one needing a secondary spell on top of raise dead while the (for example) white dragon breath not needing a 'remove freezer burn' spell to work, but that is the D&D way where the mortal peril is abstract except for when it isn't (in which case it is highly specific).</blockquote>

Verification